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EDS Silent On New CEO's IT Consulting Past
theodp writes "Slate reports on the press release issued by IT consulting giant EDS to announce new CEO Michael H. Jordan that curiously doesn't show Jordan to have any experience in the IT consulting field. In the late '90s, Jordan helped create IT consulting firm Luminant, took it public, and served as chairman of its board for 21 months. Luminant raised $80+ million from its IPO and paid $422 million to buy businesses as part of its pure-play roll-up strategy before filing Chapter 11 and having its assets sold for a mere $3 million. Slashdot readers may remember Luminant as the wacky workplace of My Fake Job, in which an ex-"Late Night" writer described 17 days he spent faking a job at the dot-com."
EDS is the outsourcee of choice for my provincial government. In fact they are entirely willing to give a multi-million dollar contract to EDS, without a tender, because "no one locally can do the job".
Uh-huh, yeah. Right.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
I worked at Luminant and Michael did work there... although I don't think he had much if anything to do with the day to day managment. I was hoping he would have had a very active role but I didn't see it.
http://www.hawknest.com/
curiously doesn't show Jordan to have any experience in the IT consulting field
Of course not. He was busy playing basketball
After a failed career as a member of the Chicago White Sox minor league team...and a lackluster return to the NBA, I suppose he now had some divine inspiration to try his hand at IT Consulting?
Should've stayed retired, man.
That a high profile failure is better than a low profile success, at least in the management world. I can't understand it, but then again I'm just a lowly engineer.
-- Repeat with me: "There is no right to profits".
You dont need IT experiance to lead or start in that position, your not doing the grunt work in a firm that size. you hire experts to handle the IT and consulting part. His job was to assemble the crew, and steer the ship (into the rocks...). It dosent seem to me to need to be listed as IT consulting background. rather as executive experiance. the skills you need there are sneakiness, a lack of morals, and an absence of ethics classes. I think he has already demonstrated those skills quite well. I wish him good luck, as I make a note to keep his connections out of my portfolio...
Whetever happened with regards to this? Did legal action follow? This is the funniest thing I've read all week, even if its a bit dated now.
siri
Rather than spending millions on 1 guy who doesn't know much about technology, wouldn't the company be better off hiring a few hundred low to mid level tech people? No wonder all these companies are going bankrupt.
Does it really matter that Luminant was not successful business model and it failed under the effects of the Dot bomb crash ?
When advertising the appointment of a new CEO why would a company mention his negatives like
"he was at the driving seat of a tech company that that ran into bankruptcy". It would be obvious that they would dwell on what he did successfully.
Also, just because someone failed in a dot com start-up would not strip him of all the success he seems to have enjoyed - and he seems to have had quite a lot of it.
- 10 years at McKinsey
- Pepsi, where he rose to president and CEO of PepsiCo WorldWide Foods
- Turned the old industrial company Westinghouse into a New York media heavyweight
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
Does anybody have a link to the "My Fake Job" story?
The baseball money only buys so much booze and so many hookers; we all know that IT Consulting is a business in which everyone makes it big and ends up a millionaire.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
As an EDS employee, I think anyone would be better than former CEO Big Dick Brown. Big Dick drove EDS into the ground. He was too busy building jets in the air, running squirrels, and herding cats to care about the business. The finical woes of EDS had nothing to do with the IT consulting, it had more to do with poor business decisions. He was canned board of directors and received a $35mil severance package. He has publicly stated that he needed the money because his wife has expensive tastes. What a load of crap.
Jordan done good things at CBS and hopefully he can turn EDS around. The first thing he did was to bring Jeff Heller back. Jeff Heller was with EDS from 1968-2002. I'm sure his reason for leaving had something to do with Big Dick Brown.
Lou Gerstner wasn't a tech guy either and he saved IBM.
fucktad
Well, one good thing is that I, as an EDS employee:
-> Won't see the "Action, urgency and excellence" emails no more..
-> Perhaps can sell the book, written by Mr Brown, on EBay for loads of money in 10 years?
*rofl*
a consultant comes in, cons you in giving them all your money, and then insults you :) :)
I read this in a Scott Adams' book.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
We all have things in our past we don't like to talk about.
For me, it was the period in the early nineties when I wore
silver parachute pants and hypercolour t-shirts.
apt-get install deathstar && deathstar alderaan && echo "You're far too trusting"
They laid me off in 2001. Management there as a whole is clueless (moreso than average). It was an *awful* enviornment entagled so deep in political wrangling it was a miracle we ever acomplished anything. Our customers hated us. The employees hated management. Management treated employees like shit. Everyone was afraid of getting canned so they could spend more money re-doing the christmas decorations at the corporate HQ in Plano.
I once heard a Poli-Sci guy once say that a people gets the government it deserves. In this case I have to say a company gets the management it deserves.
Now that Dick Brown is gone perhaps that book they gave me (written by one of Dick's proxies) might actually be worth something more than toilet paper.
One good thing, perhaps all the lame emails from Dick would send out every month bragging about using the corporate jet to visit important clients in Hawaii (or some other equally exotic location) will finally come to an end.
My group couldn't even order a pair of hard disks to monitor systems and this fucker is flying all over the world looking for more customers to screw.
As far as I'm concerned... The fuckers deserve what they get.
DISCLAIMER: I'm a bit bitter still so this view should be taken with a grain of salt. Perhaps my area was exceptionally bad.
IMHO, EDS is evil - stay away.
At one large multi-national company I worked for, EDS made this cozy deal with high level managers - and our company signed a very long term IT outsorcing contract at a very expensive rate. Of course the contract stipulated that EDS would take over all IT services within the company.
After my company was locked in, EDS proceeded to hire a large number of low wage McWorkers who were billed out at an extremely expensive rate as consultants. Of course, I doubt some could even figure out how to use a mouse, but that did not stop them from trying to run all the infrascructure and datacenters. It was truely an amazing sight.
Thankfully, at the time - the dot.com boom was still going pretty strong so it didn't take much to quietly tip-toe out the door as the IT department fell into chaos. I'm still sorry for them to this day, poor souls.
To me, combining that kind of incisive decisionmaking with the geniuses at EDS who allowed the geeks-gone-wild environment of Chaos2Order to flourish ("Mister accountant dude, you know what we need? A car! In our ninth-floor office! And we need, like, a crane to get it in here!") means that I should either dump my stock, or offer to let them buy my consulting business.
"Freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I'll spend to find out how to get people more."
You do know the Saskatchewan government turned down the EDS proposol don't you?1 29.html.
http://www.gov.sk.ca/newsrel/releases/2003/03/06-
And I believe CGI and TMC have more Government contracts in Sask than EDS. .
-- I care not for your foolish signatures.
This is exactly the kind of reasoning that leads to the kind of crap you see represented in Dilbert. Your reasoning may apply in other industries, but the IT field is different.
I'm speaking from personal experience. Top level executive or not, if the occasion ever arises where is heard to pronounce SCSI as "scoozie", that just wreaks of a basic level of incompetence/ignorance that says, "I don't belong here."
The IT industry has a certain culture that disallows fat PHB's who are involved 'only in a managerial capacity'.....hell, we have enough issues with "project managers", much less suits with no interest or passion regarding our geekhood.
Its not like EDS doesn't have more than enough mid-level employees. Probably too many.
But is this Micheal Jordan the same Micheal Jordon who played basketball or is this someone else?
...and IN SOVIET RUSSIA, beowulf clusters imagine 1, 2, 3 profit!!!! jokes made out of YOU!!!
should never have made it to slashdot.
Here is part of "My Fake Job" found on alt.punk. It goes up to Day 16. Anyone have a link to the rest?
alt.punk part 1 of "My Fake Job"
My dad works at EDS and said that he hoped this new guy was better than the last one....
I really hate to send him this, but better he know now... time to unload those stocks.
Looking for Book Reviews? Check out Literary Escapism.
There's a basketball player named Michael Jordan? I would have thought that the ./ crowd would be fans of yet a third Michael Jordan, the well known machine learning researcher
I read the article, I read this thing, I flipped through some jokes on here about the references to the basketball player by the same name...
but why the hell is this on the front page of slashdot?
I think I'm missing some part where I should care about who is appointed as CEO of some company?
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Ya, I remember when he tried playing baseball. This probably wont be much better.
On the other hand, how could you do worse than the last guy, especially when its a guy named "Dick Brown". that name is just begging people to make fun of you; wouldnt it be smarter to have people call you "Rick" or something?
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
I am on the pointy end of the NMCI stick as one of the first 30,000 of the supposed 350,000 seats that EDS is supposed to roll out for the government. The contract is three years behind schedule (hey, it was a four year contract) and Congress recently approved them for two more years (I guess they were doing a really good job). The contract costs my boss $4,000 a year to rent (yes, rent)a 900 MHZ Dell Laptop. But, without that rental, we will no longer be able to communicate with the rest of the organization. If I want to upgrade to a CD burner or heavens forbid a DVD player, they are an extra $350 a year to rent..each. That is OK since I have to have NMCI tech support install the drivers at $150 a tech support call. Oh that is right, EDS is cash strapped. Apparently $8 billion to roll out 350,000 1998 Dells is just not enough. When will the madness end?
I wish EDS better luck than past Jordan companies.
I used to work for a company known as Westinghouse Electric Corporation. Mike H. Jordan came to us from Pepsico after previous CEO's nearly bankrupted us through incompetence, but at least it was well intentioned incompetence (lost 4 Billion USD in bad Florida real estate).
Jordan didn't know anything about Westinghouse either, other than we had Group W broadcasting. That would be the start of his media empire that he appearantly wanted to build.
Short version: Mike comes in as Westinghouse CEO, buys CBS, Westinghouse changes name to CBS. CBS sells off all non communications assets. Viacom buys CBS and Jordan goes elsewhere.
All during this time, Jordan and his buddies pay themselves royally while killing a company that while a bit down in the dumps, could have survived. I'm sure George Westinghouse and Nikola Telsa are still rolling in their graves.
It sounds like after that, he destroyed another company, Luminate. I'm sure he got paid real well for that one also.
I give EDS 3 years or less.
I don' think that one needs to have IT exp. as Lou proves, BUT the point here is the left a key fact off his resume.
http://www.hawknest.com/
I posted the whole thing on my school space, for anyone who wants a great read:
My Fake Job
Thanks! For some reason I couldn't get google to bring up the 2nd part. Did you end up clicking on the author name and looking for the 2nd part via post titles?
You're just jealous that you didnt get first post. YOU FAIL IT!
Anyone notice his name is Michael Jordan? Maybe he's better suited playing basketball than managing IT firms...
$DEITY bless $NATION
How did this post get here? How boring to read.
Perhaps we should start hanging these CEO asswipe types up by their testicles: if their balls separate from their bodies they are honest and may have the job, if they remain attached they are crooks and can be left that way forever.
This might discourage having the position of CEO in the first place, and we might then find a better way to run our corporations. If you think this is drastic, you should see what I **didn't** write here...
(
As a civilian employee of the Navy, I can attest to the fact that EDS "IT consultants" are a bunch of know-nothing crooks. They were given a huge contract to create a network for the Navy/Marine Corps (NMCI) and have done nothing but screw it up. People can't do any development on it (and we are a research lab), it doesnt work with ERP software, and it routinely loses or outright deletes people's mail or mailboxes. The only explanation people in the trenches have of this sorry mess is that there were huge kickbacks somewhere between the DoD/Navy and EDS.
The selection of Jordan isn't about IT. It is about fixing EDS which is just now starting to feel the heat from low cost offshore IT services. They have avoided the pounding the rest of the industy has taken by selling longer term contracts and by seeking co-dependent client relationships. I'm glad Dick Brown is gone. That name has implications concerning how he would treat his business partners.
$G
-- $G
THE OLD BOY NETWORK
You can substitute this same strategy for IBM, Accenture, Deloitte, Coopers, Ernst, KPMG, and who knows what else.
Those deals weren't as lucrative as the usual consulting gigs, but looked great on the bottom line and secured a partner his partner points.
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
who engineered the Enron and WorldCon debacles?
The hired Chelsea Clinton at 6 figures, it ain't who you know, it's who you blow.
Normally, you have to be at the top of your class with lots of leadership extras.
Dick... Brown... Pull... Out...
No, I just searched alt.punk for "hilarious article" and found part 2.
"The number of Unix installations has grown to ten, with more expected." (Unix Programmer's Manual, 2nd ed.; june 1972)
...should already know that kickbacks and log-rolling are quite common with Defense contracts.
For example, there's another boondoggle going on with the "mult-year" SAP implementation within the Navy. Why does the Navy need KPMG to implement SAP, when they could work directly with the company? Which leads to another question - wtf are we spending our defense dollars on a FOREIGN-OWNED ERP SYSTEM to help manage our national defense?
Last time I checked the news, the German public aren't too fond of us right now.
...the more I learn about Thomas Edision, the more astonished I am. If we'd listened to that raving lunatic, we'd still be using DC in our homes! Thank God someone had the wit to listen to Westinghouse!
Lots of people mentioning the Action, Urgency, Excellent emails we used to get spammed with at EDS. The emails would be received last name, first name, so Dick Brown's emails came in as Brown, Dick. Now the rest of the world knows what we knew from this very appropriate description - he was fucking his customers and employees up the ass.
$55 million dollar salary and a $35 million dollar severance. My friends who got laid off got 2 weeks severance, which they changed from a one month severance just before a huge round of layoffs.
I take a bit of sardonic pleasure from EDS' recent troubles. They are exactly a product of what they built. A company that ineffective and corrupt doesn't get 'fixed' just by replacing the head of the viper.
Yeah I ment "Hosing" not Hosting. I have worked with EDS on several e-government in IT projects in the UK. They are very , very bad at hosting. They have EMC frames that don't have the modem activated, However, the lights on the modem still flash just to fool the client. They also change firewall rules with out thinking. Many a nights have been wasted by the firewall between a Database and an AppServer has been shut off. Also, they power downed their one of their hosting facilities several time in the past year without notifying clients. My favorite story I have was when an EDS engineer logged onto our servers as root from a terminal at the hosting facility and changed the routing tables when he was attempting to document the routing table. I guess he didn't quite have the grasp of "ifconfig -a". In short their IT services are pretty scarry considering the importance of the clients they have in the UK
That's the part we all want to see.
Tech Public Policy stuff
...is the new collection of "Chair Jordan" button down short sleeve oxford shirts. They are available in classic white, casual friday blue, and for the adventurous, salmon, also known as "It's *not* pink, damnit..."
A few years ago, I made some critical statements of Adobe systems - and soon after and a smooth sounding pro posted after me and made the most buttered up statement glorifying Adobe that I had ever heard. Later on, I found out that he was actually acting as a representative of Adobe - you can imagine how duped I felt.
Well this time, I have multiple examples. EDS not only did this to my company, but a relative of mine who works for the Navy (not in IT, but uses the computer systems alot) - is having the same kind of problems in a different city, on a much more recent contract. IMHO, this is much more serious, because the incompetence is effecting national secutiry. The same thing happened, long term expensive deals were closed with high level people without even checking if it could integrate into the Navy's specialized technology and software. Then when they tried to implement, it is turning out to be a similar disaster - where the people they brought in can not make the stuff work. Infact, now many of the offices have two systems, one to do their work and the other to satisfy the EDS deals.
Perhaps if you just have a bunch of data entry people just filling in forms all day long on PC clones - and nothing else, than just maybe EDS might be able to pull it off. But IMHO, they really need to be called on this, they are acting unprofessionally and unethically.
...assuming he had any functional use within Luminant at all.
As an ex-Managing Director of one of the successful, pre-absorption companies, I can attest to the fact that he showed no presence at all, either in person or by directive.
Those with interests in EDS take note, watch this guy and make sure he takes an active role, or dish him quick. We saw nothing from the guy. They (Michael, Gil and their buddies in Houston) had no plan or discernable strategy even after months "on-the-job".
His tenure epitomizes "dot-com failures".
You are transported to a room where you are faced by a wizard who
points to you and says, "Them's fighting words!" You immediately get
attacked by all sorts of denizens of the museum: there is a cobra
chewing on your leg, a troglodyte is bashing your brains out with a
gold nugget, a crocodile is removing large chunks of flesh from you, a
rhinoceros is goring you with his horn, a sabre-tooth cat is busy
trying to disembowel you, you are being trampled by a large mammoth, a
vampire is sucking you dry, a Tyranosaurus Rex is sinking his six inch
long fangs into various parts of your anatomy, a large bear is
dismembering your body, a gargoyle is bouncing up and down on your
head, a burly troll is tearing you limb from limb, several dire wolves
are making mince meat out of your torso, and the wizard is about to
transport you to the corner of Westwood and Broxton. Oh dear, you seem
to have gotten yourself killed, as well.
You scored 0 out of 250 possible points.
That gives you a ranking of junior beginning adventurer.
To achieve the next higher rating, you need to score 32 more points.
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