The harder we work, the luckier we get," is the personal credo of Mr Richard Egan, the billionaire founder of the giant computer storage company EMC, who is expected to be nominated as US ambassador to Ireland next week. Long-time support for the Republican Party rather than luck may have helped get the coveted Phoenix Park posting for the 64-year-old New England executive whose ancestors hail from Westmeath.
Since 1999 he has been a member of George W Bush's information technology advisory council and last year he hosted a fundraiser for the Republican candidate at his Hopkinton estate home in Massachusetts. But no one will deny that Dick Egan has driven himself hard to get where he is. Mr Ross Garber, chairman of Vignette Corporation, once said that he had "never seen or worked for another firm that had inculcated such an aggressive, do-what-it-takes-to-win culture," as that created by Dick Egan in EMC.
Born in Dorchester, Massachusetts and raised in a blue-collar neighbourhood, Mr Egan served with the US Marines during the Korean War before taking an engineering degree at Northeastern University.
He was hired as a design engineer in Honeywell's data processing division and, in 1963, began graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the team which developed the Apollo guidance computer.
According to the EMC website, it was Mr Egan who "designed the Apollo Mission computer's memory systems, which enabled a successful post-moon link-up and guided Apollo's return to earth".
He then had a succession of career turns, working for Lockheed Electronics, co-founding Cambridge Mremories and running Intel's commercial systems division, a loss-making unit which he brought to profit in three years.
In 1979, Mr Egan founded EMC with a college roommate, Mr Robert Marino. Their motto was: "Pick what you can do well, then do it better and faster than anyone else."
Working from company headquarters at Hopkinton, Massachusetts, EMC engineers adapted a process using groups of cheap disk drives simultaneously to store and back up data. But quality control problems caused its products to crash without warning.
With the company reeling in 1988, Mr Egan had the good fortune to find a tough executive who would turn his firm around and make it one of the top Fortune 500 companies. Mr Mike Ruettgers was leaving New England to run an electronics company in Texas but Mr Egan persuaded him to come instead to EMC to fix the problem. "My trump card was that I knew Mike's wife, Maureen, didn't want to leave Massachusetts," he said.
The story of how Mr Ruettgers called EMC executives together the first day and placed an airsickness bag in front of each place at the conference table has now passed into company folklore. Raising one of the paper bags in his hand, he announced: "The quality of our products makes me want to puke."
Mr Ruettgers, who became chief executive in 1992, was given a free hand to take EMC on a hugely successful ride. Three years after fixing the problem, EMC toppled IBM as the leading supplier of storage for IBM's own mainframes.
The company expanded to 50 countries including Ireland where it has a subsidiary in Cork, with more than 1,000 employees.
Among S&P 500 companies during the 1990s, EMC stock ranked second only to Dell Computer. Anyone who invested $1,000 (€1,073) in Dick Egan's company in 1990 would have collected $523,000 by the end of the decade.
Long after it became a major corporation, EMC still remained a family business. Up to recently four Egan family members remained on the eight-person board. One independent board member was edged out in 1999 after questioning whether Mr Egan and other executives were awarding themselves excessive compensation, according to Business Week magazine.
In January this year as part of an executive shuffle Richard Egan stepped down as chairman of EMC to become its chairman emeritus, and Mike Ruettgers became executive chairman. Mr Egan's wife Maureen also retired from the board.
The couple, who have five children, founded Hopkinton Technology for Education Trust which supplies and helps implement advanced technology in local schools. Mr Egan has been a longstanding member of the American Ireland Fund.
The new US ambassador in Dublin will have much in common with his counterpart in London. The US ambassador to the Court of St James is to be Mr William Stamps Farish III, the 62year-old member of a wealthy Texan oil family and also a Republican fund-raiser.
