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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."
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/
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...
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
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.
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.
Actually you are mistaken. I worked for a state government in VA, for the educational branch. I hate to dissapoint you (actually it is my pleasure but the political bullshit must be obeyed).
The IT department there was quite enlightened, sadly the site managements were all in varied degree of ignorance and it was THEY, not the IT director that made the first AND final decisions regarding to IT. Hell they even had priviledge to cut you off in the middle of a budget opinion meeting to demand you return to the site to reboot a server. Then they bitched that their computer related budget got cut again... well DUH!
So whether the REAL IT crew is brilliant or stupid... getting to work with a brilliant site manager or having their rights to screw your priorities rescinded, you CANNOT win, site managers only care about being as cheap as possible and cutting every corner. When that is done... things fail, supplies are in short demand, and YOU get the bad review for "not solving all the problems adequately."
Period.
Maybe you live in the one cubicle world where the ignorant pricks don't rule absolute... but if you have ANY government work... be prepared to SUFFER if you are managed by suits or uniforms. They only care about the bottom line and well they should.
I've said my piece and vented my anger at upper and lower management.
-DaedalusHKX
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
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 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
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 OLD BOY NETWORK