It's the Value Proposition, silly

DEC Is Dead, Long Live DEC

Edgar Schein

The passing of Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie came in the same year as the passing of Kenneth H. Olsen, the founder and long-time CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). DEC went from a 1957 startup to being a $14B company, second largest in the world to IBM in the computer industry in 1987. Along the way they built computers that were both very popular and very influential. It's no exaggeration to say that the people who built them and worked on them built much of the modern computer industry. Then, in about ten years, DEC went from pinnacle to oblivion, absorbed into PC maker Compaq and then Hewlett-Packard. Schein's book attempts to explore what happened, and why DEC failed as an independent entity.

The book is written from the perspective of a management consultant, and as you might expect, it ferrets our many management and organizational issues. Ultimately, Schein claims the failure was due to the lack of a "business gene" in the organizational culture. This is, from my perspective, naive. DEC's failure came because the company gradually lost its way, and lost the ability to present a compelling value proposition to its customers, who turned, when they could, to less expensive solutions. It wasn't the failure of strategy (although the strategy was incoherent), it was the ridiculous expense of VAX and Alpha systems that sunk DEC. Schein's book seems to miss that central point.

World War II from the top

Partners in Command:
George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower in World War II
Mark Perry

Partners in Command is a dual biography of the two five-star generals who ran the Western Allies' war against Nazi Germany. The book focuses on the interpersonal relationships between the generals. George C. Marshall foresaw the need for battlefield commanders and, throughout his career, he kept notes in a 'little black book' about who he had his eye on: Mark Clark, Omar Bradley, George Patton, Courtney Hodges. The book is about Marshall assembling the team of officers who could win the war, and about Eisenhower's deft touch keeping the coalition with Britain cooperative and the coalition of these mercurial but talented war leaders focused. Recommended.

The Rise of Abraham Lincoln

One Man Great Enough
Abraham Lincoln's Road to Civil War
John C. Waugh (2007)

Having found John C. Waugh's earlier book on Lincoln's re-election in 1864 engaging, I picked up his book on Lincoln's political development. A solid book it is. The book traces the life of Lincoln through his own words wherever possible, placing the reader in the context of the time wherever possible. You follow Lincoln through his adolescent wanderings, his law school education, his early passion for Whig politics, right up the point when the Kansas-Nebraska Act voids the Missouri Compromise and Lincoln realizes that the status quo isn't sustainable -- that "[a] house divided against itself cannot stand". Waugh pulls no punches about the impact this realization, and Lincoln's steadfast commitment to being honest with his contemporaries about it, have on him. The book is not a whitewash, either; you feel Lincoln's strangeness.

Crazy 08

Crazy '08
Cait Murphy (2007)

Crazy '08 is the story of the 1908 pennant races. That National League race is immortal because of the famous "Merkle boner", when a game tied because Giants rookie Fred Merkle failed to touch second base on the otherwise game-winning single had to be replayed. The American League race was decided only by the teams running out of games, and by the absence of a rule requiring all games possibly affecting a pennant race be made up. It is also most notable as being the last season to date when the Chicago Cubs won the World Series. Theodore Roosevelt was president, radio was an experiment, Ford was just introducing the Model T, and the Cubs were repeat champions.

Murphy's long, engrossing story is mostly well-written and, as far as I can tell, quite accurate. It is a welcome addition to the baseball bookshelf. The only quibbles I have are a tendency by the author (a business writer and daughter of the longtime author of Prince Valiant) to excessively colloquial writing, and a similar tendency to use archaisms like "hard by" for "next to" in the text. I suspect this is just a tic picked up from her poring over all the purple prose that passed for sports-writing in the first decade of the 20th century.

The Cold War in Literature

The Anti-Communist Manifestos
John V. Fleming (2009)

I read a short notice for this book in the Sewanee Review two weeks ago. The notice explained that the book is about four key milestones in publishing in the period around the second world war when the true nature of Stalin's Russia was revealed to the world by four ex-Communists: Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Richard Krebs' Out of the Night, Whittaker Chambers' Witness, and Victor Kravchenko's I Chose Freedom. Before these books, American and European "progressives" actually believed that the Soviet Union was the hope for the future, a humane workers' paradise. The authors were all blasted by liberals the left as liars.

Now, I have known the book I Chose Freedom since childhood. Today it is obscure, almost forgotten, but in 1946 it was a sensation. A copy sat on my grandmothers' bookshelf, a purple-clad reprint my grandfather had purchased (and inscribed) all those years ago, one of those books I told myself I would read when I "grew up", along with the Finnish novel The Egyptian right next to it. When I was 14, I pulled the book down and read it. Kravchenko's autobiography tells of the Ukrainian famines of the 1920s, the purges of the 1930s, the alliance with Hitler in 1939, and the war, in deepest detail. I still have the book, and I re-read it every five years or so. So the notice in the Review attracted my attention, and I got the book.

And, no, it's not a right-wing screed. Fleming is professor-emeritus of English from Princeton, and the book is about the impact of the exposure of the truth -- even through novels like Darkness at Noon. Recommended, although a bit sloggy to read because the author is very, very professorial.

And by the way, if you are inclined to believe that there were no real Communists in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s, ask yourself one question: Why were none of these books made into movies when all of them are ripping good stories? The answer is certain writers and directors who were later blacklisted were instrumental in suppressing them because these poor souls believed that Russia was not a police state.