Do as I say, not as I do.

• Position: Mismanagement of Control Data Corp. by its former CEO Robert M. Price

Talk about experience. When former Control Data Corp. CEO Robert M. Price takes the lectern at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, he can give students, in the words of one analyst, "a Harvard Business School textbook example of how to screw up a company."

"It's easy to be an analyst," Price counters. "It's a hell of a lot harder to make decisions and live with them."

Price took a real roller-coaster ride at Control Data, climbing slowly and steadily from entry-level programmer in 1961 to the top in 1985. The ride down, though, was both precipitous and bumpy. As the company agonized over naming Lawrence Perlman to succeed Price in 1990, Business Week magazine called the indecisiveness "typical of the poor judgment that caused Control Data to lose $1.3 billion between 1983 and 1990."

Control Data, formed in 1957 to make mainframe computers, has survived, but just barely. In May 1992, it split into Ceridian Corp., a parent company over various sideline businesses, and Control Data Systems Inc., a 3,500-employee fragment of the original Control Data, which peaked in 1988 with 40,000 workers worldwide.

Stock analyst Robert Kleibar, of Piper Jaffray Associates in Minneapolis, says the Minnesota-based corporation became "a venerable old piece of dung." A California business journal concluded Price let operations "spread all over the map, wandering too far from high...