Chapter 14 - Tumbling to Collapse

“I don’t want to be the next Ken Olsen,” several CEOs have told me in recent years. They mean that they don’t want to miss the next great thing. But what they should want is the good sense to leave before they lose the company’s cadre of strong lieutenants or do something that cripples their ability to object. To lose or weaken the firm’s best eyes and brains in a rapidly changing business milieu is a fast track to oblivion.

Congratulations on the BusinessWeek plaudits were premature, as DEC’s post-reorganization blues persisted, and the mind-set at the top seemed unchanged. One telling incident occurred at a sales force pep rally in which middle management made an impassioned presentation on the value of spending more time developing personal relationships with senior customer executives. Barely a moment later, Ken rose to reassert his belief that those “loyal” engineers would always be DEC’s best friends. If the audience wasn’t confused, the customer might well be.

Besides, even if Ken couldn’t imagine it, the not-so-“loyal” engineers would soon abandon DEC for Unix and then Windows. Unfortunately, Ken’s imagination also failed him when it came to envisioning the customer as a consumer using computer systems for games, word processing, and, eventually, accessing the Internet.

Apart from customer defections, potentially serious problems were roiling engineering. Sharing the top job, a demotion of sorts, was a psychological blow to the always volatile Gordon Bell, who “began thinking about leaving,” according to Rifkin and Harrar: “He couldn’t thrive without a challenge, and the VAX was now becoming a process, just carrying out the plan. The creation was over. More important, stress was wearing Bell down. He felt at times as if he were carrying both engineering and Olsen. ‘Running engineering was never that hard for me,’ Bell says. ‘It was doing it with Ken on my back that made life pretty miserable, because I simply didn’t respect his engineering judgment on anything except packaging.’

“The combative, but synergistic, relationship Bell and Olsen had shared for the past decade was collapsing,” the authors wrote. “Bell believes Olsen grew frightened of him because he understood the ‘nooks and crannies of engineering.’ Bell says, ‘I used to keep management on their toes by simply being able to challenge any manager to know more than I did about a project.’ Olsen, by putting Smith in a co- leadership role with Bell, apparently intended to see engineering as a process rather than as a content-oriented job.”

New Roads Not Taken?

Strangely, Bell had given us a quite different, less self-righteous perspective in 1982, six years before the Rifkin-Harrar account was published. Gordon was easily DEC’s most expressive futurist. At the top of his R&D priorities list that year was man-machine interface, or how people might interact with their computers more intuitively and with less training. Although Bell listed a host of possible interfaces, he seemed convinced that speech recognition was finally ready for a stunning entrance after hovering on the horizon for fifteen years.

Naomi and I agreed, partly because we also assumed that many executives and non-engineering professionals would forever scorn keyboards as a secretarial accoutrement. So speech recognition would be critical to advancing the widespread acceptance of computers. A year later, Steve Jobs introduced the Mac, basically ending the question. Today, the notion that voice recognition could ever become a general- purpose replacement for the keyboard seems absurd.

But apart from man-machine interface, Bell hardly pushed rampant innovation during our 1982 interview.