By early 1985 Bob Ohlson believed that that kind of sentiment was nice, but it wouldn't grow the company. He told the other three they needed to structure ICC more like a corporation, less like a partnership. He proposed a change in job titles and duties. He would assume Eme's: president. Eme, whom Ohlson pegged as an ideas man, would become head of R&D. Eme was ambivalent about the switch. "It took me three or four months to get over it, yet it was also a relief," he recalls. "Those responsibilities were now on his shoulders." And Ohlson gladly inherited them.
Ohlson had a steel-trap mind. He had always been good with numbers; he spoke well. In later years, when life had become increasingly bitter, his powers of persuasion only grew. His partners took to calling him "the man with the golden tongue."
In ICC, Ohlson saw a golden business he was loath to entrust to others he thought less worthy or capable. By its fourth year ICC's sales had climbed to $4.7 million; net profit approached 15%. Yet Ohlson demeaned his partners, labeling Dote "a lucky SOB, a guy in the right spot at the right time." As for Eme, Ohlson says: "He was the worst sales guy I ever saw in my life."
In his zeal to mold the company in an image he deemed worthy, Ohlson hired a management-consulting firm in mid-1985 to assess the partners' effectiveness. The consultants came in and asked each partner about the weaknesses of the other three. When it came Ralph Dote's turn he spoke up: "Well, I think I have some weaknesses, too." Dote felt blindsided when the consultants' report came back naming him the "weak link" in the partnership. He claims he was the only one of the four to level with the consultants about his own shortcomings.
Ralph Dote had always been the top salesman in the company. It was his accounts -- 85% of which he brought over the first year from Tel Com -- that formed ICC's underpinnings. But now his honesty had given Bob Ohlson an opening. In sales meetings Ohlson would rip into Dote, saying he was a lousy sales manager and that he could never produce enough. What really stung was that Eme, Dote's presumed ally, was chiming in and criticizing him as a "weak player."
"God, I don't believe it. He's got Jim believing this," Dote recalls thinking. He asked Eme to meet him for breakfast one day. "Don't you see what he's trying to do, Jim? He's trying to divide us," Dote said to Eme, who responded with a blank look.
With Dote on the ropes, Ohlson subsequently turned his fire on Eme. Dote recalls Ohlson berating Eme, "You don't bring in sales. I ask you a question and I get a dissertation." Wounded, Eme next sought out Dote. "Ralph, I see what you were saying," he said. "You were right, and I was wrong."
Keeping Score
John Berst grew up in a household where hard work was a given. His father was a wagon jobber: he bought popcorn, peanuts, and pretzels in bulk and rebagged them for sale to neighborhood bars and convenience stores. He worked seven days a week; his son began helping him at the age of six.
Berst's workaholic tendencies jibed with Ohlson's. This was a bond between the two, a bond strengthened by Ohlson's initial advocacy of Berst's cause. It was Ohlson who had brought Berst to ICC. The two shared other things as well. Temperamentally, they were a lot alike; they were close in age. Their children were grown or in college; they had time on their hands, unlike Eme and Dote, who were starting families, doing their best to juggle work and home life.
If Bob Ohlson was fire, Jim Eme was air. Eme was soft-spoken, unflappable. Ohlson misread Eme's subdued nature. He saw him as a guy with his feet on the desk, his nose buried in technical journals -- a man of inaction.
That impression was wrong. In his twenties Eme had been a Chicago police officer assigned to a quiet section of the city. Bored by writing traffic tickets, he volunteered for duty in one of Chicago's roughest neighborhoods. Eme's first marriage ended in divorce, fostered in part by the disjunction between the commonplace cares at home and the ready presence of death on the street. Distracted by his personal affairs, Eme started walking, unthinking, into dangerous situations on the job. He knew it was time to quit being a cop.
Bob Ohlson, likewise, carried private burdens. His wife had cancer. Ohlson would linger at the office until 6:00 or 7:00 at night. He often came in on Saturday mornings. Ohlson saw the time he put in as evidence of his superior commitment to ICC. Eme and Dote saw in it a need to escape the reminders of death that awaited him at home.
"I fell into Bob's trap," concedes Berst. "By now he had me wondering what were they doing over there when we were over here busting our cans. He made a pretty good case." Ohlson and Berst started discussing how to gain control of the company when they held only 40%. One strategy they settled on was to hire a salesman, with the secret intent of elevating him to sales manager, displacing Dote.
To turn up the heat on Dote and Eme, Ohlson came into a meeting at the end of the fiscal year in October 1985 proposing salary increases for himself and Berst. In his mind, they were the workers, Dote and Eme the drones. "We knew what it takes to run an entrepreneurial venture," Ohlson says. "The better things got, the more Ralph and Jim decided they were going to retire without extending us the courtesy of getting off the payroll.'
Berst sat quietly by as Dote objected. "We're partners," Dote said.
"This is a corporation, and I'm the president," Ohlson rejoined. Ohlson had come to the meeting armed with magazine articles on typical salary ranges among top managers. Other presidents made more than their subordinates, he asserted.
After some heated debate it was agreed Ohlson would make $90,000, Berst $80,000, Eme $75,000, and Dote $65,000. The hierarchy was now in place. Dote knew Ohlson didn't need the money, and Ohlson admitted as much. "This is just a way to keep score, Ralph," he said.
Power Play
Bob Ohlson was an "excellence" freak. In addition to hiring consultants, he was always trying to get his partners to read books on management. He interpreted their relative lack of interest as a sign of their business ineptitude. In early 1986, in his ongoing compulsion to systemize the business, Ohlson planned a weekend retreat for the four partners at Berst's vacation house in Wisconsin. Ohlson typed up daily agendas for the team to follow, hour by hour, including when they would break for lunch. On the way up in Berst's van he played Tom Peters and Lee Iacocca tapes.
