I’m a great believer in the adage that although history doesn’t repeat, it often rhymes. So today I want to review the story of the rise and fall of EMC … and see if we can learn something from it. The story starts in 1936 when a boy named Richard Egan was born to an Irish family in Dorchester, a working-class Boston neighborhood. He enlisted in the Marines at 17, just as the Korean War was winding down, and learned to fly helicopters. He then returned to Boston, and graduated from Northeastern University in 1961 with a degree in...