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Henk (Van Vuuren) was sent to Lisboa in the April – May 83 time frame to start building a nucleus of a service organization. We had some dinosaur DEC-10’s at LNEC, and some PDP-11’s at various places. As a good Dutchman, and in true DEC spirit, Henk didn’t rent office space, he worked out of his house in Alcabideche (on the road to Sintra from Cascais). The two DEC engineers Rui Leal da Silva (unfortunately he has left us already for ever!) and Pedro Rey (where are you hanging out Pedro?) were doing the work while Henk was trying to get contracts together. During that period, I had worked myself into trouble at DEC Belgium (it wasn’t going to be the last time!) by totally disagreeing about something and being a pain in the neck. Some of my bosses wanted to boot my out, while others thought that I was right after all and encouraged me to find another job within DEC. Totally by accident, I picked up the rumour that ‘we were looking for somebody to expand the business in Portugal’. Why not me? And before I knew it, I was interviewing people to join the party. Michel Cavadini (F&A) and Alan Wright (SWS) joined. Here
we were: A management team composed of a Hollander, a Frog/Swiss, a Brit
and a Belgian! Between
July and October I shuttled between Brussels (weekends) and Lisboa
(week), trying to figure out what this was all about. We had no office,
no fax, no email, no company, nothing…(mind you, no portables either!)
I was staying mostly at the Sheraton, and at my second trip I had to be at the office of the lawyer to discuss the ‘bylaws of the company’ (the official papers for creating the company). When I asked the taxi driver to bring me to Av. Duque de Lulé, he refused! Little did I know that it was just around the corner of the Sheraton! In true cowboy tradition, the legal folks had contracted a US lawyer (living since many years in Lisboa), to do all the paperwork!? I soon found out that he was not a star, and quickly shifted our questions to a local expert. We
got started by renting a floor at Av. José Malhoa, a dirty deserted
avenue. We started hiring like crazy. Money was not a problem, and PCF
(Pier-Carlo Fallotti – CEO Europe at that time), kept repeating that
we should worry about hiring the best people and sell whatever we could.
Profits would come later. (They did!).
So
on board came Cristina Roseta, Jose Leal, Ana Marques, Jorge Felix («Vous
savez monsieur Krul, je suis un très bon vendeur! Vous allez voir: Le
marché Português est très facile! » (Jorge and I started off in
French. I still haven’t figured out why, but as we all know by now,
nobody really understands what goes on the first time you speak to
Jorge!!), and so many more great people … After
six months Cristina had figured out that I was an impossible man to work
with anyway, and decided to follow her husband to Brussels. I asked her
to solve herself the problem she had created (I didn’t have time!) and
before I knew, Ana Santana started organizing me.
We
had an empty floor, some desks, and some divider/partitions. It was
great for communications and yelling and screaming to each other. We had
1 (one) LA30 (for those acquainted with DEC after the late 80’s: This
was one of the most successful data entry / printers) and a modem. The
server (we didn’t call this ‘server’, but ‘Geneva’! Servers
didn’t exist yet!) was in Geneva. (by the way: a beefed up 11/45
serving hundreds of dial-in lines for email. Yes: in 1983! IBM eat your
heart out!). So
… a couple of times a day the secretaries went on the LA30 to get /
send emails resulting in heroic battles between them (‘A is using the
machine all the time’, ‘B is very slow’, ‘C doesn’t understand
how this is working’, etc…(I avoid giving real names on purpose!! I
still want to have some people to be nice to me on my next visit!). We
‘senior’ managers pretended not to hear this crap and let them fight
it out… The
‘empreteiro’ didn’t understand one bit about our layout: He
couldn’t figure out where the big office for the Director Geral was
going to be, he didn’t see where the big offices for the Directores
were going to be, he thought is was crazy to have the offices in the
middle (we were the important people and needed the sunlight! He
thought!), etc … At our CMT meetings we had quite a bit of fun with
that.
We
had a loose management style. Some people had a hard time figuring out
who was really in charge. In fact we all were. We were learning on the
spot dealing with all new aspects of business. We had no clue! I learned
a lot from Alan (“Bruno: why do we have this meeting? How long will it
take? How will we decide?”, Henk (“Why don’t we look at this in a
different way?” and Michel (“Bruno, this is not an expense, but an
investment”. Sorry??!!). Somebody came to me to tell me that I really should be careful because the way that Alan was talking to me was indicating that he was ‘after my job’. Whereby I replied that I appreciated Alan’s inputs very much, giving he was doing it straight in my face and with the intention to help. Not behind my back, to destroy. I think that was our way of developing an organization. It is only many years later that I read in the books that this was a good way to lead people … I
could go on for hours, but I’ll keep some memories for another day … For
instance when Jorge Moreira (HR manager) told me that we could [not]
fire people for bad performance. “The unions would object”. I said
to Jorge: “Watch me …!”. Or
when there was a smart guy (he
thought) fiddling with the restaurant receipts to try and get an extra
conto. He did fool me (for a while), but not Armindo! And out he went! Most probably I forgot some details and some people. Sorry. Please don't feel forgotten, but blame it to the reduce number of grey cells in my brain... Ate
ja! Bruno
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Contribuição de Bruno Krul (2001-11-03)O conteúdo desta página é responsabilidade do autor
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