His job now complete, Dell CFO Carty rejoins his retirement in progress

Whether pulling Dell Computer out of the financial sewer was Don Carty's last miracle remains to be seen. But however the annals of financial history may judge him, there's no doubt that Dell owes him a huge debt of gratitude.

What do you do when you're a legendary and talented former CEO, when you're credited with business decisions that saved a corporation once already, when you've spent three decades at the helm of major airlines and railways in Canada, the US, and the UK, and you're either revered or reviled as a business leader? In the case of Don Carty, you make one more turnaround, and you make sure it's an impossible one: Dell, whose internal politics and curious accounting duplications could have spelled doom for one of America's great success stories.

This morning, the man brought out of retirement from a lifetime of negotiating pilots' and labor union's contracts that kept his company from falling apart, is looking to head back to a quieter life. With the options backdating scandal impressively tucked away in its past, and with investors having largely forgiven the company's $92 million juxtaposition of funds, Dell will be replacing Carty with Brian Gladden, himself a former CEO of the former GE Plastics division.

Five years ago, AMR Corp. CEO Carty had just successfully negotiated huge wage cutting deals with the major pilots' and flight attendants' unions, totaling billions of dollars each, which Carty had said was necessary to keep American Airlines out of bankruptcy. Then the following week, the flight attendants' union learned that dozens of parent AMR's executives had voted themselves a rather hefty bonus plan.

The result was nearly catastrophic, especially for Carty's otherwise solid track record. Carty and the airline had to renegotiate most of its deals, though AMR ended up avoiding a bankruptcy filing, to this day [CORRECTION: Our source which stated AMR filed bankruptcy one week after Carty's departure was inaccurate, and our thanks to a reader for pointing this out].

But rather than spend his retirement acknowledging for people that he used to be Don Carty, he sought redemption. He may have found it, having presided over a turnaround strategy at Dell that still has every opportunity -- though certainly no assurances yet -- of restoring it to prosperity. Cost cutting was at the heart of his plan, and that included saying good-bye to the Austin, Texas manufacturing facility that was once its backbone, and slashing 8,800 jobs in the process. But expanding Dell's retail presence way beyond its traditional direct sales channel, may also have been key to saving the company.

At a recent speech at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo, CEO Michael Dell summed up the situation like this: "Five quarters ago, when I came back into the CEO role, we had just experienced a quarter where we had negative unit growth of minus 11 percent. That's not a good thing, particularly in a growing industry. Anyway, in the last quarter, according to IDC, we had positive unit growth of 21.6 percent. So, now Dell is once again growing faster than the industry."

We'll know more about Dell's growth status when it presents its back-to-regular-schedule financial analysts' meeting in ten days. But the very fact that Dell announced Carty's retirement ahead of that meeting could be an indicator of its confidence that the plan he and Mr. Dell put in place is working as predicted. Carty will remain as the company's vice chairman.

Assuming Carty's seat during this much-needed growth period for Dell will be Brian Gladden, who enters the computer industry from a very, very different line of business: plastics. Gladden was CEO of SABIC Innovative Plastics -- the former GE Plastics -- which produces thermoplastic materials such as heat- and impact-resistant resins for such things as computer keyboards and monitors, and prosthetic bone implants.

Just last month, Gladden gave a telling speech before a plastics industry conference, where he warned that manufacturers everywhere should no longer rely upon China's low labor costs to help them maintain high margins. SABIC produces none of its material in Asia, only in the US and Western Europe, though a fourth of its sales are in China. When pressed about why SABIC didn't just open a plant there to avoid import costs, according to a report in Plastics News, Gladden told attendees he expected labor costs in China to be 35% higher in 2008 than they were in 2006.

The real growth markets in that region, taking increasing labor costs into account, are Vietnam, Russia, and most of all, India, Gladden said. But rather than build Asian production facilities, he believed SABIC could more efficiently address emerging global markets collectively by implementing more process innovations. And the place where it would be easier and more productive to be doing those kinds of things, he said, would be the United States.