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Stevan Dedijer, Class of 1930
Innovator, adventurer, researcher
tales of a TAFTIE
By Brady Dennis
Sources:
My Life of Curiosity and
Insights by Stevan Dedijer
(edited by Carin Dedijer
& Miki Dedijer, 2009)
Interview with
Miki Dedijer, Dec. 2011
Obituary of Stevan
Dedijer, David Bloom,
The Guardian, U.K.
Aug. 31, 2004
“Innovator,
adventurer, researcher:
Stevan Dedijer”
www.lunduniversity.lu.se
“The Father of
Business Intelligence”
by Patrick Marren,
Journal of Business
Strategy (Nov. 2004)
“A Damn Place
Called Bastogne”
by Stevan Dedijer
(Taft Bulletin, Winter 1996,
originally appeared in the
Princeton Alumni Weekly)
PHOTO:
Per Lindström/
Lunds universitet
What successful Taftie,
no longer living, would
you like to see profiled
in this space? Send
your suggestions to
juliereiff@taftschool.org
36 Taft Bulletin Winter 2012
Stevan Dedijer lived a life that even the daydreaming Walter
Mittys of the world might have a hard time imagining.
He studied physics at Princeton, reported for Newsweek,
edited a communist newspaper, underwent training as a
U.S. intelligence agent, jumped out of planes over Europe as
a member of the 101st Airborne, oversaw a Yugoslav atomic
research program and became a university professor. He
founded a research policy institute and pioneered a field of
study known as “business intelligence.”
He lived in Copenhagen and Calcutta, in Paris and
Pittsburgh and Rome. He lectured at Harvard and Yale and
Stanford. He married three times, had four children. At
nearly 70, he took up skydiving in part to prove to people
deciding whether to fund his research that he still possessed
vitality and daring, and that he had no intention of retiring.
“I have lived intensely, changing countries, cultures,
languages, ideologies, beliefs, professions and families,”
Dedijer wrote in an autobiography edited by his wife and
published after his death in 2004, just shy of his 93rd birthday.
“I tended to suddenly jump from one social system to
another, like jumping from a place without a parachute.”
In some ways, his constant globetrotting and his hunger
for adventure made him a sort of loner, a man always on his
way someplace else. By the same token, his frequent jumps
to different places and cultures allowed him to bear witness
to some of the defining moments in modern history.
“He was a lovely and a maddening man,” said Miki
Dedijer, Stevan’s youngest son, a former science journalist
who lives in Sweden. “He showed very little fear, and
loved doing things his way. I think he needed some fear,
danger, challenge to feel fully alive.”
Dedijer was born in Sarajevo and “spent much of his
early childhood on the run,” according to an account by
the Guardian, because his father belonged to a secret military
group linked to the assassination of Archduke Franz
Ferdinand II, which helped spark the First World War.
After attending a boarding school in Rome as a
teenager, Dedijer arrived at Taft in 1929. All he knew of
Connecticut was what he had read in James Fenimore
Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. Dedijer barely had arrived
in the United States when the stock market collapsed
and the nation hurtled toward a crippling depression.
“This social disaster was a strange, provocative
mystery for me,” he later wrote, saying the experience
shaped his turn toward Marxism.
Largely shielded from the economic calamity in the
safe environs of Watertown, Dedijer reveled in his newfound
adventures at Taft. He honed his English skills and
fell in love with American girls. He marveled at the size of
an Idaho potato. He played soccer and basketball and ran
track. He sang in the glee club. He went by Steve.
After Princeton, he worked as a business reporter for
Newsweek, headed to Pittsburgh to edit a weekly communist
paper that served Serbian laborers in the western
Pennsylvania steel mills. He signed up for the OSS (the
predecessor to the CIA) but didn’t last long given his
political sympathies. He later became a paratrooper and
jumped over Europe as bodyguard to Maxwell Taylor,
commanding officer of the 101st Airborne and later the
head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Kennedy.
In 1952, Dedijer was appointed director of
Yugoslavia’s Nuclear Institute, but he became increasingly
disillusioned with the communist regime of Josip
Broz Tito and resigned. In 1961, he moved to Sweden
and joined the faculty at Lund University. There, the
ceaseless traveler finally settled in.
In the coming decades, Dedijer founded the university’s
research policy institute, published hundreds of
academic papers and developed the field of “business
intelligence,” which centers around collecting, analyzing
and applying strategic information to help make
the wisest business decisions. It is not cloak-and-dagger
corporate espionage, as the name might imply—Dedijer
abhorred such practices—but rather gaining advantage by
more intelligently analyzing readily available information.
He continued to travel widely, to write and lecture
frequently. In the final weeks of his life, he returned to his
home in Dubrovnik, a two-room apartment overlooking
the Adriatic Sea. Over the entrance were carved the words,
“I have little, I need little. May God protect what little I
have.” Even as he lay dying, his son recalls, Dedijer would
gaze out over the ancient city and proclaim, “I’m the luckiest
man alive. I’m richer than Onassis. Look at this view.”
In his final journey, the relentless wanderer found peace.
“Midst its endless wars and troubles I have had a
wonderful life in all parts of the planet, tackling difficult
dreams,” he had written in his yet-to-be published autobiography.
“I belonged everywhere and nowhere.” j
Brady Dennis is a staff writer for the Washington Post.