Quote:
Originally Posted by Pauly Wauly
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I worked for a company once that had a older managing partner I got to be very friendly with. He and his main partner were hotshot MBA's out of Harvard back in the 60's and decided early on - they didn't want to work for other people. They flipped a coin and the one who won quit and started looking for a business and the other stayed on and paid both of their family bills. They bought one and got it going well and got full of themselves and started buying up "leisure" type of businesses. They decided they knew better and centralized all the sales, marketing, engineering, etc in one place for all these different companies and started hiring all the MBA's they could to staff it.
Basically they drove them all almost into the ground. Then they had a "black Monday" event where they basically laid them all off because they could no longer make payroll. The got a loan and clawed their way back to success, but abandoned the "centralized" idea and went back to letting people who actually knew about the business to run it.
While cleaning out the offices was the first time they realized that the water cooler on the sales floor was 100% full of gin. LMAO!
Apparently their huge mistakes are now taught at some business schools as what not to do. My Partner had sat in the back of a few of them to listen and he said it was pretty hard to listen to a bunch of kids be 100% right about what they did wrong.