“Who he was as a Christian really formed who he was as a man,” said Dan Tymann, spokesman for the Kenneth H. Olsen family and executive vice president and chief of staff at Gordon College, Wenham, Mass.
Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC), engineer, scientist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist, led the drive to smaller computers and to a management style rare in the 1950s and 1960s.
DEC produced a new size of computers, the PDP minicomputer series that allowed users to get instant feedback instead of handing a deck of punch cards off to someone else to put into the computer and then waiting a day or so for the results.
As the line of computers expanded over many years, DEC built the VAX series using 32-bit technology, which competed very successfully with the IBM mainframes, especially in networking.
With the success of these new minicomputers, DEC was the second largest computer manufacturer after IBM, with 120,000 employees in 95 countries. In the 1980s, it had $14 billion in sales.
A New Way To Manage
Olsen accomplished this charge into the information technology age by being one of the first to use a management system where everyone had a line boss as well as a functional boss. It organized business horizontally by project and vertically by expertise or skill.
While it gave employees two bosses, it also empowered them to get a better product to market faster. Such a management style also suited Olsen’s personality. He was frustrated by “too many rules, too many people who could say no to something,” said Win Hindle, who’d been senior vice president of DEC’s corporate operations.
“He was frustrated by layers of management. He would communicate directly with whomever he needed to talk with about a project. He did not like hierarchy,” Hindle said.
But Olsen promoted more than this organizational structure. He also changed the organizational culture, which to this day, 13 years after the sale of DEC to Compaq, finds former employees recalling it with applause, excitement, and admiration.
Culture Based On Christian Values
Many coworkers cited Olsen’s strong Christian values and the freedom to experiment that he had enjoyed as a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the basis for how his then rare corporate culture developed. They became embodied in the Digital Equipment Philosophy, authored by Olsen and others.
“A lot of his deep religious values came out in that,” said Hindle.
The Digital Equipment Philosophy advised employees to “treat customers, vendors, and employees with great respect. They are the people that make our life possible as a company. And, if you are unsure of what to do in a difficult in situation, just do what you think is the right thing.”
“Being a business executive in the technology field, I understand the strong stand one needs to take to battle the pressures there are in big business to not always have integrity, to cut some corners,” said Dan Tymann, who worked at AT&T and Lucent for 18 years and Cisco Systems for five years.
“When you manage with integrity and believe that the people who work for you and your customers are what really matter, it makes all the difference in the company,” Tymann added. “The result was a great example to hundreds of employees in multimillion-dollar companies. The culture he established at DEC is what the best companies in this country now model. They were fairly new to industry then.”
Olsen even took his management style to his recreational activities, usually in the outdoors.
“He really enjoyed nature and science itself. He was a real outdoorsman, who loved walking in the woods, fishing, and canoeing. It was how he could wind down and relax,” said Tymann.
“He took many memorable canoe trips, with family and other times with people from work to very remote areas. He would plan canoe trips like planning a business venture where all had a role and were expected to execute it well,” Tymann said.
Olsen was also a leader in the support of women and minorities. He was among the first to name women to vice president positions and to offer scholarships and internships to minorities and those in underserved areas. “He understood the real importance in giving back and philanthropy long before it was in fashion to do so,” noted Tymann.
Science And God
In his retirement, Olsen focused on philanthropy, especially with Gordon College in Wenham, Mass. He was first introduced to this Christian school as a student at MIT. He then attended Park Street Church and participated in its youth group, which often went to Gordon College for retreats. Its pastor, Harold J. Ockenga, also president of Gordon College, was impressed by the young engineer and eventually invited him to serve on its board from 1961 to 1993.