There was once a very big company, over 100 years old, which had grown big mainly by taking over its rivals in its domestic market.
The company had a boss who ran it for 33 years, growing its sales, in that time, from £100 million to £11 billion.
The old boss spent ages agonising over a successor before handing the reins to a new boss.
The new boss said that the company 'needs to transform itself through a process of radical change' and reposition itself 'to create new value opportunities for our shareholders'.
One of the ways the new boss 're-positioned' the company was to pay Kohlberg Kravis and Roberts $29 a share for a telecoms company which had cost KKR $6.60 a share a short while before.
This, and similar deals, bought the company to its knees and, seven years after the new boss had taken over, it had been broken up and sold off.
MORAL: Better the Devil You Know
Do I assume that this very big company had a similar name to a very big US company with identical initials?
You assume right, Dr Bob
Thought so. That new guy was a reverse alchemist, managed to turn gold into macaroni cheese
Ha ha Dr Bob.
I worked for that very company before Turdus took over :-(
(like Midas except everything he touched turned to sh*te)
Ian
Turdus must have implemented the fastest collapse in industrial history, Ian, he took over in 1996 when revenues were over £10bn and the company had a market valuation of £35bn and by 2005 the bulk of what was left was sold to Ericsson for £1.2bn.
You omitted to mention that the old boss failed to develop most of the companies he took over and allowed their brands and products to wither on the vine while he sold off their assets.
Where were English Electric, Elliott Automation, AEI, Sobell, Plessey, to name just a few, before the new boss came along?
What happened to their aircraft, computers, electrical machines, consumer electronics, semiconductors?
The old boss single handedly destroyed most of Britain's electronics and electrical engineering industry.
In the same 33 year period, Samsung went from making shirts, to being a world class power in heavy engineering and electronics.
The old boss could have done so much more with the assets he purchased.
Devil indeed!!!
Very true, Wasted, but whereas old boss left a business turning over £10 billion + behend, new boss left nothing.
Your previous blog "The Government Which Backed The Wrong Horse" shows that the Generous Electric Company's growth did not even keep up with inflation.
The old boss still had something left, but how much did he destroy.
Yes Wasted, you're right. He destroyed the UK's chances in the IC industry, the computer industry and the career hopes of hundreds of thousands of people who were sacked in his time. There is absolutely no reason why we shouldn't have had UK electronics companies as successful as the globally successful UK companies in those other science-based industries - pharmaceuticals and chemicals. All that he destroyed. But . . . he still left a company turning over £10bn+ which the new boss certainly didn't.
Dear old Weinstock was interviewed not long before he passed on. Off the record he suggested that Simple Simon should have been hung at a crossroads and left swinging in the wind.
He was more the financier's friend than the engineer's but he was some salesman and did what he thought was right for his business as well as his shareholders. I don't blame Weinstock so much as the culture we have that deprecates engineering as a socially inferior profession.
Well robtronic, if it's socially inferior maybe it should organise itself as lawyers, doctors, and architects do - into partnerships - and charge like those professions do - and then find that money is the surest antidote to perceptions of social inferiority.