| Perhaps this is it.
Divorced From The Job, Still Wedded To The Culture
By KIRK JOHNSON
c. 1996 N.Y. Times News Service
AMHERST, N.H. - Peggy Chopp's 30-member department at the Digital Equipment
Corp. was eliminated over 18 months beginning in 1991. In a few swift flashes of
the downsizing knife, traditions, office friendships and established
relationships were severed and tossed aside.
But the underlying rhythms of that life have been harder to kill. Aside from
the fact that Ms. Chopp doesn't work for Digital anymore, her new life bears a
striking resemblance to her old one.
Her boss is a former Deckie, as the company's workers call themselves. Her
friends, with whom she socializes and even takes vacations, are almost all
ex-Deckies.
When a contract was bid to organize a trade show for her new company, she
spoke up for an ex-Deckie colleague who has his own business. He got the job and
used a roster of ex-Deckie employees to complete the work.
``The bond was just something that stayed with us and extended to our
personal lives, then and today,'' Ms. Chopp said.
Corporate culture, with its invisible, immeasurable power to shape lives and
communities, has always been a poorly understood force in business, management
experts say. When it has been studied, it has largely been over whether a
company's idiosyncratic totems and taboos were beneficial or detrimental to its
bottom line.
But the story of life after Digital suggests something even more complicated
and powerful: that the mixture of values and assumptions that makes up a
corporate culture may be capable of existing on its own beyond the life-support
system in which it evolved, and that in this case at least, downsizing, often
considered destructive, may have been an agent of that new creation.
``It's like a meta-corporation, an energy field,'' said Patrick Pierce, a
former media communications consultant at Digital, who, like many former Digital
workers, struggled through lists of metaphors trying to describe the community
sense that has kept him connected to people in his 450-person department, which
was shut in 1993.
``There's a creative energy and an integrity and a commitment, though that's
sort of a 19th-century word,'' Pierce said. ``It's like a secular religion.''
Though organizations have been formed or expanded for the former employees of
many companies in recent years, like Xerox-ex or Out of the Blue, for former IBM
employees, the ex-Digital network is a different animal, in part because it is
based on a paradox.
Even some former employees acknowledge that the strong, distinctive culture
that forged the bonds between people may also be part of what led to the
company's troubles, which in turn forced the downsizing that scattered them.
``At IBM, the value was in the customer, so people focused outward,'' said
George F. Colony, president of Forrester Research, which tracks high-technology
companies. ``At D.E.C., the internal mattered so much. It was a very political
culture that placed a high value on people who could play the political game,
the budget game, the meeting game. They spent their lives playing with each
other. All this makes them very close.''
Colony said he thought that the old Digital culture was in fact bad for the
company and for the high-technology economy outside Boston, in Maynard, Mass.,
where Digital is based. But he said he understood its lingering allure.
There was an epic feel in the rise and fall of Digital, he said, that has
transformed the company's history into almost a kind of mythology. ``They flew
so high and crashed so hard,'' Colony said. ``Those are the moments and years
that hold people together.''
But there were also some more specific forces that helped foster a
post-Digital society. The job reductions were large and compressed in time and
place, concentrated heavily in northeastern Massachusetts and southern New
Hampshire.
In just five shattering years beginning in 1989, the company cut itself
almost precisely in half, disgorging more than 60,000 people, an instant
community the size of a small city.
Digital's technology reinforced a culture built around networking. The
so-called matrix management system, which has since been eliminated by the
company's new management, and Digital's early and enthusiastic embrace of E-mail
made its work force deeply interconnected on the job.
The matrix system, as it evolved at Digital, was essentially an overlapping
series of circles, each of which was a semiautonomous business unit, but which
also required the cooperation of other circles within the company to accomplish
any goal. So being connected on the job made it feel natural and comforting to
stay connected upon leaving.
Many former employees also encountered an anti-Digital prejudice, a
presumption of arrogance or indolence or both, from prospective employers. That
drove ex-Deckies together in self-defense.
``Being from D.E.C. is a black mark against you,'' said Frank J. Gianattasio,
an ex-Deckie who runs a consulting firm from his home in Manchester, N.H. ``You
weren't into sell, sell, sell all the time. You were into doing something
good.'' That image, Gianattasio said, has seemed distinctly out of step in the
take-no-prisoners 1990s.
Least tangible, but perhaps most important, management experts say, was that
Digital had, for lack of a better word, spirituality.
John P. Kotter, a professor of leadership at the Harvard Business School,
said: ``Virtually all companies that attain greatness have a mission that has
meaning that goes beyond economics. If you want to say it bumps into
spirituality, maybe that's right.''
Digital had a spiritual quality, Kotter said, largely because of the
leadership of the founder, Kenneth H. Olsen, an engineer who quoted St. Paul and
whose management style Kotter likened to that of an ``18th-century preacher.''
Once a corporate purpose has crossed the boundaries into the deeper realms of
human experience, it doesn't go away, Kotter said. ``It can be like super glue,
not just Scotch tape.''
Evidence of Digital's glue can be found in a huge variety of places across
the archipelago of high-technology boutiques, home-basement software companies
and consulting firms that dot the economy of southern New Hampshire and the
northeastern suburbs of Boston.
It lives on in Jan Bunker's living room here in Amherst. Ms. Bunker is the
founder of The Digital Alumni, a three-year-old quarterly newsletter for and
about life after Digital.
The newsletter, and its home page on the Internet, offer a mix of job-search
information, gossip and nostalgia, served up like any small-town publication,
full of folksy portraits, boosterism and exclamation points.
One recent issue featured a front-page interview with Olsen, under the
headline, ``A Conversation with Ken.''
``Many people had a hard time transitioning from the Digital culture,'' said
Marcia Donaldson, who edits the paper with Ms. Bunker and writes most of the
articles. ``The newsletter says: `There is life out there, there is opportunity.
Build on the best skills you got at Digital. And by the way, be flexible.' ''
Another piece of the culture can be found in Fred Gould's barn in Plymouth,
N.H., north of here in the central part of the state. Gould has created a small
museum of company artifacts, old pictures, brochures and memorabilia culled over
a long Digital career. He says, though, that his collection is nothing compared
with some he has heard about.
An important piece exists in a sprawling former Digital building in Boxboro,
Mass., now occupied by a company called Advanced Modular Solutions. Advanced
Modular was founded by Olsen, after he was forced out of Digital in 1992 in a
management shake-up.
In the former Digital world, Olsen's ouster cemented his position forever as
the voice of what was Digital and is no more. He has used the position like a
bully pulpit.
``The culture of today, it's mean, it's cruel, it hurts,'' Olsen said in an
interview in his office, during which an assistant continually interrupted to
amplify his comments or chide him gently about being overly modest. ``But
everybody being that mean and cruel is going to get in trouble,'' he said, ``and
only the good ones will survive, the people who realize you have to be partners
with your people.''
Ron Glover, a spokesman for Digital, said that the old Digital culture under
Olsen was uniquely a product of a certain time and place. The new culture, which
Glover said was still forming, borrows from that old world - especially what he
called the intellectual openness and spirited innovation - but with increased
accountability.
Another legacy of the old culture is the deep reservoir of emotion that
Glover said allowed Digital to draw on its former employees - to be a part of
their web.
But the ex-Digital web, which really seems more like a series of loose
confederations, is as much about economics as emotions.
Communications Management International sits at the center of one such
circle. The company, in Bedford, N.H., was founded by Eric G. Woods, a former
media relations employee at Digital, who took his severance package and founded
a new company that assembles teams of freelancers for each project it takes on.
Seven of his 15 full-time employees are ex-Deckies, as well as about 10
percent of his freelancers. About 70 percent of his business comes from
contracts with his former employer, which has contracted out many formerly
internal functions to ex-Deckies.
Woods does business with Ms. Chopp's company and with McGraw-Hill in New
York, where a former Digital colleague, Bob Russell, is president of the
construction information group. (Russell said that Woods got the work by open,
competitive bidding, without favoritism.)
``I know more people now who were in the company than I did when I worked
there,'' Woods said. ``It's almost like we're a closer-knit group now that we've
graduated.''
But while many former Digital employees have done well, a vital element of
the network's viability, they say, is that it has helped many people through
times of serious pain. Not every job search has paid off.
Thom MacMahon said he relied on a Digital connection to get a job, but he
said it was really a last resort. He left the company in 1992 and now works for
a four-person company, two of them former Digital employees, that sells
pellet-fired heating stoves. He is still looking for another corporate job, but
at age 60, he says, he has been a victim of age discrimination.
``All the interviews went well on the phone,'' he said. ``Then you walk in
the door and they see you're not 30 any more.''
Fondness for what was does not mean blind adherence to the old ways. When
Russell joined McGraw-Hill, for example, one of the first things he did was rip
out the matrix management structure then in place in his group. Russell said he
had seen enough of it at Digital to know better.
``I was not going to be in matrix ever again,'' he said. ``I believed it was
not suitable for accountability in the 1990s.''
00:41 EDT JUNE 16, 1996
NYT-06-15-96 2032EDT
NYTviaNewsEDGE
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:SUBJECT: LIFE MA COMP LABR
Copyright (c) 1996 The New York Times Co.
Received by NewsEDGE/LAN: 6/16/96 12:45 AM
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