Ohlson's Story
"If I had had enough money, I probably could have cleaned the whole organization out. This was a super move on our part." Bob Ohlson's smile broadens as he leans back on the couch in his office, lights a cigarette, rests a foot on the arm of his desk chair, and launches into a vigorous self-defense of what went down at ICC. The bravado -- the obvious lack of remorse -- overlays a bitterness that rises when the subject turns to how this experience had marked him. "Obviously I'm more cynical about personal relationships. At one time I would have considered John Berst my best friend in the whole world. And then he went and stuck a knife in my back."
Ohlson is a tall, affable, slightly stoop-shouldered man. His new company, Cable Comm, had 36 employees and by his account is doing "very well." In its first year he had hoped Cable Comm would do $3 million in sales but fell "a little short of that." He won't say how short. In conversation Ohlson's demeanor ranges from courtly to profane, with one oft-recurring word being "vision." Bob Ohlson claims that he had it and his partners did not.
Ohlson's former partners claim the vision he implanted in many impressionable minds at ICC -- chiefly the sales staff -- had little to do with the company's central mission as agreed to by the partners. Ohlson's idea was to sell whole systems solutions instead of just cable. Equity ownership also became a part of the emergent and renegade vision. Again, it had never been raised as a point of contention, claims Berst; yet when people defected with Ohlson, it was flung back in Berst's face as evidence of how retrograde ICC was.
Ohlson denies any wrongdoing in setting up his company, claiming that he consulted a lawyer. Asked about some of his salespeople taking ICC customer lists, he replies: "A customer list doesn't mean a damn thing. We know where the customers are." He labels "entirely false" charges that before July 15 ICC salespeople loyal to him misrepresented themselves to gain commissions for Cable Comm. He concedes that the pressure he put on Ralph Dote amounted to harassment, "but I had heard Ralph was sitting on the fence." As for the secrecy and timing surrounding the coup, Ohlson defends them as necessary. "I know John Berst well enough to know that if this had been done any other way, he would have stopped payment on those [June commission] checks." He adds: "This was carefully planned. People stayed on two or three days after getting paid so those checks would clear." Finally, Ohlson asserts that his former partners' insistence on a noncomplete clause drove him to extreme measures: "It was bull. Why should I sign my life away for a measly $150,000? You know, if this had been handled cleanly none of this would have happened. These guys threw me a challenge. And" -- again he offers a confiding smile -- "the more I thought about it, the more I said, 'Screw them.' "
The Revival
"I'm still angry at Bob. I may never get over that," says John Berst as he wheels his Lincoln Continental out of the ICC parking lot and heads across the prairie cum-industrial-parkland for lunch at a nearby restaurant. "But Bob and I were also friends," he continues. "I miss that. I'd like to see him again, but if I said, 'Hey, let's have lunch,' I can hear his tone already. He's so arrogant." The easy ride of the big car seems to buffer us from a raw winter day and the larger shocks beyond that life inevitably provides.
It's almost a year and a half after the coup, and ICC is back from the dead. The company now employs 95 people, up from 60 in July 1987. In 1988 it opened 875 new accounts. Sales were $5.8 million, up $1 million from the year before. By June the company will move into a new building.
We have just come from ICC's factory floor, walking through a maze of workers bending over cable-handling equipment and stacking inventory toward the ceiling. Berst had shown me a carton full of identical die-cast parts and picked one up. The part is called an Ethernet hood, and it fits over the coupling on the end of a computer cable. It also serves as emblem to a larger issue. When Jim Eme wanted ICC to make the Ethernet hood, Bob Ohlson scoffed at the idea. "The piece was researched by Jim," Berst says. "We can't bring it in fast enough. I could sell twice as many of these. Bob said it would never sell. It's not a winner."
The Ethernet hood is one of about 20 identifiable contributions, technical and otherwise, that mark Eme in Berst's mind as a true "resource." These are contributions, he adds, that Bob Ohlson was either unable or unwilling to acknowledge.
Berst believes that Ohlson ultimately did him a favor. Ohlson's fanaticism forced Berst to see Ohlson for what he was. It moved him as well to refocus the business and reflect on his partners as people. Berst, under Ohlson's sway, could not appreciate the subtleties of Eme's character. He, too, saw Dote as the weak link.
In the ICC meetings, which used to turn inevitably stormy, Ohlson would often enter with a schedule for how long people would speak on a given subject. Now, if the partners need to chew over an issue, they do just that, no matter how long it takes. And once a year, Berst submits his resignation to Eme and Dote. He gives up control to get back his partners' respect.
But trust, in the deeper sense, may never be regained at Illinois Computer Cable. Berst admits that candor was once the norm at ICC, but the coup changed all that. He confesses now to a "loneliness," adding: "I tend to hold my thoughts in. I feel I have to be guarded about what I say and whom I say it to now. You're not sure who may be passing information to the other company or entertaining thoughts of doing something like this again."
John Berst these days may be running a revived company, but he is also looking over his shoulder. And he has lost a friend and confidant. "With Bob Ohlson I bared my soul," he says. "Now, I'm reluctant to totally confide in anyone." n
