Here's a five-step plan guaranteed to make an obscure company absolutely notorious.
First get into a business you don't understand, selling to customers who barely understand it either. Then roll out your product without adequate testing. Don't hire enough skilled people. When people notice problems, deny, obfuscate and ignore. Finally, blame your critics when it all blows up in your face.
With missteps like those, it would be hard to ...
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First-rate description, history, and analysis, artfully put together, researched and thought through in depth. The intriguing lead (how to make a corporation infamous) creates an anticipation which is not disappointed, and Gimbel invests the chronicle of Diebolds fateful involvement with electronic voting machines with that hallmark of all good writing: suspense---even when the outcome is known. He also demonstrates, despite ones gut misgivings, that the company is not malicious, merely (always that word, merely) naive, ignorant, and sometimes stupid---though how any American adult could have lived through the 2000 election and not known that was when the mechanics of voting became politicized beggars belief. Thomas Swidarski, current CEO, who has enacted a thorough housecleaning, no doubt saw this Fortune article as a chance to use candor by getting out in front of the story instead of being pushed by it, and comes across well---though plainly Gimbel is no sucker, as the clinching observation of the story attests. I had thought I had read the last word I ever wanted to on this topic, for this election cycle---and heaven knows theres going to be more to come---but this article proved me wrong, and lives up to the best of Fortunes reputation.
