What Makes a Company Great? The answer is simple — the people. The people can make or break a company and sometimes it is just a matter of too many people. The company gets too big to continue to operate in the same manner that made it successful.
I worked for many years in the California Silicon Valley and I saw it happen over and over. And I saw companies rise to stardom and then to fail. I saw others try to get a toe in and not make it. And others just get too big and dissolved into several smaller entities.
A Great Company – Atari
In the 70’s I went to work for Atari. They were just beginning to rise. And were already big in the arcade business and the video games were on the horizon. They had great benefits which included a free game room, but also the promise of a seven-week sabbatical after seven years of employment. I almost made it to the end of my seventh year Alas, the company was sold to Times-Warner and the scope of the company changed from a small intimate endeavor to a corporate structure. Management was replaced and people began to leave. Long-range plans changed and things started to go downhill from there. Atari was never the same and I found another job.
Another Great Company – DDA
Several jobs later, I went to work for a company called DDA -Data Design Associates. This was truly a unique company with great success and I attribute it to the PEOPLE. They were still pretty small when I went to work for them. I don’t remember what my employee number was but I don’t think we were over 20 yet. And I was a part of this group as it rose to over 100 with a celebration of the First 100. I think we made it to 140 before the company was sold.
What made the PEOPLE at DDA so special was that we were all management-level people, including the support staff. Any single person at any time could step up and manage a new project. But every person rolled up their sleeves and worked together to develop each of these projects. Today almost 30 years after DDA dissolved almost 100 of these people are my “friends” on Facebook. Can you remember 100 people and their names from a place you worked 30 some years ago? We were all family. Every person was important and needed.
So what happened to dissolve it?? PEOPLE!! The owner got divorced and ultimately married one of the other people from DDA. The ex-wife sold her share of the company to a competitor and the rest is history.
IVIS
From DDA, I went on to work for another company – IVIS – that bought the rights to the DDA software. But, alas, that company didn’t make it either. There was a long learning curve to understanding the uniqueness of the software. Many of the employees were ex-DDA people for this reason, but we were all remote people. The year 2000 hit us with the need for widespread needed modifications. And also the onslaught of the personal computer (PCs) taking over for the big mainframes. The company was down-sized in 2001 and it was time for me to retire.
PBS
But after working all of my life, I found retirement impossible and after working a part-time accounting job for a realtor, I got interested in online marketing. And after one expensive online class, I found this PBS system. It was a small closely integrated group of people and reminded me of the early days of DDA. I have been here for over two years, but I now see extremely rapid growth here much like what buried Atari and DDA, and others. I pray that history will not repeat itself.
