Conference 7.286::digital

    I've seen the same thing for the last several years in my area.
    There must be some further buried motivation or other factor for this 
    kind of behaviour.
    
    A cynical friend of mine would probably blame the 'school learned'
    MBA's "rife through the company".
    
    Scooter

    
    Kind of a tangent, but MBAs study a whole lot of companies, good and
    bad, during their course work.  They learn to look for good and bad
    things, and plan how to fix them.  DEC pays lots of money for people
    to go to school, and people spend a lot of time doing so, in order
    to earn MBAs.  Most people who earn MBAs do so after already working
    a number of years, in many cases in managerial roles.  It seems a little 
    simplistic to blame all of a company's problems on people who likely have 
    studied more about what's wrong with businesses than most people.
    
    	Dave 

    Right on Dave! Enough MBA bashing!
    
    After being in a technical management job for a number of years I
    decided to get an MBA. I now have a technical job and don't use many of
    the specifics they taught us, but we were well taught in understanding
    people and what makes people do good things in organizations. We spent
    many hours looking at how people really react to change, to the
    dynamics of people within groups, etc. I learned to think critically
    about these issues, pushing my usual assumptions, and then try and
    project how changes would ripple out over time. We looked at actual
    organizations, often with the aid of people who had actually been
    there. I found it to be a very valuable experience in critical
    thinking. I can't remember any of the specific on how you do (e.g.)
    financial calculations, but I do remember some of what I learned about
    understanding people and organizations.
    
    Glad I got it, believe it was valuable, sorry folks want to generalize
    all MBA's as mindless number-crunchers.
    
    Tim
    

    Hey !
    
    > ll MBA's as mindless number-crunchers.
    
    I don;t know anyone who has accused any MBA's of being number-crunchers
    
   8^) 8^)
    
    Scooter

If you think Digital has too many meetings, you should see what Xerox is like. 
I'm resident at the Xerox Corporate Computer Center and I spend about 75% of 
my week in meetings with their staff. At least you can be somewhat more 
outspoken internally about whether a meeting is worth it or not. Its hard to 
do when you are part of the customer's team...

Regards,

Jim

    My perceptions are based on 16 years in the field.

    In the first 10 years or so, there was a lot more "evidence of
    leadership" in the form of clear statements from Olsen, Bell, and
    others about where the company was going, what our role was and so
    forth.  These were delivered over "DECNET", the teletype network, later
    called RCS.  Frankly, when the first "parable" appeared with "I'm about
    to declare an emergency", I thought we were being hoaxed because it
    seens that wasn't the direct style I was used to.

    But that is the style of employee communications that Digital adopted
    circa 1984.  The big thing, then as now, is the "trickle down" memo
    from the top.  "Please share with your employees"-memo that we read
    here and then see in our ALL-IN-1 INBOX a few days later if we are
    lucky.  This watered-down prose style is saturating "digital today" and
    "mgmt memo".

    It's not limited to top management.  There are employees who have been
    here for five years that have never had a room-scale meeting with a
    manager-who-manages-500-or-more.  It's been an auditorium-scale meeting
    or no face-to-face contact at all.

    In contrast, in the my first two years at Digital, I had room-scale
    meetings with Olsen, Bell, and manager for US Software Services.  I
    knew that there a crisis had been reached when a District Sales Manager
    sent a secretary to a meeting when he was in the building and
    available, saying the he wouldn't attend because he was only interested
    in the "results".  The bottom-line is I had more access to the CEO of a
    25,000 person company in 1975 that I had to the manager of 50 sales
    reps in 1985.

    There is more to this management style that being merely aloof.  It has
    to do with the reality that you get "results" only when you have
    one-on-one communication: letting the individual contributors know that
    some one cares, and letting senior management hear first-hand what's
    stopping the "results".

    If a senior manager comes to read this, let me presume to speak for a
    lot of us: If you come to the field, you won't hear a lot about water
    coolers, you'll hear a lot about the factors that are making customers
    less satisfied with Digital and our products less competitve.