NINE
Unacceptable Choices
The employees of Ben & Jerry’s thought it was kind of strange that their CEO, Perry Odak, didn’t have a computer in his office. He had an inbox and an outbox and a desk, but he didn’t keep much stuff in there at all. His wife and stepson had not moved to Vermont, and neither had several of the top managers he had hired. As one person who worked with him regularly put it, “He didn’t want to leave any bread crumbs.” So it’s hard to say exactly when Perry decided the company would be better off sold.
He wasn’t the only one with that idea, though. Any company that has a strong brand and a depressed stock price is a candidate for a takeover, and the stock of Ben & Jerry’s had been depressed for several years.
In 1997, the ...
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