Digital Equipment Corp founder Ken Olsen never made much effort to polish his image as a nice guy, and his successor as president, Robert Palmer, relates to the New York Times how by the time he arrived at the company in 1985 to head the semiconductor operations, DEC’s decision-making by consensus matrix was already a management style out of step with the industry, and he spent his first several months at the company inadvertently offending other DEC managers – It never occurred to me to check with a manufacturing person in the Scotland plant about a decision I was making, he says – I remember Ken Olsen telling me how few from outside survive – he said to me, ‘You probably won’t survive either.’
