By James R. Hagerty

When Paul A. Strassmann arrived as a 19-year-old immigrant in New York in 1948, his most notable work experience was as a guerrilla warrior who blew up train tracks to stall Nazi troop movements in Slovakia during World War II.

In New York, Strassmann diversified his skills. He sold socks at a department store in Queens and studied civil engineering at Cooper Union. As a surveyor during summer breaks, he dodged scorpions in Israel and rattlesnakes in West Virginia. Later, while studying industrial management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Strassmann learned how to use a mainframe computer as part of a project to forecast traffic and estimate the number of toll collectors needed on the New Jersey Turnpike, providing enough data for a 600-page thesis.

That last talent proved crucial for his career -- figuring out how to use computers to solve business problems and make companies more efficient.

Strassmann, who died April 4 at the age of 96, rose to senior management positions involving planning and information technology at General Foods, Kraft and Xerox. During the George H.W. Bush administration, he was director of defense information at the U.S. Defense Department, responsible for upgrading computers and software. In the early 2000s, he was a senior adviser with similar duties at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, where he recalled trying to break the agency's "profligate habits."

He drew on all of those experiences as a writer and speaker on information technology. In the 1980s and 1990s, he argued that much of the money invested by companies in computers and related products was wasted in what he called a "technology arms race."

He studied hundreds of companies and found many were racing to keep up with rivals on tech spending without first figuring out what they really needed. Processes and flows of information might need to be totally reorganized before computers could improve efficiency enough to pay for their costs, he wrote.

"It is not computers but how a firm manages them that makes the difference," he wrote in Datamation magazine in 1997. Simply funneling more information to employees and managers wasn't enough, he argued: "What matters is not what people see on their computer screens, but what informed actions they take with what they learn."

Strassmann published his findings in books including "The Squandered Computer" and "The Business Value of Computers." Steve Jobs praised the latter book during a 1992 speech at MIT. "It's rather thick and it's not good bedtime reading but you can plow through it, and there's some incredible stuff in it," he said. Jobs also reported that Strassmann had told him that wars would be won on the basis of which side had the best software.

Joining the resistance

Pavel Adolf Strassmann, later known as Paul, was born on Jan. 24, 1929, in Trenčín, Slovakia. His father, Adolf Strassmann, had served as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I and then owned a wholesale-food firm. His mother, Frantiska (Weiner) Strassmann, helped run that business and served as cashier.

"Once in a while, other children threw stones at us and shouted, 'Jew! Jew!' But we considered that as natural as mosquito bites," Strassmann wrote in a memoir, "Paul's War." Things got much worse in the late 1930s as Nazi ideology infected Eastern Europe. The Strassmann family home and business were expropriated in 1939.

In an effort to avoid further persecution, the family accepted baptism into a Lutheran church, where young Paul appreciated the Bach chorales. The family's stash of foreign currency, kept in a cigar box as a way to pay for an eventual emergency exit from Slovakia, was scorched beyond use when the box was hidden behind a steam radiator. "Our road to escape was cut off," Strassmann said later.

In August 1944, Nazi agents arrested his father shortly after members of the Slovak military revolted against Germany. Paul, then 15 years old, initially hid with the family of one of his father's former employees but feared that his hosts wouldn't let him stay long because of the risks of concealing Jews. He fled into the woods, in the direction of gunfire, with the aim of joining resistance fighters known as partisans.

By instinct, he had decided it was safer and more heroic to join the resistance than to cower in an attic. His parents both died in the Holocaust. His sister, Ella, survived work as a slave laborer in a German factory.

Strassmann managed to ingratiate himself with a band of partisans who used explosives to block railways and roads. As food grew scarce, he traded his cigarette rations for bread. The adventure turned into a frozen hell after snow began falling in November. The partisans slept in hay ricks, where they were tortured by fleas and lice. After being separated from his colleagues in an ambush, Strassmann spent much of the winter slogging through snow along mountain paths, in search of warmth and shelter.

After the defeat of the Nazis in May 1945, "my first priority was to obtain a passport to leave the country," Strassmann wrote. He finally managed to do that in 1948, with help from a family friend in London.

Too much Jell-O

While studying civil engineering at Cooper Union, he met an art student, Mona Frankel. They married in 1954. Moving on to MIT for graduate studies in business expanded his career options. In the mid-1950s, an MIT professor launched a new course in the use of computers by businesses. Strassmann recalled that he was one of only two students who took that course.

In 1961, General Foods hired him to review proposed capital-spending projects. One of those called for a $20 million expansion of warehouse space. Warehouse managers said the project would allow them to reduce rental costs for use of other firms' warehouses.

Strassmann began investigating why General Foods needed so much storage space. He learned that the company had enough lime Jell-O in stock to last decades.

The problem turned out to be a failure of communication among managers of factories, warehouses and marketing departments. Departments had incentives to minimize their own costs but lacked information and incentives needed to consider the company's overall interests. Rather than approving more warehouse space, he went to work on those communications problems.

After an interlude at Kraft, he was recruited to Xerox in 1969 as head of information systems. Xerox, faced with growing Japanese competition in the copier market, was diversifying into computers and promised to dazzle customers with "the office of the future" -- a concept so vague, Strassmann noted, that it could be interpreted however anyone wished.

Part of his job was coordinating with Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, a freewheeling band of researchers and visionaries. They developed graphical displays that made computers much simpler to operate, Ethernet networking technology and laser printers, among other things.

Though Xerox was paying the bills, PARC's work ended up benefiting Apple, International Business Machines and Microsoft far more than it did Xerox, which failed to establish a lasting presence in computers. Strassmann criticized top executives at Xerox for failing to exert more control over PARC's research.

But he also wrote that PARC researchers made little effort to develop affordable products that Xerox could sell in the near term. "Their game was to come up with as many wow-effect features as possible that would thrill their academic colleagues," he wrote. "What was missing was a connection between invention and practical use."

Strassmann retired from Xerox in 1985, when he was 56. That left plenty of time for writing, consulting and teaching at West Point and George Mason University.

His wife, Mona Strassmann, died in 2022. His youngest son, Eric Strassmann, died in 1984. His survivors include three other children and seven grandchildren.

Mindful of his narrow escape from Nazism and subsequent communist rule in his homeland, Strassmann never let his guard down. During the Cuban missile crisis, he moved his family from the New York City area to a farm in Salt Point, N.Y., which he considered less likely to be a target. He discussed emergency survival methods with his family and made sure his sons learned to shoot guns.

He didn't want to be known as a Holocaust survivor. "A survivor just sits there, and survival is handed to him or her," Strassmann wrote. "I am basically a fighter."

Write to James R. Hagerty at reports@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 14, 2025 10:00 ET (14:00 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.