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My favourite Carol Bartz story

I really enjoyed my time at Autodesk and was sad to leave a great company when I left for my adventure at Ordnance Survey. Autodesk was an exciting place to work, very focused on design, well managed and lead by Carol Bartz. Her vision and leadership was a key part to the success of Autodesk, in particular making it a billion dollar company within a few years.

I can imagine that her leadership style which was direct to say the least, may not seem very “yahoo like” but it worked at Autodesk.

I remember a corporate redesign which resulted in everybody getting new business cards with just a email address rather than a name on the front (very .com of Autodesk at the time), so I was ed.parsons@autodesk.com. Now a few of my colleagues who had PhD’s or letters after their names were a little disappointed that their full title would not be on the card.

In front of 1000 staff at an all-hands sales meeting Carol addressed the issue; “If you don’t like your new business cards, F*ck off and go work for somebody else” – can’t imagine Jerry Yang doing that.

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

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