Re: Thoughts on the book: DEC is dead, long live DEC

In article <44EE5EB4.1F371648@xxxxxxxxxxxx>, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spamnot@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

I finished reading it. The first half could have been condensed as:

Olsen was hands-off type, let the engineers battle and decide between
themselves. This worked well initially, but ended up creating
independant kingdoms that where inter-kingdom communication was not
good. In mid 80s, Olsen became aware of this, but when he tried to do
something about it, he had lost power within the organisation and
couldn't force changes onto those independant kingdoms. When he tried to
reshape the management "matrix" in 1990-1992 period, the various kings
didn't accept it. Seems to me that Oslen set himself up to lose control
by devolving power so much in the early days.

The way I read it, the kingdoms were not a result of Olsen's management
style per se, but of the natural growth of the company. As the middle managers
were held responsible for more employees and more production, they began to
spend more time in CYA activities. As time goes by, this devolves into turf
wars and extreme protectionism of your people.
I found that particularly enlightening because I've always wondered why
corporate politics, which are usually counter-productive if not outright
damaging to a company, are so pervasive. It was helpful to me to understand
that management is very often given conflicting priorities and expected to
comply with them to the letter. Using an example from my own situation, what
is a manager to do when he's instructed to encourage his team to get as much
training and education as they need to do their job, but then is handed a
miniscule department budget? Or when your team is tasked with being the sole
producer of a particular suite of high-quality products, but you're only
allowed a "skeleton crew".

Manufacturing wasn't too concerned about efficiency, and it seemed that
throughout DEC, money was no object and they were perfectly happy making
high cost items as long as they were also high quality. There were too
many plants around the world and no real central controls (remember
those independant kingdoms).

Indeed, the priority was quality at any cost. It shows how idealistic
that Olsen was.
Along with the lack of central controls, they had no way for the
geographically-disperse groups to communicate. I'm not sure why that was, I
don't remember if the author analyzed it. (After all, was this before WAN's
and All-In-1 or VaxNotes?)

When it was decided to battle IBM, DEC hired 26,800 new employees in a
short period of time. This didn't pan out, but those employees stayed
on, thus greatly lowering the sales/employee numbers and making it even
harder for DEC to compete. (this was mid 1980s).

Yeah, Olsen felt a great deal of paternalism for his people and took
pride in never laying anybody off. So the headcount grew and grew.

While the book is quite long for what it contains and short of juicy
interesting details about DEC (more about generalities), it does make
one wonder about how one can lose control over a large succesful
corporation. And one has to wonder about companies like Yahoo and Google
who are growing by leaps and bounds and going in every direction they
can.

He implied it was something related to group dynamics. When a company
is small, the boss has a high degree of control. Ken was surprised to find
that after the company had tens of thousands of employees and multi-national
that it ran itself and not necessarily in good ways.
Then too, the author commented that around that time there were enough
new managers around who didn't respect Ken as much as the original team did
that they pretty much dismissed anything he said. "Yes boss" to his face, then
did what they wanted when he left the room.

Also, after reading this book, I think that writing to CEOs or even the
board is far more valuable than previously thought since it is very
likely that they are detached and isolated from all the bad news, and
skipping over all the management within the corporation to reach the top
guys is probably more important than ever.

If you can do that without being seen as going over your supervisor's
head... sometimes corporate politics are so set in that the company's going
down no matter what you do.
(On a tangent, did anyone read the article about that man who tried to
warn his company (Lockheed) and the coast guard that some ships they were
refitting for them were full of problems? According to the story, both
Lockheed and the Coast Guard dismissed his concerns and laid him off as a
troublemaker (although their official reason was budgetary). He recently told
his story in a 10-minute video that he placed on Youtube.com for public
consumption. Ouch!)

- Sharon
"Gravity... is a harsh mistress!"
.

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