Last Friday, Eckart Wintzen died in his house in France. Eckart was one Holland’s top entrepreneur, and can safely be mention along the likes of Paul Fenter van Vlissingen (although I doubt he would have liked them himself) and Hans Breukhoven.
Eckart stated BSO, literally translated as Bureau for Systems Development. It was one of Holland’s biggest system integrators, which he sold to Philips in the nineties. Wintzen instigated a special management policy in the firm. Whenever a department (or office, whatever you call it) grow to more than 50 employees, the department had to split. Each department had its own P/L and balance sheet and there was fierce competition between various departments (although there was a certain degree of geographical separation between all of them, meaning they couldn’t simply go after accounts in other parts of the country). The was no corporate head office to speak of, meaning all departments took care of their own administration and only certain guidelines with respect to marketing, logos, letter heads and reporting were centrally defined.
This management style is referred to cell philosophy with each department representing one cell. Wintzen wrote a book about his time at BSO (highly recommended by the way) called Eckart’s Notes.
Eckart Wintzen died last Friday, at the age of 68.
Eckart early departure is covered in a lot of blog entries all over the world.