This is a story of woe.
Imagine a young salesman. Straight off of closing the biggest deal in his company’s history. $5m of software in 1989. To say I was full of confidence and full of myself would be the understatement of the last millennium.
I was working for McDonnell Douglas, working hand in hand with our “Offset Business” group in London. McDonnell Douglas were one of the world largest defense contractors with aircraft such as the F15, F18, AV8B, Apache and C17 aircraft. British aerospace suppliers were always keen to secure business with McDonnell Douglas.
As a seller of mechanical design software I was well positioned to use the influence of the mother company. All doors were open to me. My big win was with a company in the south of England. A company part owned by Westland – now part of Agusta-Westland. I closed the deal with the Chairman at the Farnborough airshow. Yes, I was the real deal.
I set about ‘mopping up’ the rest of the Westland group of companies. My first target was an aero structures business on the Isle of Wight – off the south coast of England. I cold called and met with the CEO, spent time with the executives in charge of design, manufacturing and IT. I had our Offset team make supporting noises. Things were going well. Oh, I should mention, IBM were the incumbent. But they didn’t matter did they? After all, my technology was by common consent far superior. And Westland were a customer of McDonnell Douglas. Nobody at my company questioned me. I was golden boy. So confident was I that I bought the car. A lovely Jaguar it was. V12. Perfect.
There’s a saying that you never hear the bullet that kills you. This makes sense because a bullet is often travelling faster than the speed of sound, I digress. Of course IBM knew what was going on. They also realized that I had product superiority. They knew that in a direct feature vs feature fight, they would lose.
One day, all communication stopped. Something had changed. The phones went silent. Calls were no longer returned. Posted letters were met with non-committal responses.
What was it that IBM did?
Of course, as a young sales person I ‘knew’ it couldn’t be something I had done. There must be some questionable activities going on. No doubt about that. What had happened?