Twenty-First-Century Management: The Revolutionary Strategies That Have Made Computer Associates a Multibillion Dollar Software Giant

by Hesh Kestin

Twenty-First-Century Management is the first book to take an inside look at the secretive but extraordinarily successful computer software giant Computer Associates. Using revolutionary management techniques that defy every rule, Charles B. Wang, the founder and chairman, has taken Computer Associates from start-up to a nearly $2 billion company. After a hundred years of industrial growth, challenges from abroad have so shaken American business confidence that simple imitation of the Japanese is now often seen as the only hope of U.S. economic survival. Yet a model twenty-first-century corporation is alive and well and living in America. Computer Associates' corporate culture is a Harvard MBA's worst nightmare: nobody bothers to write memos, major decisions are made during basketball games, and lines of authority shift endlessly, usually undermined by CA's chairman himself--or his brother, president of the company. Most shocking, the entire company is thoroughly and tumultuously reorganized every year, sometimes more often. Why? Because CA's chairman, Charles B. Wang, knows that now and in the decades to come any company's single most important asset is its people--if moving the best managers into the most important spots means making the head of finance chief of sales, so be it. With doubt and fear corporate America's constant companions, Twenty-First-Century Management details strategies and methods for business success in the coming century. And, in a strikingly apt format, it does for the usually dense and dull business book what CA has done for business--create a revolutionary model, but one that works.

189 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1992