The Soul of a New Machine

by Tracy Kidder

  "You mean West created the excitement."

  "No," said Rasala, in a flat voice. "The machine."

  "The opportunity," offered Holberger.

  "The machine," said Rasala.

  Then there was a moment during which everyone avoided everyone else's eyes, and the conversation resumed on another subject.

  Adopting a remote, managerial point of view, you could say that the Eagle project was a case where a local system of management worked as it should: competition for resources creating within a team inside a company an entrepreneurial spirit, which was channeled in the right direction by constraints sent down from the top. But it seems more accurate to say that a group of engineers got excited about building a computer. Whether it arose by corporate bungling or by design, the opportunity had to be grasped. In this sense, the initiative belonged entirely to West and the members of his team. What's more, they did the work, both with uncommon spirit and for reasons that, in a most frankly commercial setting, seemed remarkably pure.

  In The Nature of Gothic, John Ruskin decries the tendency of the industrial age to fragment work into tasks so trivial that they are fit to be performed only by the equivalent of slave labor. Writing in the nineteenth century, Ruskin was one of the first, with Marx, to have raised this now-familiar complaint. In the Gothic cathedrals of Europe, Ruskin believed, you can see the glorious fruits of free labor, given freely. What is usually meant by the term craftsmanship is the production of things of high quality; Ruskin makes the crucial point that a thing may also be judged according to the conditions under which it was built.

  Presumably the stonemasons who raised the cathedrals worked only partly for their pay. They were building temples to God. It was the sort of work that gave meaning to life. That's what West and his team of engineers were looking for, I think. They themselves liked to say they didn't work on their machine for money. In the aftermath, some of them felt that they were receiving neither the loot nor the recognition they had earned, and some said they were a little bitter on that score. But when they talked about the project itself, their enthusiasm returned. It lit up their faces. Many seemed to want to say that they had participated in something quite out of the ordinary. They'd talk about the virtues of the machine —¦ "We built it right" — and how quickly they had done it — "No one ever did it faster; at least, Data General never did" — and of the experience they had gained — "Now I can do in two hours what used to take me two days." One of the so-called kids — kids no longer, but veterans now — remarked, "This'll make my resume look real good." But, he quickly added, that wasn't what it was all about..

  Many looked around for words to describe their true reward. They used such phrases as "self-fulfillment," "a feeling of accomplishment," "self-satisfaction." Jim Guyer struggled with those terms awhile with growing impatience. Then he said: "Look, I don't have to get official recognition for anything I do. Ninety- eight percent of the thrill comes from knowing that the thing you designed works, and works almost the way you expected it would. If that happens, part of you is in that machine." On this project, he had reached a pinnacle the day when he finally expunged the "last known bug" from the board that he'd designed.

  Engineers are supposed to stand among the privileged members of industrial enterprises, but several studies suggest that a fairly large percentage of engineers in America are not content with their jobs. Among the reasons cited are the nature of the jobs themselves and the restrictive ways in which they are managed. Among the terms used to describe their malaise are declining technical challenge; misutilization; limited freedom of action; tight control of working patterns. No one who made it through the Eagle project could in fairness have raised such objections. The work was divided, but it was not cut to ribbons. Everyone got responsibility for some important part of the machine, many got to choose their piece, and each portion required more than routine labor. The team's members were manipulated, to be sure, and the unspoken rules of their group were Darwinian, but many of those who made it through declared that they had been given as much freedom as they could have wished for.

  Rosemarie Seale believed that West had granted them more latitude than they would have been allowed under a typical manager. She had worked for a number of other managers, and being the "mother of the team," she could speak with authority on how they had been raised:

  "The bottom line on this is that effort was done; it was done well, with very little help from the corporation, if any; a lot of people were allowed to grow; a lot of people were allowed to feel good about themselves — not a pat on the back — but deep-down good about themselves. I guess all of us were trying to prove something. I was trying to prove that I could be more than a secretary, that I'm a new, liberated woman. Amazing! We all had something different to prove and we were all trying to prove the same thing.

  "He set up the opportunity and he didn't stand in anyone's way. He wasn't out there patting people on the back. But I've been in the world too long and known too many bosses who won't allow you the opportunity. He never put one restriction on me. Tom allowed me to take a role where I could make things happen. What does a secretary do? She types, answers the phone, and doesn't put herself out too much. He let me go out and see what I could get done. You see, he allowed me to be more than a secretary there.

  "I'm not putting Tom up as a paragon of virtue. Many's the time when I was bullshit with him. But who could expect life to be perfect? I would do it again. I would be very grateful to do it again. I think I would take a cut in pay to do it again."

  A great deal has been written on the question of how to motivate industrial workers. Presumably such literature arises because so many jobs have been made so trivial that few people can find any meaning at all in them. It may be that techniques of management alone can't cure the problem. But clearly, for even the most potentially interesting jobs to be meaningful, there must be managers who are willing to throw away the management handbooks and take some risks.

  Maybe in the late 1970s designing and debugging a computer was inherently more interesting than most other jobs in industry. But to at least some engineers, at the outset, Eagle appeared to be a fairly uninteresting computer to build. Yet more than two dozen people worked on it overtime, without any real hope of material rewards, for a year and a half; and afterward most of them felt glad. That happened largely because West and the other managers gave them enough freedom to invent, while at the same time guiding them toward success.

  West never passed up an opportunity to add flavor to the project. He helped to transform a dispute among engineers into a virtual War of the Roses. He created, as Rasala put it, a seemingly endless series of "brushfires," and got his staff charged up about putting them out. He was always finding romance and excitement in the seemingly ordinary. He welcomed a journalist to observe his team; and how it did delight him when one of the so-called kids remarked to me, "What we're doing must be important, if there's a writer covering it."

  Engineering is not of necessity a drab, drab world, but you do often sense that engineering teams aspire to a bland uniformity. West was unusual. Alsing, who might have traveled anywhere, but whose life had been largely restricted to the world of engineering, responded most strongly to him. "West," said Alsing, "took a bag on the side of the Eclipse and made it the most exciting project in the company, the most exciting thing in our lives for a year and a half. West never bored us."

  As for West himself, there is no doubt that he had experienced an odd, nervous kind of fun. The circumstances had been propitious. There was a crisis. Solving it called for unorthodox procedures. He'd found, it seems to me, an opportunity to reconcile for a time two opposite ambitions — one conventional and quantifiable, the other unorthodox and vague. He was back in Cambridge, as it were, singing folk songs, while at the same time putting money on Data General's bottom line. He could be, for a little while, a balladeer of computers.

  "We're building what I thought we could get away with," West had said. But Eagle
sufficed. "With this machine we're going way beyond what any one person can do I always wanted to build something like this."

  Now it was done. The Eclipse Group and the many others who had worked on the machine — including, especially, Software and Diagnostics — had created 4096 lines of microcode, which fit into a volume about eight inches thick; diagnostic programs amounting to thousands of lines of code; over 200,000 lines of system software; several hundred pages of flow charts; about 240 pages of schematics; hundreds and hundreds of engineering changes from the debugging; twenty hours of videotape to describe the new machine; and now a couple of functioning computers in blue-and-white cases, plus orders for many more on the way. Already, you could see that the engineers who had participated fully would be looking back on this experience a long time hence. It would be something unforgettable in their working lives. All this, at last, was no canard.

  DINOSAURS

  Months after the machine's announcement, Jon Blau was cleaning up a detail; it had to do with an interconnection between Eagle's CPU and another device. Looking through some documents, he came across the name of a cable that he'd never heard of before, and puzzled, he called to Holberger, "Hey, Ken, what's this?"

  "Ahhh," said Holberger, looking at the document. "That looks like a Tom West special."

  At that moment Blau felt he «aw it all. For the first time, he fully realized how many other groups besides his own had been brought into the project, to perform large and little tasks, such as the design and fabrication of this cable. There had been a tricky little problem here and this cable solved it Though just a detail within a detail, it was crucial. There must have been dozens of problems like this standing between Eagle and the company's door, ones that he and the other recruits had never known existed. Who had anticipated them and arranged for their solutions? It had to have been West.

  Blau knew that he could not have done that job himself. For that job, you'd need to know a lot, he thought; you'd need intimate knowledge not only of the CPU but also of the company's entire product line. He tried to imagine how hard it must have been to pull everything together. As time went on, at least one other young engineer would have an experience like Blau's; he'd come across a problem and find that West had identified and solved it long ago. As for Blau, he had often wondered what, if anything, West did behind his office door. Now he stared at the document before him, and he exclaimed, "Wow!"

  There really was, as West had often said, more to building a computer than designing and debugging a Central Processing Unit. Someone had to dream up its general outlines in the first place. Someone had to make sure that the computer would work compatibly with the company's existing lines of peripheral equipment. Someone had to set goals of cost and performance and see to it that they could be met. These and many other items lay on the list of what West, often all alone, had accomplished.

  Although he had rarely confessed it to anyone in the company, West had taken a large gamble. "You have to believe in yourself enough to make some pretty outrageous statements," he had said, referring to his largely successful efforts at selling the virtues of Eagle. Secretive as a mother cat about the location of her kittens, West had masked most of his activities, including his worrying.

  He had once appeared to Carl Alsing as a mysterious stranger passing through town, and he really was that person — by constitution and preference a loner. He had never before owned responsibility for such a large project or for the performance of so many people. He had taken it upon himself, of course. Somehow, though, he seemed to have gotten it in his mind that he was responsible for things that he couldn't possibly control. The team had signed up to create the computer; he thought he himself had signed up to make sure that if they did their part, Eagle would get out the door and be a big success and the team would be rewarded, with stock and prestige and the freedom to play pinball again. Half the time, while sitting alone in his office, planning and planning, he had imagined that total failure was imminent. Danger made life interesting, but anxiety gets tiring after a while. By late summer West appeared ready for the project to be over, and it nearly was for him. Late in June, having rounded up supporters in various divisions of the company, he had for the first time formally presented the machine to de Castro, at the meeting of executives called the Product Board; and while de Castro had not responded as enthusiastically as West had hoped he would, the Captain nevertheless seemed to give the machine his laconic blessing.

  There had been a time when people with CB radios had been overheard in the vicinity of Westborough discussing the "battle" between the Eclipse Group and North Carolina; but nervous, invigorating talk of that sort had long since passed away. After the Product Board, Eagle was out of the closet and West slackened his public relations campaign. The machine had its own momentum now. During that summer, West suddenly remembered bike rides he'd taken with his father on Sunday evenings, and he found time to reassert that tradition with his oldest daughter. Suddenly, it seemed, he realized that his children were growing, and apparently he intended now to guide them on their way. He said one evening: "That's the bear trap, the greatest vice. Your job. You can justify just about any behavior with it. Maybe that's why you do it, so you don't have to deal with all those other problems '

  I went sailing off Cape Cod with West for a few days in early August. On a morning that began with squalls and then became windless, we were heading out under the power of the boat's diesel toward the Buzzards Bay Tower, through a steep, unpleasant sea. Suddenly, the engine quit. West stared at me, with his mouth half open. Then he set his jaw and turned away.

  He disappeared into the cabin and in a moment I heard some banging from below. A little later he poked his head up through the hatch and said, "Try it."

  No luck. It wouldn't start. West disappeared again.

  He again poked his head up through the hatch. He was holding the engine's manual aloft. "This is a good manual. The only problem is, ummmmmmmh, it's not for this engine." Then he was gone again. More banging. Try it again. No luck. West's head appeared in the hatchway, reading from the manual: " 'It is axiomatic that when a diesel engine fails while underway, that there is a fuel problem.'" He laughed, as if he had just read something funny. Again he was gone and again he reappeared, 'his time to spit out a mouthful of diesel fuel. Finally, of course, he made the engine run.

  Back on land, one night shortly afterward, West told me that this incident was probably the closest I'd ever get to seeing him work on a computer. Then he remarked: "You assumed I could make it work. But I had never worked on a diesel engine before, and I was kinda pissed. I didn't think I could do it." I took it he was tired of playing the hero with mechanical things. Clearly, this was not the same man who would describe himself to virtual strangers by saying, "I can fix anything."

  West kept on losing weight. He was tired, and he was preparing himself for a large change.

  Nearly a year later, Holberger and Alsing were reminiscing about Eagle in a barroom, and Holberger remarked that what had happened near the end of the project reminded him of the typical conclusion of one sort of Western. A town hires a gunslinger to clean it up, but when he's taken care of their problem, he's still a gunslinger and sooner or later the respectable citizens are going to " run him out of town.

  Alsing warmed to the analogy at once. "Of course! Of course! That's a classic American story."

  When the new recruits had arrived, they had been told that the Eclipse Group represented the very heart of Data General. The veterans who told them so certainly believed it. Their group, as they saw it, was the most dogged, hardworking, practical, productive and dangerous in the company, a bastion of the old successful ways, a paradigm of the company as it had been when it was small. They believed in the rule of pinball: if you win, you get to play again; but failure is unthinkable, so you'd better let no one get in your way. Holberger's remark about gunslingers recalled some old scenes:

  * I'm sitting in West's office taking notes, when I look up and see We
st eyeing my pad from across his desk. He smiles. Then he reads my notes to me. In business, he explains, still smiling, you learn to read memos upside down.

  West is standing at his Magic Marker board, drawing a diagram of the company's hierarchy as it affects his group. "There's some dogs and cats out here," he says. "This guy is a nonissue." He draws a large X over someone's name. "This guy disappears in time."

  * Holberger sits at his terminal, sending out a bogus EMERGENCY WARNING MESSAGE.

  * Rasala goes thundering into Diagnostics.

  * West sits in his office and declares, 'The only way I can do this machine is in this crazy environment, where I can basically do it any way that I want."

  When the Eclipse Group started building Eagle, the management structure around them was extraordinarily bare. During the project, new executives were hired to fill the gaps. They came from other companies and did not know, of course, the odd, unspoken rules by which the Eclipse Group played. The team's environment was changing, and the veterans felt it, in small ways and large: Rasala complaining about a new rule that forbade employees from taking home used packing boxes without going through the formality of getting a property pass, West in a traffic jam outside the plant one morning, muttering: 'This is really beginning to make me mad. I used to be able to park at the front door of this company."

  One day Rasala, Holberger and West were sitting around in West's office, voicing general agreement that beating people up didn't seem to get results anymore. Most other groups just didn't seem to. be willing to put in lots of overtime on a machine anymore. Picking up a line from West — that the Eclipse Group might be "a dinosaur" of a team — Holberger suggested that they order some T-shirts, which would bear the name Eclipse Group under the image of a panting Tyrannosaurus rex.

  West and the other leaders of the Eclipse Group had acquired some enemies who would not mind seeing them taken down, and West got into a long-running battle, which heated up as the debugging approached completion. As he explained it to Rasala, West felt he was fighting to preserve the group's substantial freedom and to prevent a situation in which the team would simply be delegated to do certain jobs. Rasala said: "The real fun — the way you get an Eagle out the door — is to get the guys to invent it, to come up with an innovative idea that's gonna make money. Once you've got that, there's no problem motivating people. Once we've got that, okay, baby, we're gonna do a hell of a job. And I think that's what West is fighting for'