"I'll be here until I'm six feet under," Sewell Avery once confided to a Montgomery Ward vice president in the dazzling interval of friendship before Board Chairman Avery inevitably fired the veep for "disloyalty." To keep his tight control of the mammoth retail company for 24 years, Avery fired dozens of other executives he suspected of undermining him. Last week the plot that Avery always imagined actually happened. He was forced to resign under pressure of a palace revolution led by a majority of his own board of directors. On hearing the...
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