Those Were The Days

Remember when bankruptcy meant you were broke? When John De Lorean was just a GM exec with a dream? When you thought a silicon chip was a new kind of snack food?

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COMNPUTER COUPLE UNTIES KNOT, BUSINESS SLIPS AWAY

It had all the trappings of a soap opera etched in silicon. Vector Graphic Inc. once a high-flying maker of microcomputer systems (INC., March 1981) was in trouble, its bottom lines flushed with red ink, its chairman and cofounder on the way out. And behind the fall -- well, who could ignore the marital merry-go-round at the top? Lore Harp had won fame and fortune marketing the computer equipment her husband, Robert S. Harp, designed. Then they were divorced and she married publisher Patrick J. McGovern, of the CW Communications Inc. publishing empire.

But Bob was not one to take all this lying down. Buying out a tiny Vector subsidiary, he soon had a healthier business than his ex-wife. And when he remarried last fall he issued a press release detailing the wedding. Take that, Lore.

Alas for the gossips, personal problems accounted for only a fraction of Vector's woes. The company had prospered by selling high-end multiuser computers to businesses. By 1983, when losses were beginning to mount, it was elbow to elbow with Altos Computer Systems, Fortune Systems Corp., and half a dozen other aggressive enterprises in what was an increasingly crowded marketplace. Bob Harp's company, Corona Data Systems Inc., wasn't a direct competitor. Instead, Corona had an entry in the new IBM Personal Computer-compatibles market, where business was booming.

MANAGEMENT: WINNERS AND LOSERS

Arthur E. Imperatore: "There is a greatness a heroism that is an intrinsic part of most everyone," says Imperatore champion of the little man and president of A-P-A Transport Corp., a trucking company based in North Bergen, N.J. "Our job as managers is to coerce that greatness out of our people."

Imperatore (INC., April 1982) has been applying the art of gentle persuasion to his operation since 1947, when he went into business with four of his brothers. Over three subsequent decades he has battled wildcat strikes, unions, competition, recession, deregulation, and apathy with a feistiness noteworthy even for an industry hardly known by its Victorian etiquette (he once sprinted down to his loading docks, grabbed a handful of change, and, flinging it at several idle workers, screamed, "Here, you sons of bitches. If you want my money for nothing, take it, take it all").

Loyalty to Imperatore has its consequent rewards. In 1975, he sank $750,000 into an employee recreation center, and two years ago he chartered the Queen Elizabeth II to take his gang on a three-day float to nowhere. Pretty heady stuff when your normal cruising waters are the outer lanes of the New Jersey Turnpike.

Imperatore, meanwhile, has been raising other eyebrows with his plans for a $3.5-billion development project on the Jersey side of the Hudson River (INC., November 1983). Unofficially dubbed West Manhattan, the project is expected to take as long as 40 years to complete and will include a version of Copenhagen's Tivoli gardens and a 750-foot tower based on a Leonardo Da Vinci design.

Donald Burr: Burr (INC., January 1984), founder of People Express Airlines Inc., the fastest-growing company in the history of aviation, entered the air travel game in 1980, about two years after the passage of the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978. With several of the large carriers (Braniff International, Continental Air Lines, Air Florida, et al) wobbling in mid-air, Burr introduced low-cost, no-frills flights that quickly became the standard by which small, independent airline companies compete against the biggies for lucrative routes. To any air traveler even remotely cost-conscious, flying the skies has never seemed friendlier.

Neither has managing ground operations. Where Burr's company has truly taken off from standard operating procedures has been with its innovative mix of job rotation, employee equity (wherein employees are actually required to own stock in People Express, a stricture that has forced a great many of them to become involuntarily wealthy), and belief in an environment that enables workers to "release their creative energies."

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