Collins Consider Ray MacDonald, who took command of Burroughs in 1964. A brilliant but abrasive man, MacDonald controlled the conversations,
I told all the jokes, and criticized those not as smart as he (which was pretty much everyone around him. He got things done through sheer force of personality, using a form of pressure that came to be known as "The MacDonald MacDonald produced remarkable results during his reign. Every dollar invested in 1964, the year he became president, and taken out at the end of 1977,
when he retired, produced returns
6.6 times better than the general However, the company had no culture of discipline to endure beyond him.
After he retired, his helper minions were frozen by indecision, leaving the company,
according to Business Week, "with an inability to do Burroughs then began along slide, with cumulative returns falling 93 percent below the market from the end of the MacDonald era to
2000. We found a similar story at Rubbermaid under Stanley Gault. Recall
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