Karl Meets The Corporate Powers That Befuddle <OR>
Karl vs. the Korporate Board

I hate dealing with roomfuls of executives. The old joke about deducting ten points from the group IQ for every member after the fourth certainly applied here: eight members meant an IQ of 60. If this was an individual, he would be drooling on himself. I took a deep breath and started my report

When I finished, I looked at my friend Steve, the MIS Manager, that got me into this. His boss the VP MIS and his boss the CFO were both looking severely depressed.

The CFO cleared his throat twice and asked, "So all these scattered networks really do talk to each other now, and to the Vaxes and to the IBM mainframe?"

"That's right, one way or another, every PC can now reach every other server or host in the company."

The VP MIS looked at Steve and said, "I thought you told me this wasn't possible with this budget."

"I didn't think it was," said Steve. "Karl's smarter than I thought."

"We should have called EDS or Andersen Consulting, like I wanted," said the CFO. "They never would have made this work with that budget."

I couldn't believe this: I taught pigs to sing to make this happen, and they're unhappy. "Am I missing something?  Did you want this to work, or not?"

The CFO glared at me. "Of course we didn't want it to work. How can we get more money from the Board of Directors for a new mainframe if these damn PC's do all the work?  Steve, didn't you explain the situation to him?"

"No, we cut the budget so far I didn't think he could come close. Putting Unix boxes on the PC net and running the data bases there saved too much money."

The VP MIS groaned and said, "How am I going to tell my IBM salesman we don't need the new 3745 Front End Processor I wanted?  I'll never get another free lunch now."

The VP MFG looked at me and said, "I'm happy. Using the PC email to All-in-One gateway does what I need. File transfers are easy enough for even me to do."

"Oh, shut up," said the VP MIS. "Since things work better with fewer people, my staff will shrink. How will I get a raise now?"

I got the picture. "If it's more money you want, say the project is incomplete until we get better management."

The Human Resources VP woke up at that. "I don't care what you say, I'm not resigning."

"Neither am I," said the VP of Sales.

"No no no, I don't mean better managers, I mean better management. We didn't have the budget for an SNMP control station and software."

"The Board likes monitoring employees for productivity. We can sell that," said the CFO. "Steve, go ahead and pay his bill."

"What does he mean, Steve, go ahead and pay my bill."

"We figured the project would be so far past budget we could stiff you for your fee. That way, you won't come back. Since you won't be here, we can blame you for everything."

The CFO shook my hand. "If this Unix stuff is for real, I guess we'll have to keep going. Thanks." He turned to the VP MIS. "Maybe we can string the IBM guy along for one more lunch. I've never been to the Executives Club downtown, and he mentioned that for next week."

James: This was the second Karl story actually printed. Notice the clever (ahem) jabs at stodgy corporate management who refused to acknowledge the value of Unix. Yes, Open Systems Today was a bit radical in those days, and I went right along.