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As his Argonne contracts multiplied, Mickelson taught friends and neighborhood housewives how to make the tiny (one-twelfth inch wide) cores, and private companies began buying them.
Then he financed expansion by selling stock to the public. Today he owns four plants, employs 2,200 people and turns out sophisticated memory systems that sell for $35,000 to $180,000 each. The Government gave him a lot of help, but he had the good business sense and the raw courage to seize an opportunity.
Advice Seller
John Diebold, 39, a self-professed "management philosopher," has made the most of blending technology with management consulting. From his office above Manhattan's Park Avenue, he tells companies and even governments how they can use advanced technology, notably computers, to be more efficient. The Diebold Group of Companies spans 13 offices from San Francisco to Milan, and Diebold is worth "well over a million." He is by no means the biggest
U.S. management consultant or the first to concentrate on data processing, but his blend of vision and personal push has made him the best-known and most debated personality in a generally anonymous field.
All this began with a graduate-school thesis. At Harvard Business School in the early 1950s, Diebold helped prepare a report on the new science of automating factories. He used it as the basis for a book, Automation, which helped popularize both the word and the author. Then he set up a firm in the attic of his father's house in Weehawken, NJ. Ultimately Engineer Diebold hired businessmen and technicians to work for him while he supervised his firm's growth and actively promoted his ideas and himself. He is currently selling advice to Lockheed, Du Pont, Agfa, Xerox, IBM, Allstate Insurance, Philips Lamp, Westinghouse and 250 other companies.
Recently he made a deal with the French Rothschild bankers, who are partners in his Paris consulting branch, to set up a company that will offer computer services to French firms. He is also conducting a course for executives of 90 major U.S. and European companies in the long-range impact of information technology on business (his total fee: $1,000,000), and is negotiating with the government of an East European satellite to teach its managers U.S. business techniques. That project has been approved by the U.S. Government, which has often engaged Diebold as an adviser to the Labor Department, the Peace Corps, and the U.S. delegation to the United Nations Science Conference. Says Diebold: "I'm not interested in being heard by everyone, but I want to function in the mainstream, where the action is."
And Many Others