DEC Is Dead, Long Live DEC

fourKen Olsen, the Leader and Manager

There is a story that Ken Olsen tells on himself, that he learned the basics of management as a young adult in his pre-DEC days when his church put him in charge of the Sunday school. He says that he went to the library and read all the management books that he could find and developed from that a concept of how to manage. Whether or not he found Alfred P. Sloan and Douglas McGregor at that time I do not know, but in subsequent interviews he often attributed his own managerial theory to those two people. From Sloan he says he learned how powerful it is to “divisionalize” and give autonomous units profit and loss responsibility; from McGregor he says he learned how important it is to believe in and trust people. ...