Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–100
you pay ’em.” He said, “What do you know about marketing?” I said, “I have a feeling I may
know as much as you do.” [Laughter] Which is a great place to start.
He had a strong personality. He was perfectly willing to deal with controversy. His
name was Andre Salaber. He was a Basque. He used to say, “You must think you’re tough.” I
said, “Yeah, you Basques think you’re tough, too.” We had agreed that night that he would pay
them. Well, I got there in June, and sometime during the winter—the snow was falling—Mario,
one of the vice presidents, roughly at my level, shows up and says, “We’ve changed our mind.
You’re going to pay them.” I said, “Oh, so they’re going to report to me.” “Well, no.” And I
said, “Oh, no?” I said, “I had a deal.” “Well, we’ve changed the deal.” I said, “Yeah, you’ve
changed the deal.” I stick my head out of the office, and I say to my secretary, “Bari, I want you
to get John Roddy up here.” He was sort of my building person. He comes up. I say, “John.
You know Mario. He’s got this group here that does market research. You know where they
are. They’re all together, which should make this easy. I want you to take all their stuff, put it in
cardboard boxes and I want them out just off the edge of the property. And I want it done
quickly.” Mario, the vice president, says, “It’s snowing.” I say, “What does that have to do with
it?” He says, “You wouldn’t do it.” I said, “John, would I do it?” He says, “Yeah, boss, you’ll
do it.” I said, “OK, when I give you the word, it’s going to occur very quickly. I want all those
people and all their stuff out there, off the edge of the property, by the side of the road. And
Mario will tell you who’s going to come pick them up.” Mario says, “You’ll do it.” I said, “You
better believe it.” He makes a phone call back to Andre and says, “I think we don’t have a deal.”
[Laughter]
So then I’m at some retreat they’re having for those of us who were sort of high middle–
level VPs, and someone—the general counsel, I think—came up to me and said, “You know,
you’ve only worked for this company for six months. Why is it you play the game just the way
we do?” I said, “You want to play this game? I can play this game. You want to play tough
guy—‘I can make you do what I want,’ and all that? I can play that game with you. But you
know, at the end of the day, it doesn’t make any of us a penny.” I said, “Why don’t we just
forget about doing this kind of stuff and worry about making money?” And he looks at me as if
I’ve come from Mars, because everybody knows business is not about making money. For the
people doing it, it’s about power. It’s entirely about power. It has nothing to do with making
money, most of the time. I just had the wrong notion of why people in business do things,
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