DEC Is Dead, Long Live DEC

tenThe Impact of Success, Growth, and Age

DEC’s growth, innovative capacity, and ultimately its economic difficulties all resulted from the interaction of the technology, the organization, and the culture. In chapter 9 Paul Kampas analyzed how the evolution of the technology stream created particular transition difficulties for the company. In this chapter I want to highlight how those difficulties were compounded, even created to some degree, by DEC’s incredible success and subsequent rapid growth. Growth is generally regarded as a desirable condition. But as we will see in this chapter, an organization that lacks the money gene, an organization that is growing on the strength of its technical vision, in this case the minicomputer, develops ...