Conference 7.286::digital

	My Digital Dream? Leadership by upper management. The only one providing
	any is Ken and he certainly can't do it all anymore.

	What's inspiring me to build a better Digital? The hope that maybe
	someday we can all go back to healthy raises and that I might be
	able to afford a house. (and that we, as a company, just might be 
	able to get our collective act together and provide the services
	to our customers that they demand.)

							mike

    
    I actually was wondering what the "official dream for everybody" was
    from executive management.
    
    I guess there are two questions then:  What is the official dream and
    what is the dream each of us has in addition to the official dream and
    vision.
    
    To answer for myself, the "official" dream for a future Digital, that
    every employee is inspired by, is unclear to everyone I know (as of this
    writing).
    
    Personally, I visualize a dream where all employees own total
    responsibility with total authority to achieve something STUPENDOUS,
    even greater than what is, and sharing in turn that successful
    achievement in a tangible LARGE equal, interdependent profit sharing
    reward where working together in greater harmony and cooperation is
    nurtured accordingly.
    

    Isn't it enough that it's DECember and DEC is entering a new DECade?

    REF: 989.3 >>Isn't it enough that it's DECember and DEC is entering a
    new DECade?>>
    
    That's it!!!  ;-)
    
    On the other hand, perhaps a better past example was President John F.
    Kennedy's "dream" for the U.S. to be the "first" to put a man on the
    moon -- that was certainly a dream that galvanized a nation, exciting
    and inspiring everyone.
    

    
    regards 989.4 - the dream to put a man on the moon was also very
    heavily funded by a 'non-profit' organization
    
    Whatever dream we have (and I don't feel like we have a corporate
    dream - only a collection of individual dreams sometimes only vaguely
    related to each other) must also be invested in. To date, some of
    what appear to be good ideas (DELTA for one) don't seem to have
    any funding behind them. In the case of DELTA, the district team
    members are expected to be the DELTA team also - although in some
    cases the district team members may be the problem!
    
    So let's dream ... but let's be practical! There will always be
    work that is somewhat unattractive but which must be done. 
    
    

    For DEC to be the company of choice to work for and to purchase from
    as the DECade begins!
    Tom

    I'm dreaming of a good early retirement package.

    re .6
    
>    For DEC to be the company of choice to work for and to purchase from
>    as the DECade begins!
    
    Why do we have to wait until Jan 1, 1991?

    re -1:
    
    Due to inconsistencies in our time recording methods, the decade
    of the Nineties begins with 1990.
    
    Yes, I realize this is a rathole. No, I'm not that interested in
    defending this position.  However, I do have a recent MAIL message
    discussing this and other issues that (in my opinion) ranks right
    up there with Stan Rabinowitz's "The year 2000 is not a leap year"
    SPR response.
    
    I'll post it if requested (with proper permission, of course).
    
    					andrew 

    Re: 989.2 - Your vision as stated in your last paragraph is right on
    target! I beleive that this is where we're headed and in fact I am
    currently facilitating "Visioning" seminars in our Customer services
    District that are producing statements like yours.  In fact, with your
    permission I would like use your statement in our sessions.
    
    In regards to the "Upper Visions", they need to exist and be visible,
    but visions that work for the individual or work group must be
    developed by the individuals and groups themselves.  As long as we can
    hold our visions strongly, they will result in new "realities".
    
    Re: 989.5 - 
    << So let's dream ... but let's be practical!>>
    
    If we know HOW to reach our vision, we have not dreamed far enough. 
    Set the vision - The "how to's" will come later
    
    

    Perhaps to "dream yet be practical" should be interpreted to mean
    that we must still recognize the "grunt" work and other unappealing
    parts of realizing dreams must still go on -- we can't fantasize
    them out of existance.  Not that we should confine our dreams to
    the knowably realizable.  As you imply, dreams with constraints
    have no wings with which to fly.
    
    (I fantasize about slaveys to do my housework -- I DREAM about building
    a wonderful house, but I know I'll be the one to clean it!)
    
    Sherry

    
    The two examples of dreams that come to mind:
    
    President John F. Kennedy galvanizing a nation with the dream of being
    first to put a man on the moon.
    
    Henry Ford with the dream of a low cost car that every family could
    afford, realized with his unique concept of the assembly line, driven
    into reality with a VERY motivated work force, since he hired workers
    at what was then just about the highest hourly wage being paid.
    
    Both dreams are easily visualized and understood by every worker,
    galvanizing all into a cohesive total team working in unison and
    cooperation.
    

   Akio Morita's book about the SONY corporation illustrates very clearly
   where you start when you want to do great things. Sony's senior most
   technical person (and one of the founders) comes into a meeting with  a
   small book. He throws it on the table and says "That's the size of the
   CAMCorder I want SONY develop. Let's take it from there!". I am pretty 
   sure they wanted other dreams such as "by 1990, I should be the largest 
   selling car in the U.S" which Honda has accomplished. There is a book on
   Honda that describes how they planned to build a plant in Maryland that
   would have a capacity of four times their existing one and how within a 
   couple of years they had to build other plants. 

   How about dreams for DIGITAL?
 
    By the year 2000, DIGITAL would transform into a company that provides
    total distributed information management services to half the world's 
    corporations. They would be a total service provider managing the entire
    information gathering and handling be they on DEC hardware/software or
    on any other system. This service would not stop at just data processing
    but provide information management services that help achieve the
    customers' business goals. Customers would see only Insurance Specialists,
    Government Specialists, Transporation Specialists, Consumer Product 
    Specialists etc.. and not SWS, Customer Services, District Offices,
    Marketing, Production, Personnel etc.. These are meant only for our own
    internal organization. I don't care who the personnel person is in my
    Honda Dealership. All I care about is "can they get my car running".    

   

   Re: 989.14

   Just wanted to add a couple of more comments to my reply. In the computer
   industry of the last 30 years, IBM managed to garner a huge percentage share
   of the market by being Industry Specialists and not just Hardware/Software 
   vendors. They were Insurance Specialists, Transportation specialists etc,..
   to their customers. They got very complacent and didn't have the foresight to 
   predict/prepare for technologies like Networking, Distributed Information
   Management etc..Meanwhile DEC started out as a technology company and Ken
   had the foresight to develop networking, expandability of computer systems.
   Now we are at a cross-road where a number of things could happen. DEC could
   still be a bunch of techies who don't even know what SWS does or what the
   company is doing or why it is generating the revenue it does or transform
   ourselves into a different kind of company where technology is paramount
   ONLY IF SERVES THE OVERALL DREAM OF DIGITAL. If IBM can figure out and 
   pioneer technological breakthroughs, with the service record they have
   and their current presence everywhere, they could have more than 90% market
   share once again. Let's make no mistake about it!!

   Nari

    
    I think the net is the key.  The future industrialized world will be 
    networked together.  It will be a different kind of world and a
    different way of doing business.  But the network is the key. 
    
    mary

    RE:.16. 
    
    	...and that net is called DECnet OSI/Phase V.
    
    
    					Thom...

   While the networking strategy may be key to implementing a distributed 
   information management system, it pays keep technology in the proper
   perspective. When you call a plumber, his new all-purpose 
   wrench-drill-hammer-universal-question-answer machine may be of absolutely
   no interest to me if the shower isn't fixed. To me as a customer, 
   a distributed information management system with clerks, calculators and 
   homing pigeons is of more interest than a fancy network of workstations
   and T1 communication lines if the latter doesn't get the work done.
   Sometime back there was an article in some magazine about how the 
   catalog store L.L.Bean uses as little high-tech as possible and only 
   where it absolutely beats any other way of doing the job. And they are
   supposed to be No.1 in their field.

   This is where DIGITAL should start working backwards from the customers
   business needs to a network or homing pigeons! Technology by itself 
   is of limited utility as the rise and fall of various technologies 
   have demonstrated in the past. (AI technology, CASE and of late Neural
   Networks). When the hype dies down and the dust settles, the problems
   still remain hoping for the next hype!!.

   The key seems to be the job. How can DIGITAL help this insurance company
   process its underwriting faster? How can DIGITAL help speed up their
   claims processing? If the answer to these problems is re-designing the
   forms and not a fancy program, that's the recommendation they get from
   DIGITAL. Next time they have a need for a multi-million dollar payroll
   processing system, DIGITAL can sell them the necessary hardware/software/
   consulting.

   Nari 

    As an interesting aside, L.L.Bean just laid off 150 people Nari._;-)
    
    Solutions to individual customer requirements is and has been a
    good approach to selling but I don't believe it is the key to the
    future.  The future requires fast, accurate, international
    communication.  It will enable the L.L.Beans' of the world to fill
    orders in Europe or the Far East as if they had a plant right there.
    It will enable suppliers to automatically fill customer orders,
    and be paid instantly and automatically.  It will create an entirely
    new and different way of doing business.  
    
    In short (and to use your analogy), the customer who hasn't the vision 
    or means to fix his shower isn't likely to be the target of the
    plumbers'
    new-all-purpose-wrench-drill-hammer-universal-question-answer-machine.  
    The plumber is targeting bigger fish I would assume.

    It does pay to keep technology in the proper perspective.  But IMHO
    that places technology way at the top of our list of priorities.  The field
    is so young and it has hardly begun to impact the world order. 
    The best is yet to come.
                             
    Mary

    
    Sitting here with the exhilaration of having successfully completed a
    facility fire drill one minute ago, I'm writing this reply to suggest
    we all enter an idea for a dream since the replies to date don't
    suggest a current one that is galvanizing all 125,000 to work in unison
    to build something GREATER than what currently is.  Here's my
    submission -- what's yours?
    
    Digital will become the "Mitsui" of the world both in information
    technology and value-added information services using our proprietary
    technology.  We will put a terminal and computing power on every
    worker's desk, networking the entire global village, promoting the
    power of shared information and ideas upward, downward and laterally
    with freedom and without restriction.  We will accomplish this goal by
    empowering every employee with total responsibility and authority
    (including having a say in who will be a given group leader to
    guarantee more effective REAL leadership), giving creativity and the
    ability to drive change into reality, to its lowest level, letting
    virtually every employee take ownership to figure out and implement
    what must be done, tens of millions of changes, to accomplish this goal
    in the least amount of time at the greatest efficiency and
    effectiveness.  To ensure total cooperation, harmony, and
    interdependent involvement, forming one team and mind of all current
    125,000 employees working in unison, there will be equal,
    interdependent profit sharing of all extra profit (above a certain
    minimum percent of operating income as a percentage of total revenue,
    thus encouraging both new revenue growth with margin and profit growth
    as a percentage).
    
    Mitsui, I believe, is at this writing THE world's largest corporation
    doing currently $130,000,000,000 in revenue.
    

    re .19  Why is it that when an example is given that seems to indicate
    that there are people in the outside world doing very well without
    an extensive dosage of Digital technology the next reply is often
    of the form:
    
      "Did you know company XYZ was indited yesterday for cruelity to white
      mice?"
    
    I see this over and over in management meetings.  Attacking the
    subject of an an example is all too often used as a method of
    trivializing the premise or proposal.  
    
    I have even seen this used as a "management tool." 
    
    	Person #1: "I spoke to person X today, and he showed me evidence
	that would indicate that option Y is not cost effective."
    
    	Person #2: "Person X has had a lot of trouble meeting their
    	current committments as of late."
    
    The result is that the (sometimes false) accusation of Person X,
    becomes the only point anyone remembers.
    
    Bean's has done very well with their minimalist approach to technology.
    Competition in this field has been growing extremely fast.  The
    market is recognized as trendy.  Nationally the GNP growth is very
    low (at or approching recession levels), and consumer goods growth
    is dropping.
    
    Oh, by the way, Bean's is NOT laying off anyone.  150 jobs are being
    eliminated over time by attrition, and retirement.  
    
    Perhaps, their approach does have a goodly amount of merit.  Growth
    of the Digital Easynet, workstation deployment, CPU/employee,
    accessability to machine resources and raw processor power have
    been tracking our profitability in almost direct inverse preportion.
    
    -kevin
    
    
    

    re. 21
    
    My dream is to get access to the workstations, EASYNET and all the
    things you seem to correlate to our reduced profitability.  Out
    here in the field, getting to use any of our new technology that
    many of the previous noters talk about, is a dream!  8-)
    

    The argument about technology and it's application to everyday life
    will always be a source of debate. Just remember, it wasn't to long
    ago that schools didn't allow calculators in math classes, now they
    are accepted. We use watches to tell time, it wasn't that long ago
    we looked up in the sky for the position of the sun or moon to know
    the time. Technology is progress, it's to bad we don't have the
    wisdom to use technology to keep our planet clean.
    
     

   I think was misunderstood a little looking at the previous couple of 
   notes. I was making a point that TECHNOLOGY IS A TOOL NOT THE SOLUTION.
   Of course, without technology a lot of things are not possible. Particularly
   in the high tech area, there has been a tendency to get excited about 
   technology for technology's sake. Yesterday I was listening to a local
   radio talk show on computers when a small businessman called. He said that
   he doesn't know anything about computers nor does he care to know. He has
   been looking for an integrated accounting system which can handle all
   of his accounts on a computer. It seems that he has been to all kinds
   of business computer stores. Everyone of those stores threw a lot of
   hardware jargon at him, memory, processor boards, Mhz etc..Not one of
   them was able to listen to his accounting needs and point him to 
   a set of accounting packages that would help him do what he wanted. He
   doesn't give a damn if a computer does it or some other gizmo does it.
    
   This is not a problem with just users of PC's or small systems. A look at
   MIS magazines such as DATAMATION or INFORMATION WEEK would reveal umpteen
   articles about the gaps between business needs and the information systems
   folks' lack of comprehension of their real tasks. They talk in terms
   of workstations, MIPS, LAN's and new CASE tools instead of turnaround
   time for insurance underwriting, claims processing etc.. 

   This provides an incredible opportunity for anyone including DIGITAL to
   continue doing what they are doing now; develop excellent technology and
   have the wisdom to perceive it in the proper perspective, as a TOOL AND
   NOT AN END BY ITSELF. We can either grow out of the hacker-child-genius
   phase and be an adult company providing solutions or continue to be a
   hacker-child-genius that corporations provide a small basement to work in
   away from the real problems. The choice is ours.

   Nari