A vice president's position is about to open up at Ramsey
Electronics, maker of components for audio and visual equipment
and computers. Whoever fills the position will be one of the four
most powerful people in the company and may one day become
its CEO. So the whole company has been watching the political
skirmishes among the three leading candidates: Arnie Sander,
Laura Prove, and Billy Evans.
Arnie Sander, currently head of the research and development
division, worked his way up through the engineering ranks. Of the
three candidates, he alone has a Ph.D. (in electrical engineering
from MIT), and he is the acknowledged genius behind the
company's most innovative products. One of the current vice
presidents-Harley Learner, himself an engineer- has been pushing
hard for Sander's case.
Laura Prove spent five years on the road, earning a reputation as
an outstanding salesperson of Ramsey products before coming to
company headquarters and working her way up through the sales
division. She knows only enough about what she calls the "guts"
of Ramsey's electronic parts to get by, but she is very good at
selling them and at motivating the people who work for her. Frank
Barnwood, another current vice president, has been filling the
Chief's ear with praise for Prove.
Of the three candidates, Billy Evans is the youngest and has the
least experience at Ramsey. Like the Chief, he has an M.B.A.
from Harvard Business School and a very sharp mind for finances.
The Chief has credited him with turning the company's financial
situation around, although others in the company believe Sander's
products or Prove's selling ability really deserves the credit. Evans
has no particular champion among Ramsey's top executives, but
he is the only other handball player the Chief has located in the
company, and the two play every Tuesday and Thursday after
work. Learner and Barnwood have noticed that the company's
financial decisions often get made during the cooling-off period
following a handball game.
In the month preceding the Chief's decision, the two vice
presidents have been busy. Learner, head of a national
engineering association, worked to have Sander win an
achievement award from the association, and two weeks before
the naming of the new vice president, he threw the most lavish
banquet in the company's history to announce the award. When
introducing Sander, Learner made a long, impassioned speech
detailing Sander's accomplishments and heralding him as "the
future of Ramsey Electronics."
Frank Barnwood has moved more slowly and subtly. The Chief
had asked Barnwood years before to keep him updated on "all
these gripes by women and minorities and such," and Barnwood
did so by giving the Chief articles of particular interest. Recently
he gave the Chief one from a psychology magazine about the
cloning effect-the tendency of powerful executives to choose
successors who are most like themselves. He also passed on to
the Chief a Fortune article arguing that many American
corporations are floundering because they are being run by
financial people rather than by people who really know the
company's business. He also flooded bulletin boards and the
Chief's desk with news clippings about the value of having women
and minorities at the top levels of a company.
Billy Evans has seemed indifferent to the promotion. He spends
his days on the phone and in front of the computer screen,
reporting to the Chief every other week on the company's latest
financial successes-and never missing a handball game.
The Chief was going to have to make a tough decision very soon!