what he says seems plausible to me. i've worked in the past for big banking doing database related work as well as cost analysis and budgeting of certain computing platforms. while he was in sales and apparently quite exposed to the higher-ups, my position was purely technical, at the bottom of the ladder. but not completely.
the general feeling of his story is 'right', but the one detail which does not quite fit with my experience is that he repeatedly went to the higher-ups to complain about malfeasance, basically telling the higher-ups that the higher-ups were screwing the company. anybody who has worked for a bank or finance-related companies knows that such places are rigid hierarchies - i knew of peoplke who had to go at the end of every day into their bosses office to inform about his activities of the day and receive his duties for the next day. i dont know about the US, but where i worked people knew that their boss was not their friend, and that malfeasance, malversation and other funny business is part of the landscape, accepted because you cant do anything against it anyway and because speaking about it too loud will brand whomever speaks out too loudly as a troublemaker.
i'll tell some experiences of mine and a colleague so you can compare with what mr. grove is saying.
about two years into my employment for one of the biggest banking corporations of this country, i was put in charge of tracking costs of a machine park of about 100 computers, in part very big and expensive hardware from sun. i was given this job, it appears, because i was the only one who did not say no. nobody else had wanted it. once i had an oversight of my platform, one of the things which came to attention was that i had inherited 3 very expensive 64-cpu sun computers. these computers had two problems: they were massively over-dimensioned, and they were so expensive that i often had to engage my boss to quite down the anger of the owners of the 50 or so projects which were running on these machines. i tried to find out how these machines could have been bought at all. it came out that of the 6-7 people who had taken the buy decision only one remained in the company, all others had in the meantime assumed well-remunerated jobs elsewhere. officially nobody knew anything, but the insinuations from all involved were more than clear - some people were financially very well off as a result of this acquisition.
looking for a solution to my troubles, i found out that somebody else in the company 'owned' a platform where all the projects running on my tar-baby could run for about half the cost, and that the migration work would be well within available resources, human and budgetary. i went to my boss with that and was forbidden from following up, because these (decisions to use my expensive hardware) were 'political' decisions from higher up. so i returned to the routine of being called names by angry project managers. next thing that happened was that a colleague, involved in one of 'my' projects, made a proposal to migrate the whole thing to a computing environment composed entirely of intel hardware - multi-cpu blades in 19" racks. all the hardware needed would have cost us about 3 months of our operating budget, and the operating costs would be about 1/10 of what we were paying at the time. he went to his boss with that. about a month later we were graced with two brand new 128-cpu sun computers, each machine costing about one year of my until-then assigned operating budget, each cpu about 3x as strong as the already overdimensioned ones we had. OTOH there were the fights on all levels to get an extra memory-card or cpu approved for some of the smaller machines, peanuts in comparison.
unrelated and due to insights coming from his job, my colleague also found that for overdrafted accounts (the accounts of our banks clients), the weekend counted as 3 days instead of 2 days (saturday and sunday) - a simple yet apparently difficult to track method to charge undue interests to clients. let me just say that the issue of overcharging interests is a recurring theme here: it is something that comes up almost yearly in the media, each time the banks make some contrite noises and the thing goes away. as for myself, due to my being involved in cost calculation and budgeting, i soon found myself sitting in meetings with people high up in the chain of command, the people who had real decision power over the money of the company. my impression was that these people, all of them sporting multiple academic titles and sitting in chairs labeled CFO, comptroller, vice-president for something ... had no real grasp of the finances of the company they were supposedly in charge, or much of anything else, that the decisions of these people were uninformed and apparently contrary to wisdom - that it was up to underdogs like myself to bring at least some rationality into the decision-making process. the meetings with these higher-ups were, to me, basically sessions for them to impress each other with impressive rethoric and expensive swiss watches. i think that is what is popularly known as the 'dilbert method of management.
neither my colleague nor myself are working for that banking conglomerate any more.
i am telling this, again, to allow people not from this 'industry' to compare. grove's experience as related above and my experience overlap on the issues of irrational management, graft, screwing the clients, the companies finances appearing to be a mess held together by duct-tape.
about the other things he talks, people from different companies colluding to screw each other, involvement with more nefarious elements of society, connections to politics, i can only opine that i dont think it beyond them. it is the nature of capitalism and those who most profit from it.
