Joe Alsop

My Travails with Joe Alsop

I was updating my web page, and on the hunt for a decent profile or biography on Joe Alsop, CEO of Progress Software, when I came to the sudden realization of how little there was written about him. Oh there was plenty written about his uncle, also named Joe Alsop, who was one of John F. Kennedy's confidants and a well syndicated writer for the New York Herald Tribune, but there was virtually nothing written about the current Joe Alsop - CEO of Progress Software - the man I worked for directly or indirectly for almost 10 years.

Update: There is now an excellent paper written by some Harvard Business School students on Joe Alsop and Progress Software on this website (I got their premission to publish it).

The current profiles of Joe Alsop are so slim you could call them anorexic. As an example, in the Progress Software 10K for 1998 there are entire paragraphs written about all of the executives, except for Joe! For Joe they wrote:

"Mr. Alsop, a founder of the Company, has been a director and President of the Company since its inception in 1981."

Hello? Is that what you write about a man that is a CEO of a company that has sold billions of dollars of software over its lifetime? Even the Wall St. Journal has the same pathetic one-liner profile of Joe Alsop in its corporate profile of Progress Software. Shame on them.

Yet, I have no doubt that Joe himself mandated what was to be written in that 10K. That is so Joe. Well, Joe, I have this to say: I don't work for you anymore. I can write what needs to be written.

Note: this is going to be one or two pages at best. I'll leave "the book" for someone else to write. Also, this isn't going to happen anytime soon. I've got my hands full right now.