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Review of "Code Name Ginger"
Hi all--
Today's Detroit Free Press contains a sardonic and pithy review of this book, which details How the Segue Came to Be. Regrettably, it's not yet up at http://www.freep.com/index/books.htm , so check back tomorrow. Reviewer is Marta Salij. Good quotes: "Kamen, my friends, is a piece of work. Brilliant inventor, dumb boss. On nearly every page, Kamen commits on or all of the Eight Deadly Sins of Bosses: Parnoia, Indecision, Parsimony, Unpredictablility, Interference, Favoritistm, Egostism, Hypocrisy. Kamen was sure that Honda or Sony would steal his idea, so he refused to let his marketers show the machine to consumers. All the while, he was showing Ginger off to dozens of business partners and friends. Then he blamed the marketers for not having a sales strategy. He was so cheap that he wanted his engineers to drive to Detroit from New Hampshire--in winter--to save on airfare, while putting a deposit on a new ...jet for himself. He refused to pay a competitive salary for software engineers... ...his employees were agitating for stock options, a point Kamen could never understand. He expected his employees to be grateful that he controlled everything. When [he] finally agreed to a stock offering, he doled out the options with wacky logic, giving the director of engineering less than other department heads because he didn't have to relocate for the job and because --get this--he liked his work. 'He should pay me to work on this project.'" "There are no women in this book...and the men here often behave like 5-year-olds jazzes on Juicy Juice and Transformers." "[the author] can't say why the name changed from Ginger to Segway Human Transporter, with the ripe-for-ridicule abbreviation SHT. He can say why Flywheel, a neam the team loved, wasn't chosen: By the time Kamen authorized them to buy the doman name www.flywheel.com, it was gone. Foiled by the boss, once again." Enjoy! --Karen M. |
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Review of "Code Name Ginger" | Karen M. | General | 0 | July 13th 03 08:22 PM |