CA

"of all U.S. businesses. Understandable, since CA evidently thought so little of its labor force that it paid bottom dollar for its office space and furnishings. You could count the employee benefits on the fingers of a hand that had survived a serious industrial accident: a health club and free breakfast, but that was probably only because CA chairman Charles B. Wang liked to play basketball and eat donuts."

"*Financial comparison of the two giants is an accounting minefield. Microsoft appeared to have pulled ahead in revenues as of 1991, but this included $213 million from sales of hardware. Subtracting the hardware revenues leaves $1.63 billion net. By the same measure and for approximately the same period, CA has characteristically understated its total revenues by choosing not to take into account at least $348 million from companies acquired for cash in 1991. With these included, CA revenues surpassed $1.7 billion."

"would ever write a business book about it. Its chairman ran CA like a storefront family business. It was so rife with nepo- tism that a shockingly large proportion of its nearly eight thousand employees could name at least one co-worker who was related by either blood or longtime friendship. Opera- tionally there were no rules, or they kept changing. Nobody ever bothered writing a memo to let others know what he or she was doing. Lines of authority shifted constantly, usually undermined by CA’s chairman himself or his brother, presi- dent of the company."

"CA sells products priced in the thousands, the hundreds of thou- sands, and the millions, but to far fewer clients. Had the two gone into communications and not computing, CA would be making enormous and extremely complex switching systems to run entire telephone companies, Microsoft would be making cute little phones that light up in the dark."

"CA’s hardheadedness in sales and marketing is paralleled in its pragmatic approach to software development itself. Unlike most companies, CA has been able not only to make decisions quickly—how and why, we'll get into shortly—but also to im- plement quickly. Its genius at software development is not the genius of inspiration but of putting together the right people to do the right jobs now so that it can all be ready next week, not next year. This is not academic but industrial, not science but engineering. When a new basic principle of thinking machines is discovered, CA will not be the one to do the discovering but will instead have a dozen commercially attractive products or enhancements to existing products up and running on com- puters as diverse as IBM mainframes and Apple Macintosh desktops, and many capable of working at the same time with different types of software. “Not invented here” is not a problem at CA. Maybe it wasn’t invented here, but hell, it works."

"price not in five years’ worth of revenues but in five months’. To say that CA had some magic formula is to seriously underesti- mate the simple rationality of people who are able to discern that heavy fixed overheads do not add to revenues and that when you have healthy revenues and are still broke, you don’t have to look far for why. ADR’s director of marketing and its entire sales force were actually getting bonuses while the com- pany was seriously in the red. Everyone was getting bonuses. How come? Because this veteran company—the furthest thing from a start-up situation (in which it is understood revenues will not cover costs)—was simply budgeting for a loss. Hey, they were losing less than they had expected, right? Right. That’s worth a bonus, right?"

"for producing cars that people actually want. Indeed, CA’s ap- proach is so market-oriented that if you close one eye, it may be looked upon as a nontechnology company; the technology is the response, not the impetus. If so, it’s clear the CA approach will work if the market is calling for freeze-dried bananas, two-seat sports cars, or underwater glue."

"create new products that clients could afford. When a software package built around a very useful function found clients who liked it but were unwilling or unable to shake loose $50,000, CA neither discounted the product nor sat around waiting for the economy to improve. Both approaches are passive. Instead, CA developers simply undeveloped the product, removing from the package everything but its very attractive basic functionality so that marketing could offer it for $7,500. That the response was"

"architecting, taking what’s good in the new products and merging it in with the overall vision to create this layer and allowing us to be independent of any of the hardware plat- forms. That’s a lot of investment that people don’t realize CA"

"people and dismiss the rest. Ancillary functions, like finance, were absorbed by CA headquarters. This left the creme de la créme of the acquired company, welcomed without reservation into CA. Yet of those who took up CA’s offer, few would make the grade. The most successful were often those who had been frustrated by the acquired company’s corporate restraints; they flowered at CA. But the dropout rate of acquired employees—"

"ments about other people. Charles: ““I rank them, I tell them. Yeah, and if you screw up, I'll put you in the penalty box for a while. I’ll tell you you screwed up and that’s why you're there. Now, learn something while you’re there. And if you don’t like it, leave—because CA doesn’t need you and you don’t need CA. You’re talented, go somewhere else where you love it. You don’t think we love you, but I’m going to tell you exactly where you stand. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I tell people to treat their people the same way. But here’s where even we get wishy-washy, back and forth. Someone says, ‘This person is the worst person I ever had.’ Then he says, “He is probably the best employee I ever had.’ Come on, you said he’s bad—he’s bad. But now sud- denly he’s the best? Come on, these cancel each other out. This is a meaningless piece of bull, this report. “Why’d you bother putting anything down there in the first place? Oh yeah, you've got to check off because you have to fill out the form, but that’s not the purpose of that form. The form wasn’t meant to be filled out so that everybody’s file has this form signed by a manager. That’s not the purpose of it. The pur- pose was for you to face the issue of telling your person where he stands in your organization.’ This is a long story at CA. We"

"And only through ranking can Charles Wang manage a company as big as CA (now nearly eight thousand people), as various (CA develops, sells, and services hundreds of software products), as spread out (with well over a hundred principal offices in the United States and around the world), and as dynamic. Though Charles has an elephantine memory for people who work at CA, not even Dumbo himself could know enough about each on a current basis: Charles depends on fresh updates from others down the line. With this knowledge he and a small group of managers can go about their job, which is to decide what the company should be doing, where it should be going, and how fast. Without this knowledge the process could not succeed."

"managing people. The product-owner has to make sure he’s got the appropriate people, that he’s got a team, and that the various responsibilities get met.”’ It was a form of neo-Darwin- ism. Russ: “But not everyone’s cut out for it. It’s a new concept that we created here, and it really takes a well- rounded, versatile individual. It’s got to be someone who's technical. He’s got to understand the vision, where the prod- uct is, where it’s going. Good with people. And support ori- ented. And development oriented. So we look from within and say, ‘OK, who deserves this shot, who might be good?’ And as talented as he or she may be, sometimes we find that this isn’t a product-owner, so they might be best going back to what they were doing before, being a development leader for instance. He might be very good at that, but not a very good product-owner.”’ Natural selection. As the framework evolved, product-ownership took on a tensile strength within CA. Product-owners became responsible to superproduct-owners, who themselves became responsible to what can only be called mega—product-owners—the ultimate product-owner being Charles. Little wonder that the product- owners who succeeded took on the characteristics of Charles himself: extremely technical, marketing-sensitive managers who could motivate and lead people and who kept their eyes on the details while shaping the vision. With this sort of manager, a skein of “ownership” cut through the entire structure of devel- opment, marketing, and support at CA, functioning not as a"

"Of course there are those on both the administrative and techni- cal sides who remain unwilling to accept the challenge of man- agement responsibility. Not only are they not stigmatized at CA, but in a company where upward (or inward, toward-the-center) mobility is the norm, such people are treasured. They are the islands of stability in a sea of change. Nancy: “There's this"

"When it is a case of someone not being able to do the work, however, the stick that CA wields is loss of responsibility, per- haps with a couple of chances at other jobs. Charles: “Just don’t pass around the turkeys.’ But only up to a point. A middle manager: “This is not the kind of place where you virtually have to murder someone to get fired. What I really like about CA is it’s almost like winning. It’s like only the best survive. What you have left is very brilliant people.”"

"The principle of ‘“‘succeed or ’bye” is so enshrined at CA that Tony’s monthly Best Idea public notice always ends the same way, as does every internally communicated announcement of earnings, acquisitions, or personnel changes. “Remember,” one assistant vice president told me, laughing in bemused embar- rassment as he quoted the company’s ubiquitous cheer-cum- admonishment, “that this is the most important day of the most important week of the most important month of the most impor- tant quarter in the history of CA.” The AVP: “This is a classic"