hio -
a few comments on the fortune article.
1 - CPQ did not have 21,000 employees in 1991 - it had about 2600. It had only 14,000 when it acquired Tandem in 1997. Tandem had about 7,000 - that took the total to 21,000. Bad research by the fortune reporter.
2- Bob Stearns is grinding his ax here. He was never an insider - in 1995, when I did some work with the systems division headed by Gary Stimac, I was told to basically ignore Stearns, that he was not connected to anything that was happening operationally. Pfeiffer finally unloaded Stearns after the DEC acquisition, but he had been increasingly isolated and disconnected for years before that. I suspect Stearns is using his former contacts in the analyst community to take revenge on Pfeiffer. I automatically discount anything which uses Stearns as a source.
But the part about Pfeiffer's creation of a climate of intense, cut-throat competition in the executive ranks rings true. I have heard for years that he would intentionally set his executives against one another to see who was the best man. If this was in fact Pfeiffer's management style, it explains a lot of the behavior we have seen in the last few years, and also why Pfeiffer would have been doomed to failure as the company grew. |
