Frank Kales passed away on Dec. 8 at the age of 81. He was well known among soccer connoisseurs as general manager of Ajax soccer club during the turbulent 1999-2000 period. Before that, he worked for decades at IBM where he eventually became director of the Global Education branch.
Kales joined Ajax on Feb. 2, 1999, as the second director after the IPO. He came over from computer concern IBM. Kales wanted to put the club on a more American (read commercial) footing. He managed to secure a sponsorship contract with Adidas for the Amsterdam professional club.
Sports-wise, it was a time of crisis. Under his reign, Ajax celebrated its centennial on March 18, 2000, but performance on the pitch was disappointing. Coach Jan Wouters was fired and the club finished fifth in the Eredivisie. Shortly thereafter, in the summer of 2000, Kales left Ajax because of a difference of opinion with the (meddlesome) supervisory board. Things didn't go well with the hard core of soccer fans either: they felt that a former basketball international could not lead a soccer club and regularly threatened him.
Before joining the soccer club, he was employed by IBM for many years. There he started as an 'intermediate systems marketing manager' in January 1965. He then moved up to director of worldwide marketing at Big Blue. He later led IBM's PC and Unix business in Europe to eventually head the worldwide training division (Global Education). Based in Terhulpen, near Brussels, in an IBM building which is now a Dolce chain hotel.
After his time at Ajax, he became an Internet entrepreneur in the field of e-commerce and e-learning solutions and advised managers on the issue of how to deal with new technology.
On his Linkedin page, Kales reminisces about his very first profession from 1961-1962: journalist for the newspaper Het Vrije Volk. For that he wrote, among other things, "a nice piece about the last telephone exchange in the Netherlands going digital.
