When I started with EMC we had one hardware platform, Symmetrix, four software products for that platform and the CEO was Michael C. Ruettgers.
Mike came from the defence industry, was the product manager for more than a few city destroying weapons, had an easy smile and a ruthlessness which put sales people on edge even when he was smiling at them.
It was described to me once as feeling “…like a Great White Shark swam up along side you, gave you a wink and then quietly swam off into the darkness to rip someone else to shreds.”
If you boasted within earshot of Mike that you were going to make the Sun rise in the West by the end of quarter, he’d be up before dawn every morning to see how you were doing and then kick your ass when the quarter ended for failing to meet your deliverable.
It was simple. You had an agreement which you failed to honour and there were consequences for that.
His interaction with Wall Street was humorous to watch and the last fifteen minutes of the quarterly financial call was dedicated to what competitors sucked, why they sucked and why they couldn’t run their business properly.
This was the age of EMC, ‘The Storage Architects’.
Mike’s tenure began to wind down, the call of duck hunting and the sirens song of returning to the defence industry (To this day he’s on the board at Raytheon) became stronger and stronger until one day we were petrified when Joe Tucci suddenly showed up as President of EMC.
Joe had “saved” Wang according to some former Wangers (A poor choice of word if you’re from Cork but I’m running with it) by selling the company on to Getronics.
‘Oh god’, we thought ‘he’s going to break us up and sell us on to someone like HP and we’ll all be out on the street’. Such is the thinking when you’re pushing boxes from one side of the manufacturing floor to the other and at the time we had nothing much to talk about besides that and how high the stock was climbing.
The stock, having split more times than any cell in your body, did exactly what you’d have expected it to do during the dot com crash. It hit the floor and went right through it. Indeed the only thing which slid faster than the stock price was EMC’s revenue and we posted a loss so extensive there was shock amongst the employee populace.
“It’s that Tucci guy’s fault.” was the scuttlebutt around the canteen tables at break time. “He doesn’t know how to run a company like EMC so maybe Mike will let him take the hit for the crash and then come back and save us.”
Naive of the realities of the business world as that reads now unlike Mike Joe wasn’t omnipresent to us. Mike fired off emails when he was happy but equally when he was unhappy. Joe’s emails came from an ominous sounding but much more formal Office Of The President And CEO but only when he had something to announce.
Where Mike would saunter on stage in his tan sports coat and easily meander through complex slides, which he did regularly, we thought Joe never did well when driving PowerPoint and sightings at the edge of the Empire were few and far between as when Joe travelled, which he did and still does a lot, it was to see customers.
In retrospect it was unfair to compare both styles of leadership as they were two different people but we couldn’t help it. When Joe’s just talking to a room full of people he’s dynamite. At an EMC only event at EMC World he was talking to a room full of us about his early days as a Mainframe Programmer and his first job as a Sales Engineer. That’s the guy we could have done seeing more of a decade ago.
With EMC laying broken on the floor the sentiment of those of us working in the engine room became rancorous. We were seeing a lot of the company legends being run out the door and that didn’t sit well. The fact these legends in their own living room were amongst the largest contributors to our collapse didn’t dawn on a lot of us until much later.
So, with a sense the company was doomed I walked into the public library and asked to see everything I could on Wang from 1990 to the present day. What I found amongst voluminous piles of bound business magazines and newspapers was a broken and bankrupt company which through tough cost cutting and little nostalgia for it’s past came back from bankruptcy to doing $3B+ in revenues in just a few years.
Indeed it was so successful a rebirth it was an attractive acquisition for Getronics.
And then the light came on.
We had the right guy in the CEO’s office at exactly the right time and unlike Wang we had money in the bank and were in a growth market. The company started rebuilding itself in a new image and pursued acquisitions in areas far outside of box building and right into entire new industries.
We’d never have one hardware platform and four software products ever again and if you didn’t get with the Clariion, Software and VMware program you’d be shown the door so fast you’d open it with your face.
This was the age of EMC, ‘Where Information Lives’.
And that age is over.
Joe is still the CEO and his contract runs to 2013 but his tenure has outlived the tagline he launched. Out with the tagline, in with the statement..
EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing. Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyze their most valuable asset — information — in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way.
What it lacks in elegance it makes up for in accuracy. It’s pretty much what EMC does these days.
Will it survive as long as the taglines did?
I suppose that’s a question for the next CEO.
