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DEC Is Dead, Long Live DEC: The Lasting Legacy of Digital Equipment Corporation
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$22.50
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Manufacturer: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 338
EAN: 9781576753057
Format: Illustrated
ISBN: 1576753050
Label: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Manufacturer: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 317
Publication Date: 2004-08-09
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Studio: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
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Editorial Reviews:
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Digital Equipment Corporation achieved sales of over $14 billion, reached the Fortune 50, and was second only to IBM as a computer manufacturer. Though responsible for the invention of speech recognition, the minicomputer, and local area networking, DEC ultimately failed as a business and was sold to Compaq Corporation in 1998. This fascinating modern Greek tragedy by Ed Schein, a high-level consultant to DEC for 40 years, shows how DEC's unique corporate culture contributed both to its early successes and later to an organizational rigidity that caused its ultimate downfall.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Generic B-School Bullet-Point Speak
Comment: If you did a global replace of "Packard" for "Olsen" and "H-P" for "DEC" the book would still read because the book isn't about DEC. It's about the authors and they agree that they are all just really clever people.
But that's about all they agree on. It doesn't appear that they read each other's contributions because there is little consistency in the stories they tell or even the dates and numbers they use.
If you like your history mushed into pablum and served up as B-school bullet points then you'll probably like this book. But if you are looking for a history of DEC, I'd advise you to look elsewhere.
Customer Rating:
Summary: how [not] to run a knowledge organization
Comment: We hear a lot about "knowledge workers" and innovation. So how does one run an innovative business based on knowledge workers? DEC did this for about 30 years, before being bought by Compaq. The title means the company is gone, but it's values live on via its employees.
The author was a consultant that worked with the executive management for a number of years. His thesis is that the policies that helped the company create rapid growth ultimately failed to help it when the market changed (e.g. the PC appeared). Further, the company's culture (and that's a popular phrase in this book) had genes for innovation, individualism, engineering and technology but lacked a "money gene" required to make a viable business.
When DEC was growing, it was OK to have multiple projects tackling the same problem. However, as growth slowed, the funds didn't exist but the company had no mechanism for pulling the plug.
So go out and read it, and decide for yourself whether this is going to apply to Google.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A must read for anyone in a disrupted business today!
Comment: This reads better than any novel that you will pick up. A great place to learn Schein's concepts of organizational culture. This is a must read for anyone in or leading a business that is being disrupted such as newspaper, TV broadcast, music, stc.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A name dies, but the spirit thrives
Comment: When I started reading this book (the first two chapters) I was a little hesitant at reading further as it was a very ambiguous prep for the story. However, after I started chapter 3 I was excited to discover how inline Ken Olsen's views are with my own and my own experiences.
I initially got this book in order to learn why a company fails and try and avoid the pitfalls that DEC encountered. As I read further into the book I found that the strengths of the culture were symbollic of humanity in general, and to discount the culture was to discount some of humanities most fundametal and essential attributes.
Corporations as entities are setup to run in perpetuity; however, the most difficult obstacle to longevity is vitality. Many companies today that have been around for more than 40 years really don't offer much in the way humanitarian benefits. In other words, you're not going to work at a GE and expect to revolutionize anything. The immediate problem is that as corporations get more and more hardened their vitality is lost and the very culture that inspired them to be innovative disappears in favor of purely existing. How do you combat this?
DEC's legacy is not the products that it produced, but the vitality that sprang-forth from people who sought something more and were empowered to reach their dreams. A company's true worth cannot be known until you see how many companies/ideas came out of it, not as spin-off's, but as inspired, elegant, and useful innovations/products that in-turn inspire others to reach their dreams.
Overall the book does a good job of relating the facts of the ultimate rise and fall of DEC from a monetary perspective, but it does an even better job or relating how inspiration, motivation, and empowerment can truly create "magic" in both the past and in the present. The spirit of DEC lives on, indeed the spirit of America lives on...
Customer Rating:
Summary: a sad tale of what might have beens
Comment: One of the first computers I worked on was a Dec-10. I also used one of the PDPs. Then I later was sysadmin and wrote Fortran code for a Vax 785. So I was rather nostalgaic over DEC's demise. This would have seemed inconceivable in the mid 80s, when DEC was at its height, and second only to IBM. But Schein's analysis points out that the seeds of DEC's fall were already flourishing at its apex.
One merit of the book is how it points out that it was not just Ken Olsen who made all the bad decisions. Notably that the "PC was just a toy". It was also the rest of the top management. Worsened by a complex matrix management structure. This had the effect of drastically slowing decision making.
The book is a sad tale of what might have beens. For instance, it is well known how DEC missed the PC revolution. But it also dropped the ball on networking. DEC came up with DECNET by 1984. It had many very capable network engineers. But DEC's routers and switches were only for DECNET. DEC could have been DEC+Cisco, if it had migrated aggressively to the Arpanet/Internet. Sure, it had some presence in the latter. But not enough. It kept pushing its DECNET and in the end the Internet just drove DECNET into irrelevance.
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