Everyone: Yep, that was Art. When I worked there, since I was pretty up the totem pole, I called him Art. I remember that as he was buying up other companies when I worked there, he would have me go to the new acquisition and have the owner of the company pick me up (no rental car and have them put me up at their house (no hotel). He told me that his desire was to have the biggest catalog of software for a privately held software company in the world. A lot of the software companies he bought was at the end of it's useful life, so it was just to have the product name in his catalog. He told his finance department and sales management that they were to get at least a letter of intent from any prospect. He would then tell the bank that ASG had sold a contract and have that added to the value of the company. It was truly weird.
Mitch -----Original Message----- From: zMan <[email protected]> To: IBM-MAIN <[email protected]> Sent: Sat, Mar 7, 2015 8:11 pm Subject: Re: bloomberg article on ASG and Chpater 11 A friend used to work at ASG, is out of mainframes now. I forwarded this story and got the following response: >"MISTER Allen" (NO one was allowed to call him "Art") once sent out an email to everyone complaining about the rigors of flying all over the world on his private jet, and how he'd like it if people sent chocolates to his plane, as long as they were "high quality Belgian chocolates". Yes, at their own expense. >When you look up "megalomaniac" in the dictionary, there's a drawing of Mr. Allen. Other ASG stories are legendary, including folks having to requisition rubber bands and having them shipped from HQ *in lots of 10*. Given that Art's wife was apparently equally loony and was CFO, I guess the bankruptcy isn't a surprise. The good news: http://www.asg.com/Company/Executive-Management.aspx no longer shows any folks named "Allen", -- zMan -- "I've got a mainframe and I'm not afraid to use it" ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
