ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

234 ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AND LEADERSHIPthe separate enterprises would have a culture that derived fromthe beliefs, values, and assumptions of their Smithfield-appointedmanagers.This brief case illustrates that there is nothing automatic aboutfounder leaders imposing themselves on their organizations. It dependson their personal needs to externalize their various assumptions.For Smithfield, the ultimate personal validation lay in havingeach of his enterprises become financially successful and in his abilityto continue to form creative new ones. His creative needs weresuch that after a decade or so of founding financial service organizations,he turned his attention to real estate ventures, then became alobbyist on behalf of an environmental organization, tried his handat politics for a while, then went back into business, first with an oilcompany and later with a diamond mining company. Eventually, hebecame interested in teaching and ended up at a Midwestern businessschool developing a curriculum on entrepreneurship.DECThe culture of DEC has been described in detail in Chapter Three.In this section I want to focus more specifically on how DEC’sfounder, Ken Olsen, created a management system that led eventuallyto the culture I described in Chapter Three. Olsen developedhis beliefs, attitudes, and values in a strong Protestant family and atMIT, where he worked on Whirlwind, the first interactive computer.He and a colleague founded DEC in the mid-1950s becausethey believed they could build interactive computers for whichthere would eventually be a very large market. They were able toconvince investors because of their own credibility and the clarityof their basic vision of the company’s core mission. After some yearsthe two founders discovered that they did not share a vision of howto build an organization, so Olsen became the CEO.Olsen’s assumptions about the nature of the world and how onediscovers truth and solves problems were very strong at this stage ofDEC’s growth and were reflected in his management style. He be-