A
fter his tour in the U.S. Army, Al Dunlap landed his first job in civilian life as an executive trainee at the Kimberly Clark paper mill in New Milford, Connecticut. The start of his career in business also coincided with the final death rattles of his disin- tegrating marriage with Gwyn.The three of them—Al, Gwyn, and their son Troy, barely six months old—had jammed themselves into a two-bedroom garden apartment north of Danbury, Connecticut, a quick thirty-minute drive south down Route 7 from Pittsfield, where Jack Welch was al- ready making a name for himself as an “out-of-the-box thinker” in GE’s Plastics Division.
But Al’s personal life was now in such chaos that it is a wonder he was able to turn up for work at all.1 At odd and unpredictable moments, he would erupt in tantrums and storm about the apart- ment inspecting the furniture for fingerprints. One such bout lasted for nearly three weeks.
For the Christmas holidays of 1963, the young family went to visit Gwyn’s parents in New Jersey. The first day or two passed
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uneventfully. But predictably enough, a fight eventually broke out—this time while Gwyn’s parents were out and she was alone in the house with Al and Troy. They had agreed to spend the day vis- iting their grandparents, who all lived within driving distance. But the question next became whose grandparents would they visit first, Gwyn’s or Al’s? As the yelling escalated, Al suddenly pushed his wife into a nearby coffee table and onto the floor. Then standing over her, he raged, “You son of a bitch, I’ll kill you.”
At that precise moment, the telephone rang. It was Gwyn’s mother, phoning home while on some shopping errands. As Gwyn reached for the receiver, Al roared, “Gimme that phone or I’ll smash you with it.” Hearing this, Gwyn’s mother began to shriek, “Call the police! Call the police!”
In a flash, Al was out the door and heading for his car. At the end of the day, he returned, scooped up his clothes, and left again.
Where he went isn’t known. But three days later, when Gwyn at last decided to venture out of the house and got in her parents’ car with Troy in a baby’s seat and began backing into the street, Al abruptly appeared out of nowhere and began following her, blowing his horn and attempting to force her to the side of the road. At her wit’s end and fearing an accident, she finally pulled over.
Somehow, Gwyn managed to calm Al down, and they agreed to meet in a nearby diner in the town of Westfield and talk through their issues. But once they settled themselves into a booth, Al’s voice began to rise, and suddenly he was cursing and yelling at her all over again—and Gwyn scooped up Troy and fled. Al caught up with her in the parking lot and began trying to push her into his car. The baby began to cry and so did Gwyn. A crowd gathered and several people stepped to her defense and drove her to the Westfield Police Station. There she told her story, and a policeman escorted her back to the diner in a patrol car. Al was now no longer anywhere to be seen. So Gwyn got out, put Troy in his seat in her car, and headed
AL AND DENNIS IN THE PASSING LANE 69 back to her parents, escorted by the police cruiser as far as the West- field town line.
A family priest, Father Flanigan, was asked to provide counsel- ing, and on Al’s assurances, which all agreed were genuine, that he was sorry for his past behavior and would mend his ways, the cou- ple returned to Connecticut and Al went back to work. But it wasn’t long before the violence and vituperation began all over again, now with the menacing additional element of Al standing before her, brandishing one of his guns, and musing about canni- balizing her body.
In November 1964, after less than eighteen months in the New Milford garden apartment, Gwyn could take it no longer. And fol- lowing a particularly brutal shoving incident that ended with Al waving a kitchen knife in her face, she grabbed up Troy and fled one final time—for good.
Soon thereafter, Al was transferred by Kimberly Clark from its New Milford plant to the job of shift superintendent at a company plant in Neenah, Wisconsin. The plant’s general superintendent was a man named Ben Nobbe, who enjoyed snarling at his subordinates.
Al seemed to regard Nobbe as a nasty-tempered old coot—except that he also seemed to view the man’s behavior as somehow endear- ing—or at least as worthy of emulation. “He wore his bastardness like a well-worn badge of honor,” Al said of Nobbe in his memoir, Mean Business. He was a “stern disciplinarian and a tough guy who didn’t take crap from anyone.”*
Mimicking Nobbe’s management style, Al quickly became his most trusted aide and was soon accompanying him on trips to meet with suppliers and contractors. One of those trips brought him into contact with a man who owned a plant that supplied toilet paper to
* The admiring characterization of Nobbe as a “stern disciplinarian,” echoes Dunlap’s equally admiring characterization of his mother, Mildred, as a “strong, disciplined woman.” See A. Dunlap, Mean Business(New York: Times Books, 1996), p. 112.
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Kimberly Clark as a subcontractor when the company’s own plants could not meet demand. The subcontractor, Sterling Pulp & Paper, in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, was heavily in debt, and burdened with an obstinate workforce. Whether Nobbe was beginning to feel threatened by Al at Kimberly Clark isn’t known. But whatever his reasons may have been, Nobbe suggested that Sterling hire Al to shape the place up.
This lifted Al, in less than four years, from trainee in charge of no one, to plant manager of a 1,000-employee factory—and he was still not yet thirty years old. It was a career trajectory that seemed, in the very suddenness of the takeoff and the overnight explosion of the re- sulting responsibilities, no different from what Jack Welch was un- dergoing at that very moment back in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where GE was soon to anoint him general manager of the Plastics Division—at the age of thirty-two, the youngest general manager in the company’s history.
Yet, there is a point at which youth becomes a liability for some- one in a leadership position; the energy of youth can overwhelm the limited experience such a person possesses, impairing the ability to make judgments based on those experiences. Leadership is more than simply being the person who can yell the loudest or bully the weak most aggressively. Often leadership involves finding a consen- sus “sweet spot” among a variety of individuals, all with competing and differing opinions about how to handle a situation.
Dunlap had never learned the subtleties and finesse of leader- ship since his only prior exposure to the challenges of leadership had involved the command-and-control structures of the military. In that environment, barked orders from junior officers are most effec- tive when the thought of disobeying them looms as even more frightening to a subordinate than following them—possibly into the teeth of opposing enemy fire.
Al went to work as general manager of the Sterling Pulp & Paper factory in June 1967 and found himself trying to ram layoffs down
AL AND DENNIS IN THE PASSING LANE 71 the throats of the company’s volatile and unionized workforce. But his tactics of yelling and bullying only succeeded in making the sit- uation worse. Soon he was receiving death threats from anonymous callers to his house.*
Meanwhile, the owner of the company, a fellow named Ely Meyer, had introduced Al to a bank teller named Judy Stringer.
Quickly picking up on Meyer’s suggestion that he’d go a lot further in business if he had a wife, Al married Judy a few months later.
Al’s idea of courtship seems to have featured all the tenderness of a rotary lawn mower running full throttle. At one point, he began pressuring Judy to marry him before December 31 so he could save $600 on his federal income taxes that year. The actual marriage, which in fact has wound up lasting for more than 30 years, does not rate a single line of detail in Dunlap’s memoir, and Judy herself rates only two more brief mentions over the course of his career-long narrative.
Soon enough, Judy began what amounted—at least so far as the world at large could see—to a slow but relentless retreat from in- volvement in his career. Wise to his uncontainable ego, she stopped playing golf with him because she could consistently beat him at it, and took up tennis, which proved to be a game in which he could beat her.†
She also discovered a disarmingly sneaky side to the man that she had not expected. During their first Christmas together, Judy
* The details are set forth in Dunlap’s 1996 business memoir, Mean Business: How I Save Bad Companies and Make Good Companies Great(New York: Times Books, 1996). In Al’s recollected version of events, his relations with the plant’s union is characterized as
“pretty good,” but it is never clearly explained why his tenure at the plant would lead to
“threats of violence” and “anonymous calls and letters from nuts who said they were going to blow up my car or shoot me in the parking lot.”
†See P. Shillington, “Rambo in Pinstripes,” the Miami Herald(June 5, 1995), in which Shillington reports, “Dunlap is a better tennis player than golfer. He shoots in the ‘high 90s.’ His wife can beat him; Dunlap, as you might predict, doesn’t like to lose. ‘I think that’s probably why we got into tennis,’ Judy is quoted as saying, ‘because he can beat me at that.’ Dunlap laughs heartily at his wife’s insight, nodding in agreement.”
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went out for the afternoon to visit with some friends. Returning home earlier than expected, she discovered Al on his hands and knees in the living room carefully rewrapping various presents he had unwrapped to peek at while she was out.2
Eventually Judy retreated into the escapist world of novels, which she devoured avidly. When the subject of “Life with Al” came up in an interview with a reporter, Judy acknowledged that her hus- band would needle her for wasting her time by reading novels, but she just laughed it off . . . as she did the evident fact that living with Al was like living with a platoon sergeant on field maneuvers. Among his quirks: Every trip had to be planned with military precision—
right to the point of insisting that all suitcases and luggage had to be unpacked on arrival at any destination, even if it was 3 o’clock in the morning. But Judy had long since figured out how to deal with such demands: Just follow orders (and keep on reading those novels).3
Al lasted at Sterling Pulp & Paper for roughly six years, from June 1967 to June 1973, leaving when the company’s aging owner, Meyer, died. Realizing no doubt that he’d never be able to survive at the company without Meyer around as his protector, he left for a new job at a rival’s plant, also in Eau Claire. The company, Max Phillips &
Sons, offered him a three-year contract, but this time around there was no Nobbe-type fellow—the cantankerous older superintendent he had worked under at Kimberly Clark—to protect him from the colleagues he abused with his snarling temper. Quickly realizing it had made a terrible mistake, the company fired him after less than two months on the job.4The apparent reason: He arrived with a chip on his shoulder and began bad-mouthing his boss so viciously that it had started to hurt the business.*
* The same type complaints were echoed about Dunlap two decades later. Listen to an executive named Jerry Ballas, who worked with Dunlap at Scott Paper Company in the mid-1990s. Characterizing his management style as “terrorizing,” Ballas told an interviewer for Public Broadcasting, “I mean it literally, it’s terrorizing working for
AL AND DENNIS IN THE PASSING LANE 73 After being dumped by Max Phillips & Sons, it took Al almost six full months to find another job, which he finally did in May 1974 at yet another paper mill—though accepting it meant that he and Judy had to move from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, to Niagara Falls, New York.
The company, Nitec Paper Corporation, had originally been a Kimberly Clark facility; and back in the 1950s it had enjoyed a booming business with three shifts running twenty-four hours a day, six days a week. But business had deteriorated, and the plant had eventually been sold to Nitec, which had let it deteriorate even more. Al was given the title of Chief Operating Officer and the job of shaping the place up.5
The man who hired him, Nitec’s chairman of the board, George Petty, apparently liked Dunlap—so much so that if the sworn testi- mony Al eventually gave in a subsequent lawsuit is to be believed, Petty soon invited him to join in on a little side action he had going.
The action involved a paper company in Canada that Petty con- trolled . . . and various secret offshore bank accounts in places like Switzerland and Bermuda.*
the man. What you do is you avoid, at all costs, getting near him . . . avoid contact with him.” From the transcript of “Running with the Bulls” (Hedrick Smith Produc- tions, 1997/1998) for PBS.
* The details of Dunlap’s secret Swiss bank account, as well as those involving his even- tual falling out with George Petty and others at Nitec, are set forth in the case of Albert J. Dunlap v. Nitec Paper Corporation et al.,U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, 77 Civ. 3056, 1977, the background to which litigation is discussed else- where in this chapter. At one point in a July 9, 1979, affidavit in the case, Dunlap stated:
“I was privy to a variety of conversations to which Mr. Petty and one of his lieutenants, Joseph Mason (‘Mason’) were parties. During these conversations, Petty described the wide use by him and Mason of secret numbered Swiss accounts (and for that matter sim- ilar Bermuda bank accounts) maintained either by them or by shell companies in con- nection with various questionable transactions. Among the transactions thus described by Petty included a type of transaction in which in substance Petty, through the use of a corporate shell, bought pulp from one company he controlled and sold it at a substan- tially higher price to another company he controlled, depositing the profit in his own Swiss or Bermuda bank account. Accordingly, in reality it is Petty and Mason and not I who have the most about which to be embarrassed.”
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To listen to Petty explain what he and a colleague had been doing with those accounts made Dunlap “extraordinarily uneasy,” he later claimed—since, presumably, his instincts told him that main- taining a secret Swiss bank account was a dangerous thing to do. But knowing something is wrong is one thing, and refusing to partici- pate in it is quite another. So it was against all his better judgment, and in seeming disregard of the questionable legality of what he was becoming involved in, that he opened a secret numbered account at a Zurich-based private Swiss bank called Hottinger & Co.—follow- ing which, according to Dunlap, some $40,000 in “consulting fees”
was deposited in it by Petty. This of course dragged in Dunlap even more deeply, presumably making him even more nervous about the matter. Yet, still he said nothing, as if it were all a bad dream that would go away once he woke up.
Meanwhile, Al had already begun earning a reputation for him- self—not just at Nitec but throughout the whole of Niagara Falls—
as an insufferable and self-possessed boor. Seemingly oblivious to how he was viewed by those all around him, he befriended the mayor and the two became frick and frack, turning up at public func- tions together as a sign of Niagara Falls’ “partnership of business and government.”
Among Nitec’s many problems was its outdated pollution con- trol equipment. To get the company to upgrade it, the city of Nia- gara Falls had to give Nitec a variety of tax breaks. But this meant that the Niagara Falls City Council had to ask for periodic briefings from Dunlap about the company’s progress in installing its new equipment. The briefings themselves were always the same: Dunlap would strut into the Council chambers, decked out in one of the hand-tailored suits that he had now begun to wear as the plant’s top manager. Comfortably positioned as the center of attention, Al would thereupon begin to spew forth an unending stream of bom- bastic self-celebration about how much he was doing and how hard he was working, to “save” Nitec Paper.6
AL AND DENNIS IN THE PASSING LANE 75 Not surprisingly, the city’s more seasoned businessmen spotted Dunlap’s Achilles’ heel right away—his preening sartorial vanity—
and were soon using it to maximum effect. One local insurance agent signed him up for some Nitec key man insurance by compli- menting him on his wardrobe at every opportunity. He would spot Al in the crowd at a benefit perhaps, and walk up and say something like, “Jesus Al, that’s the most spectacular suit I’ve ever seen! I’d just say it’s lucky there’s only one of them because no one could possibly wear it as well as you . . .”—at which Al’s chest would puff out and his head would tilt back to display the full and glorious profile of this one-of-a-kind businessman in his one-of-a-kind suit.
The only problem that Al’s flatterers faced was getting paid. For- mer Vice President Dan Quayle’s uncle, Robert Quayle, was a mar- keting vice president for the Carborundum Corporation, which supplied components for Nitec’s pollution control upgrade equip- ment. Quayle complained often that Dunlap would demand instant delivery of the equipment but would dally endlessly when it came to paying for it after it arrived. Said one of Quayle’s colleagues of Dun- lap, “Frankly, he was a world-class asshole. He’d stiff you for months on bills then get abusive the second you asked for payment. He was just the worst. There must have been something wrong with him.”7
Al’s turnaround talents brought about a small profit in 1974 and a slightly bigger one in 1975, and apparently believing himself to be the greatest business leader the city had ever seen, Al joined the Ni- agara Falls Country Club and began challenging members to meet him on the tennis courts.* But it took no time at all before he found
* Tennis players experience an elevation in testosterone levels following a successful ten- nis match, whereas the losers experience a decline in testosterone during the same pe- riod. Actual percentages of testosterone change have been measured in monkeys following fights. Victorious monkeys show a 20 percent increase in testosterone levels for roughly 24 hours following a fight whereas the level may fall by as much as 90 per- cent—and stay lower longer—for monkeys that lose. See D. Blum, Sex on the Brain(New York: Viking Press, 1997), pp. 167–171.