Adventures in CADAM-land
a memoir by Michael Bourgo
Early in 1980, my boss informed me that a special marketing team was being assembled out of Division HQ to provide CADAM (acronym for a software product called “Computer-aided Design and Manufacturing”) marketing and support expertise across the country. He informed me that he had received inquiries about my availability to join this special task force. He further added that if I were interested, I could accept an invitation to be interviewed. Following that, he said, if I thought it was something to pursue, he would be willing to release me from the International Harvester team.
Naturally, I was excited at the
prospect of a move up to a divisional posting.
By tradition in IBM people started in the branch, learned the ropes, and
demonstrated successful results. That
led to a staff job in the regional or divisional office, where one acquired a
broader perspective of the business and learned a new set of skills. If that posting was deemed a success, it was
followed by a move back to the branch office either in management or as a
senior professional at a management paygrade.
On the other hand, it was also
somewhat unsettling. What if I didn’t
have the stuff to do the job? What if I
found the travel requirements (which Jim warned would be extensive) were not a
good fit for my family life? What if?
There was no reason to stay in
the Chicago West IBM branch on the Harvester team. 1979 had been an utter disaster all
around. The strike started, which
brought budget cuts. Our old friend at
the IT center, John Novack, had retired
and his successor, a brash character from the truck division and no friend of
Big Blue, had at quickly replaced two large IBM mainframes in the Corporate
Computer Center with copycat versions made by a competitor named Amdahl. The success my sales partner Marv D. and
I had achieved with our CADAM installations could not offset that much red ink
in our sales ledger. Marv and I were
both rather disgruntled fellows: we had turned in banner results in 1979 and
our reward was no recognition and meager commission checks since we were on a
shared plan with the rest of the team.
The manager of the new national CADAM
team was a man named Gerald Patterson, and he had taken note of what Marv and I
were doing in Chicago. Thinking about
this forty years later, I now wonder why he recruited me instead of Marv. I had not learned a great deal about the CAD application
over the years. I knew how to operate the
display scope and do simple drawings, but I certainly did not have the skills
to explain or demonstrate in detail how to produce a complete engineering
drawing on the system. My strengths were
in the computer support realm: how to select the hardware, install the software, how to solve typical
problems, how to do back-ups, etc. All
were valuable things to know and essential to the success of the installation,
but it was Marv who knew how to talk to the engineers in their own language and
persuade them that CADAM was a better answer than pencil and paper.
Patterson got in touch and we
had several preliminary chats over the phone.
He then arranged to meet with me in March in Chicago. It was a long discussion, well over an hour. I gave him a rundown of what I had been doing
at Harvester. He gave me a very thorough
and frank picture of what should be expected in the proposed job: no promotion
for the moment (not music to my ears), a lot of travel, a lot of overtime and
an uncertain future. Jerry was not
terribly friendly, in fact a bit gruff, but impressed me as a no-nonsense
straight shooter that I could trust.
As he explained it, his team was
an experiment designed to discover if IBM could become a force in
computer-aided design. His crew of eight
would be a resource to help the branch offices by bringing in depth knowledge
to the CADAM sales process. It had been
three years since the CADAM product was introduced and there had only been a
handful of installations. He thought we
had just a couple of years to show results, and if we failed, there was no
telling where we’d end up. We parted
with an agreement to be in touch. Though
Jerry did not make a formal offer, I felt that I had passed muster.
I went home that evening and
explained the situation to my wife.
Never a risk taker, apprehensive about how much time I’d be absent, and no fan of overtime, she was dubious. Over the next few days I argued that this was
our chance to move up in the world and that it would not be wise to turn it
down. Eventually, she agreed.
Before long my boss informed
me that Patterson had an offer to make.
Jerry and I connected on the phone and he spelled it out: I would be
working from downtown Chicago covering the entire Midwest Region (some 15
states or so) and paired with a sales partner named Don M. I would still be an IBM journeyman at salary
level 55 (same as my rank in the branch) but with a very decent pay raise—about
10% as I recall. I was to start my new
duties as an “Industry Specialist” on May 1, 1980. For the next 30+ months I could say, “Hi, I’m
from HQ and I’m here to help.”
Don was moving to Chicago from
New Orleans, where he had sold CADAM to a major ship builder. Originally from Philadelphia, he was a stylish
dresser who sported a Frankie Valli pompadour. He was the stereotypical
salesman in every way—jovial, optimistic, and prone to hyperbole. He had some background in engineering and was
a real performer when giving a presentation or a demo. As the guy who knew the computer side of
things, I would be his complement.
Though we were complete opposites in terms of style, interests and
skills, we hit it off at once and worked well together, though as time went on,
we tended increasingly to operate alone in order to be able to cover more
situations.
My first few months on the job
were not very productive, but a learning experience. I paid close attention to Don as he went
through his song and dance and began to feel much more comfortable with the
language of engineering and engineering drawings. I went to Chicago’s venerable
bookseller, Kroch and Brentano and
purchased a comprehensive drafting textbook, which I studied from cover to
cover. I talked Patterson into funding a
trip to Los Angeles so that I could attend a weeklong CADAM basics course at
Lockheed’s ed center. With that and many
hours of practice on our demo display unit in the Chicago Data Center, I was
eventually able to demonstrate all the functions of the system both confidently
and competently.
My father (a civil engineer) had
died the year before I got this new assignment and I have often thought how
amused he would have been to witness his son, the history major, enmeshed in
the details of drafting. I can still
imagine him saying about time that I finally learned some really useful
skills.
The next two years went by a with a blur. I averaged some 100 air flights each year, and visited virtually every branch office in the region. We had booths at various manufacturing and engineering trade shows where I learned the ins and outs of scooping up good prospects on the convention floor. I also spent far too much time away from home, leaving my wife to carry the load there while I went about the job of making myself a likely prospect for future promotion. By midyear of 1981 I had done enough good work to persuade Patterson to promote me to the advisory level, which meant I was now positioned for my post CADAM career.
It was in 1981 I really came
into my own. First I managed to close
three sales in Akron—Firestone Tire, Goodyear and Timken Steel. Along with other wins, I sold the product to
Long John Silver’s and opened up the fast food industry for CADAM, which
eventually led to a close at McDonald’s (though the actual sale at the golden
arches was not completed until after I left the team). This record resulted in a IBM Director’s
award ($1000) and an invitation to the SE Symposium, which was to take place in
Miami. My spouse was not amused. “I’m supposed to be happy that you just won
another trip out of town?”
But I did manage to reward her
just a bit for her sacrifices by arranging a weekend for her in New Orleans, a
city that had long been on her wish list.
With the assistance of Don and one of his old pals in the New Orleans
branch, several prospective customers were located who needed a call from an
IBM product expert to close the sale. I
went down on a Wednesday, spent Thursday on business and Friday met Jerrie at
Louis Armstrong International. We had a
glorious weekend seeing the sights and enjoying several of NOLA’s best
restaurants. I have no idea if IBM ever
managed to sell anything to the two accounts I visited.
On one other occasion I managed
to preserve domestic harmony with a bit of travel ingenuity. It so happened that my son’s first cello
recital and a major executive presentation in Akron at Firestone were on the
same day. The presentation was at 2:00
PM (EST) and Jon’s recital was at 7:00 PM (CST). Theoretically, I should be able to fly home
in time to get to the concert, but there were several large if’s looming in the
background. Would the meeting end at
3:00 after the customary hour or so?
Would I be able to get the Cleveland airport in time for a 4:55
flight? Would the plane be on time
landing at O’Hare? And so forth…
There were two things I could do
to help, and I did them. First I booked the
home leg from Cleveland rather than Akron since it would be a direct flight and
bit faster. Second, I paid for an
upgrade to first class so that I wouldn’t have to wait ten minutes or longer to
deplane from the back of the aircraft in Chicago. I had a few harrowing moments here and there on
the way home, but all worked in the end.
Just as the musicians started to file in, I took my seat and escaped any
possible fall-out since I had promised my family that I would be on hand
without fail. (As a bonus, the
presentation had gone off without a hitch,
the VP of engineering signed off, and we had an order in hand the
following week.) Occasionally,
everything seems fated to work out.
My success in Akron led to an
effort by the branch to recruit me. The
bait was a promotion to senior rank (with pay equivalent to first line
management and a promise that I would be reporting directly to the branch
manager). However this had not been done
according to the rules, which called for getting Patterson’s permission before
approaching me. The ever alert Jerry did
a little sleuthing and discovered that Branch Office 012 did not have a hire
ticket or a budget for my move. He at
once broke up the romance and instructed me to have no further truck with the
offending manager (who just happened to be the former account exec at Harvester
in Chicago). As things turned out, Mr. Patterson had other ideas
about my future.
In the spring of 1982, Jerry
landed a job as the Location Manager in Cedar Rapids and left us. His team had more than met expectations: over
two years, we had landed more than 50
new CADAM accounts. Don and I had
accounted for about 40% the wins, even though we were just two out of eight
players on the team. We were not pleased
with Jerry’s replacement (in fact I can’t remember his name), and Don started
job hunting in earnest. He was ready to
go and more importantly, his wife was a warm weather soul and he wasn’t sure
his marriage could survive another winter in Chicago.
After two years of this, I
understood how a support staff job like mine burned people out. The constant travel, the hours, and the
intensity of the situations we found ourselves in were highly stressful. In my 33 plus years at IBM, my 30 months in
CADAM were by far the most jam-packed I ever experienced. Before and since I never worked that hard or
learned so much in just a short time.
A large part of the strain was
that every situation seemed like a crisis or could become one. We had to deal with a lot of skepticism from our
engineering clients. After all IBM was not exactly a major player in the
engineering and scientific realm—our forte was record keeping and bean
counting—in short data processing (this despite the fact that an IBM 360/65
mainframe guided the Apollo missions.) The political landscape in most
companies found the engineers and the IT folks on opposing sides.
The CAD marketplace was intensely competitive and some of our rival firms had products that were more functional than CADAM. We quickly learned to size them up and recognize when we were in a weak position. If a customer wanted to do intricate 3-D design work, we were in trouble. On the other side, if a customer wanted to speed up the time it took to release new product specs to manufacturing, this was an opportunity we should not lose. Of course, productivity was not always an easy sell among engineers preoccupied with elegant designs.
Because there were so few of us,
we had to be careful how we allocated
our time. If we thought a situation had
already been lost to the competition or the customer was simply “kicking
tires,” we might refuse to get involved.
Such decisions were not welcome among the branch office sales teams that
solicited our help, and we were all recipients of numerous complaint letters.
Happily enough, Jerry was a tough-minded character who refused to be swayed or
intimidated, and only rarely did he find that a complaint was legitimate. In that case, you got a brief lecture, a pat
on the back, and were sent back to the fray.
I also experienced a goodly
share of the humility that comes with defeat.
In some cases I suppose I had done my best and it was simply not enough
to overcome the obstacles to a sale. In
others (and there were more than a few) I made a serious mistake or my skills
were not up to the task. It’s a cliché
that we learn from failure because it should be true—though as we all
know, there are plenty of people who don’t seem to profit from their mistakes.
Towards the end of 1981 I had my
first and only opportunity to use my knowledge of French in a practical
setting. To address some of CADAM’s
shortcomings in advanced 3-D design, IBM struck up a partnership with Dassault
Aviation in Paris, which had developed CATIA (a French acronym for 3-D
interactive design software), which ran on IBM mainframes and used IBM display
technology. Henceforth we could offer
the two products in tandem: complicated design on CATIA and high speed drafting
via CADAM.
There was a problem with the
product launch: the support team sent by Dassault had minimal (some said no)
knowledge of English. What to do? My esteemed boss stepped forward with a
solution to this dilemma that he knew would please his boss, our industry
director: he just happened to have an employee with a working knowledge of both
French and computer-aided design. So for
some four weeks, I got to follow the French around, acting as their interpreter
at various events. Their boss was a bit
officious, but his employees were nice fellows.
Patrick Rozoy and I became good friends and stayed in touch for a while
after he returned to France. After 40
years his business card is still in my file.
As 1982 rolled on, I really was feeling a bit worn out and I knew I was ready for something else. What would it be? Turns out Mr. Patterson had a plan in mind: upon taking charge in Cedar Rapids he discovered that he had an SE manager that did not meet his requirements. However, said manager was apparently very anxious to leave town, and Jerry wasted no time finding him a job somewhere else. He then offered the position to a fellow that he thought could do the job properly—one Mike Bourgo. It was an offer that pleased me (I was ready for a move up) and my wife (Iowa was the place she wanted to live). The children? They were not sold, but what could they do? Not much.
Sometimes I think about all
those people I spent so much time with and what happened to them. Jerry Patterson and I never lost touch and
the sad news of his death at 79 came with the Christmas card in 2020. I recently decided to google Don and
Marv. I found a Don of the
appropriate age (78) in Henderson, Nevada, just the sort of town that might
have appealed to a guy with more than a bit of the high roller in him. A Marv D. (age 85) turned up in Houston,
again a suitable place, in this instance for a guy who knew a great deal about
engineering and aviation. But will I
make any effort to find out if these are the fellows I knew? I think not—after all, the guys I knew no
longer exist—just as the me of 40 years ago is scarcely here anymore, either.
