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A STUDY IN CORPORATE CULTURES
DIGITAL EQUIPMENT CORPORATION
THE REALITY:
HEROSPEAK
A summary of what some Digital heroes have to say
about the culture.
The subject of this paper is Differentiation.
By
Reesa E. Abrams
Stephen Heiser
September 1985
Revised February 1988
@copyright 1985, DIGITAL EQUIPMENT CORPORATION
INTERNAL USE ONLY
Table of Contents
Introduction................................................1
I. Digital..................................................4
II. People.................................................11
III. Process...............................................21
IV. Comments...............................................27
Table of Contents iii
INTRODUCTION
The purpose of this series of papers is to show what the Digital
Culture is, has been, and is becoming in the world of the
employees who have been successful. This paper portrays six
successful engineers who emerged in the first twenty five years.
These six are preceded by myths about their accomplishments.
These are not the only six heroes of Engineering.
Heroes are very important to a culture. They provide important
information about what behavior is valued in the culture. Heroes
provide the models used by younger employees in deciding career
moves. Heroes show what is possible. Heroes become larger than
life. Every characteristic is something to be examined and
followed, especially if it gives validation to who you are and
provides you with the direction you are seeking.
There are a number of ways to study the heroes of a culture. The
way chosen was to give information about some working Engineers
in their own words. This gives the perspective of a successful
person. Rather than showing each person individually, we created
a composite of their perspectives. This hints at an accepted
Digital perspective. What is most interesting is which
perspectives were similar and which were not.
Some people may take exception to my use of the word "hero".
There is a maturity level in us all that is reached in our adult
life when we finally realize that we are the heroes of the next
generation. Our behavior is the model that will be followed.
Thus, each of us is responsible to those around us in some way,
not just for the Digital of today, but also for the Digital of
tomorrow. This is the way organizations evolve. Additionally,
in the life of an engineer, there is a difference between being
considered successful by our peers and finally considering
ourselves a success. What I noticed about the six people I
interviewed was that they had achieved the success as well as the
maturity level. This is what a hero is all about. Furthermore,
the six heroes in this paper have continued, long-term technical
success as well as the repect of the people across all levels of
the corporation.
I had to decide who to study. This study is being funded by Bill
Johnson, so I asked him to pick six people in Engineering for the
study.
INTRODUCTION 1
What is interesting is what they had in common. They were each
clear about their technical skills and accomplishments. They
each were quick to tell me how important teams were to building
successful products. Additionally, each knew clearly their own
strengths and weaknesses. They each told me that Digital is a
production-oriented company. You must produce and keep producing
to be continually successful. Each told me about the value of a
mentor or some management person who kept the path clear for them
to keep producing. I also heard from them how important it is to
them personally that Digital is an engineering-driven company.
Each of them in his own way put me through my paces to make sure
I was safe to talk with.
What is also interesting about these six people is their
differences. Their styles, for example, cover a broad range of
characteristics. Some work lots of hours and weekends, others a
regular week. Some like the intensity of New England and others
want to be left alone to produce. Some think process is
important, others think that getting the work out is more
important than rules. They disagreed on what quality is. Some
believe that it is customer-driven. Others feel that a quality
product is more esoteric and that you know it when you see it.
Some are arrogant, others embarrassed by all this attention. Some
are affiliative, some are not. Some are introverted, some more
extroverted. What stood out is that each individual has figured
out what works personally. This reinforces my personal theory
that one characteristic about Digital is that each person is
valued as an individual. Dealing with each person is an
experience in culture shock.
After I had spoken with each of the six heroes, I had a
conversation with Bill Johnson to summarize his philosophy about
heroes and why he had sent me after these six. The text of that
interview follows:
1. Why did you pick the six people you picked?
"Largely, because believe that within Engineering they were
viewed as people who had made significant contributions over
time, that they had involvement in either successful projects
or products continuously, or had brought some new method or
technology in to the company."
2. These are clearly the heroes of the old Digital. Where is
Digital going?
INTRODUCTION 2
"First of all, they are heroes of the old Digital up to 1978.
Before 1978, we had this strategy that said, there are so
many markets we can go into. We are going to have so many
market areas for us to go after, it is important for us to
differentiate what we're doing internally and externally.
Therefore, having a clear, viable objective different from
anybody else at Digital was important. Differentiation was
the real key to becoming a hero in the past.
"The key to becoming a hero in the future, since 1978, has
been integration which means trying to make things look the
same, just spaced differently."
3. "How do you get heroes in place?
"You get heroes by getting management to say and value what
they do. I suggest to you that the reason why there aren't
any new heroes is because there really aren't any senior
managers who value that integration. We talk about one
product, one company, one message, one strategy. What we
really need is one really good product, and one really good
company that carries with it its own message.
"Heroes can exist at all levels. I think there are
management heroes that exist.
"What is interesting to me is the consistency of the messages
delivered by six heroes."
Reesa Abrams
September, 1985
INTRODUCTION 3
I. DIGITAL
WHAT IS GOOD ABOUT DIGITAL
I tend to value Digital because of the competition or the
tendency toward anarchy or the lack of central structure, and I
regard that as a valuable trait.
One of the most positive things to me has been the sense of
working with peers.
I think we're solemnly committed to building quality products,
and we have, if not a precise, at least a strong definition of
what quality means, and there's a strong desire throughout the
company to build high-quality products. We have aggressive goals
about what we're trying to achieve.
I feel a substantial sense of ownership for some of our products
and for things that have been accomplished, and I think that's
true of many of my professional peers around here. After you've
done something that you think is good, the company has put it in
to production, and it's widely used and accepted, and people are
pleased with it, then you know you did the right thing. That's
tremendously reinforcing.
Another thing that's important to me about Digital is the notion
that it's an engineering company. I really do have the sense that
the reason we're strong is because of the quality of the
engineering we do, and that provides a lot of the direction for
what we're going to do.
It's got something to do with the way the company not just says
"the people" but somehow puts its mind where its mouth is. I
don't really mean money in dollars, I mean the actions that we
all subscribe to have something to do with the fact that this is
people, even though we create machines.
If you can take it in a broad continuum, it is paying attention
to people: to the employees as people first, workers second;
customers as people first, bill paying customers second. Even
some of the things that the company does in the community have to
do with people rather than the politics of the community so much.
You sort of have a feeling that when you come through that front
door there are people who work here. That's probably the most
important thing. It translates into little things like the
creative engineering types with whom I'm most familiar. I'd give
them their head even if it is a wild goose chase or an idea that
is going to wind up costing more than it's going to benefit,
because we don't presume to know what is going to happen anyway,
so we have a little latitude in what we do.
I. DIGITAL 4
There is a reluctance to formulate rules. We try to operate on a
minimum number of rules. We all know that once you create a rule
that concerns human behavior then the next day you're going to
have to make exceptions and eventually deviate from the
established structural guidelines. I think the one thing that is
most important at Digital is that somebody can stand up with
ideas, follow through with ideas, build products, and be the
person who guides his own destiny. That's what I really like
about Digital, and that's why I'm still here.
People like to say we're better at producing products that have
higher quality than other people, and I think that's true. I
think that is the reason we've been able to introduce new
computer architectures like the VAX and the PDP-11, that were in
the forefront.
I perceive that Digital is an atmosphere that I can excel in, and
it's an atmosphere in which I can work with good people.
We tend not to follow all the rules, and we don't chastise people
for not following the rules.
When I needed the company to come through for me, they did.
DIGITAL GIVENS
There are no absolutes.
DIGITAL CHARACTERISTICS
Running a company can be hard on people at times - a sort of ever
present fear of losing.
I don't think Digital is particularly unsafe, certainly in a
macro sense. You're probably not going to get fired or anything.
It's certainly worse other places. I think it does build up a
lot of tension.
We have indicated to our product management people that we want
to go out and talk to customers. They give us wonderful things
about how they will have the time to work on this, set up groups,
go out and talk to customers, and let us know what they say.
They're sure we're too busy to want to do this. My perception is
that there are a lot of design decisions that we need to make
that could be influenced by the customer. Existing and
prospective customers for this type of product are hard to get
because I don't know who to call.
I. DIGITAL 5
We're operating in a vacuum. I'm guilty of this when I presume
that our customers look like us. Many people have failed on that
presumption.
We only make computers, we don't use them.
NOW VS THEN
Chances were good, if you're a middle-level technical person,
that there were only a few other people who were working in your
particular area. You have the opportunity to become a project
leader, more or less immediately, and if you do well in one or
two projects, you have the opportunity to rise and be recognized.
Very quickly. That's a lot harder at Digital these days in the
sense that we're a much larger company. We have more established
technical people, and we're also doing harder, more complicated
things. There's not that opportunity to immediately do the
technical thing and bubble to the top.
At that time we didn't try to heap so much responsibility on
product or project leaders as we do now. We didn't have the
complexities of having program managers and umpteen product
managers, and we didn't have a whole bunch of products. We
didn't have the whole company trying to inject requirements into
all the plans. Most of the products in those days were directly
related to some product line. And much of the input came from
that product line or maybe a few other product lines. There's a
lot of input now versus very little before.
HOW DIGITAL COULD BE BETTER
Digital has some legitimate superstars, but I don't consider
myself a superstar in that sense. I think there are plenty of
people who make substantial contributions who aren't superstars,
but who have something really of value to be communicated and
emulated. The company would be better off if more people were
aware of that.
I've seen examples of situations where the product is perceived
to be in trouble and a lot of turnover happens.
Projects that are somebody else's idea have a much higher failure
rate than projects that are the idea of the person who is leading
the project. One of the problems that we often have is when we
haven't identified an appropriate group to undertake a task.
Instead, we have four or more groups sitting around hacking at
the task from their own perspective.
I. DIGITAL 6
I'm not sure how good we are at identifying those kinds of
failures and bringing them to a quick merciful end. I think
they'll tend to muddle on for a while and finally the whole thing
may just kind of collapse. One of the things around here is that
you probably end up both blaming and praising the wrong people.
Following the letter of the law is not going to make a successful
software project. There are plenty of failed projects that had
nice, thick project plans and functional specifications. They
didn't look any worse than lots of other projects and yet the
thing didn't come off at all. They did not really put the
process to work in an effective way. There are people who have
been quite successful by breaking lots of "rules", though I
don't think there are people who have been highly successful who
have just totally ignored what phase reviews were about.
Frustrations are usually based on something that is keeping me
from doing what I believe to be the common sense thing to do.
Periodically, when we build teams to do certain things, we don't
use out heads. We build teams to give value to things and to
people who are proven losers.
Today, I'm very frustrated about the fact that it takes so long
to get certain things done within the company. People are so
preoccupied with pettiness they don't seem to want to worry about
the big things anymore. Therefore, they don't want to worry about
what projects are going on and so on.
I think one of the frustrating things is that I'm a senior person
in the corporation and I don't even get those memos.
The management is a cast system set up around the management
people at senior group and vp level. They tend to have their
staffs and the engineering people seldom, if ever, hear about
certain developments.
I just wish people would use their common sense and trust me to
use common sense. I think sometimes when the poison pen memos
are flying back and forth, it is because we don't trust each
other to use our good judgment. The biggest single problem with
the corporation today is that, in engineering, people don't trust
each other. Engineering people don't trust the sales force to do
the right thing with products and the sales force doesn't trust
engineering, so we have a terrible situation.
Another thing that we've done over the years is forgetting our
roots in that we have abandoned some markets that we were "king"
in. An example is a lab market. We have just let MassCom take
the lab market from us. Those are the people who ran the lab
business from Digital so there's no reason in the world we
should've forgotten about that.
I. DIGITAL 7
I think that today's teams are too big.
I think people have lost track of how to meet schedules because
we haven't trained the people running a software or hardware
project how to schedule.
I think there are a lot of people who can learn about scheduling
and about how to run a software project. We don't teach them in
a general way, but I think they can learn. I think that the
people who are working on my project right now are learning what
I believe to be a fool-proof method of how to schedule a project
for success.
Someone was asked what's different about the company; why aren't
we seeing more ideas come to product? The answer is because you
can never get somebody to decide whether that's important or not
important. We need to be able to stand up and say, "That idea is
lousy. I don't want you to work on that." On the other hand, we
need to be able to recognize good ideas and say, "that's a very
important product for this company to be building, put a team
together and do it."
The reason personnel is frustrated is because they read that darn
orange book. They follow the rules and don't use common sense.
They're working with people, but they're not solving people
problems in people ways.
The company could help engineering get its job done by setting up
a workable structure around engineering to do the things like
budgeting.
When we started the VAX project, the VAX VMS, it was clearly
known that we were building a team to do a specific job. And
there was corporate commitment to that. We don't have corporate
commitments anymore. If I was trying to get a project going now,
it would be a lot easier if there was a commitment by someone who
just wanted to take a stand and say, "That's important. We
should do that. Go do it."
I think that the mentality of the corporation is to be all
entrenched and defensive right now. But we've got to get out of
that, because what made us really great was not being defensive.
We're playing catch-up all the time here. We're catching up on
the hardware projects we're doing: we're catching up on the
software projects we're doing.
We think we can do anything, but we are terribly constrained by
realities of the corporation.
I. DIGITAL 8
I'm not sure we do anything very consciously.
Well, we have a couple of workstations. But the problem was at
that time that we had to produce the absolute Cadillac
workstation that would never exist anywhere and beat the
competition hands down. And consequently, we didn't get anything.
I think the competition is a little better at getting a product
idea formulated and into a product than we are. We've got to
change that.
If only there were some kind of a marketing strategy that lasts
more than one quarter. It takes two years worth of strategy to
market what we are seriously going after in a particular market.
Furthermore, there must be a series of coordinated factors by
which we will accomplish the goal and strategy we set out for. If
not, it's disorganized.
Interactions with customers are easy compared to Digital, in
getting anything done. Customers will love you to death. Digital
people will shoot you to death if you have an original idea. I'm
not kidding, this company really was not invented here. It's
riddled with feifdom, it's riddled with people posturing, trying to
make heroes of themselves at the expense of us. We don't applaud
each other's ideas at all. We attack them until, well I guess, the
person is either devastated or can take anything.
If anything, we have too many good ideas, and we don't have
effective ways of concentrating on choosing some of them, instead
of trying to do them all, thereby not doing any well enough.
Digital is really really good at building goods, but we are
hopeless at using them.
CHANGES IN THE CULTURE OVER TIME
There's certainly more overt competition between projects (than
in earlier times). I guess in a sense Digital has become more
dangerous. I think it is adversely affecting the culture. I
think it drives people towards less sharing of information,
toward less willingness to take chances. Certainly less trust.
It does seem as though there is less tendency today to break up
teams and form new teams, that there is more of a tendency
towards empire building, maintaining groups and that sort of
thing. There's good and bad to that. In some sense it's good to
maintain a stable nucleus and build on experience and all that.
On the other hand, there also seems to be a tendency to do that
even when you don't have a really well working group to maintain.
I. DIGITAL 9
Because Digital is more mature, we also have the wealth and the
luxury of having experienced people. Nowadays, when we start a
compiler project, it would be most unusual to have the team
leader be someone who has not done a large, successful compiler
project for Digital before, either as the project leader or
certainly as the first assistant project leader. When I first
came here, we were much smaller. The language group fit into
about two offices, and we didn't have that luxury, so some of us
just started off being, with some brief experience at Digital and
then there you are, you're the project leader of this compiler
project.
STRENGTH
One of the crucial things in the success of the VAX was that it
was put together as a project team or a task team and drew from
diverse groups within the company that were necessary in order to
pull off the first VAX product, and the whole family. We got
together a group that had focus, the authority to do what it
needed to do, and had the resources. in my judgment, this is
probably the best technical team, perhaps, that Digital has ever
put together in the sense of the number of quality people that it
had, and was able to draw on. In fact, it had people who had
been successful in previous related endeavors, mostly the
operating system or hardware design.
One of Digital's selling successes is that we are not IBM, and
people will buy from Digital because we are not IBM. They can
see through IBM's propaganda, just as anybody else could.
DO THE RIGHT THING
One of our early catch phrases for VAX was "this time we're going
to do it right" and, in fact, we had a lot of fun with that
because at various times we'd punctuate it differently.
Sometimes it was, this time we're going to do it, with right in
big capital letters and an exclamation point. Sometimes it was,
this time we're going to do it right, period. Sometimes it was,
this time we're going to do it, right?
We're engineers. We've trained ourselves as engineers through
sound schooling. Some of us have put in a dozen years at the
company and we know how to do this job. We've learned a lot.
The ones who are successful and still here have a lot of common
sense about what's good and what's bad. Trust those people and
trust yourself to make common sense decisions. So the right
thing is to use and trust each other. You know why Digital is
losing some of its good people? Because other companies know
I. DIGITAL 10
that Digital people who are successful are very good at what they
do. And it's very hard...we get calls from headhunters all the
time and they have very lucrative offers. What they don't offer,
ususally, is something that's appreciably different. I mean, it
might be more money, but it's the same old problem.
HISTORY
If people understood in a real gut way what that process was and
how it worked, I think that can be used in a lot of places. It
doesn't guarantee that every time we'll pull off a VAX, there are
only a certain number of times when (a) you're that successful
and (b) when there's such a wonderful opportunity.
Like it used to back in 1970 when we worked on small teams in
isolated parts of the mill, making our own decisions on a very
localized basis, ignoring the people we wanted to ignore,
shooting spears out when we needed to shoot spears out. Between
1976 or 1977 and 1981 we really lost that. Groups just grew
tremendously. All of a sudden we had huge groups doing projects.
And they didn't have any direction. They were meandering. They
were perceived to be spending a lot of time watching people do
their jobs rather than letting people do their jobs. And in some
sense I think that was a reaction to managing the tremendous
growth that occurred when VAX came out. But we really didn't do
a good job at that. We put in the structures that really didn't
work. Software Engineering is a good example. It was very hard
to get things done. It was very hard to spend time working
because you were spending half your time going to meetings.
Everybody wanted to have a task force and the fact of the matter
is that some of those task forces were important. But come out
of New England and you don't get invited to any task forces and
out production level has come up tremendously. What I know now is
that some of those task forces are just a waste of time.
In the old days, which was back ten years ago, this company was
absolutely run by engineering. And I say absolutely in the sense
that it was engineers that spawned all the ideas about the
products. Once in a while, marketing would say something about,
"Well maybe we ought to have this." But engineering would spawn
the idea and engineering would go ahead.
CULTURE CHARACTERISTIC
We tend to be very proprietary about our own products and want to
hold all the cards.
I. DIGITAL 11
WHAT SHOULD WE STOP DOING
Internally we should stop the 'cover your ass' mentality, where
everyone is worried about their own turf and about their own
project in a very short-sighted way. And this gets back to the
idea of trust. If you're going to start a project or if you're
going to work on a project you have to depend on the other people
to do their best and succeed. So we should stop being so
entrenched.
I. DIGITAL 12
II. PEOPLE
HOW DO YOU SUCCEED AS AN EMPLOYEE
Good people make themselves. It will become evident to everyone
that they're good without their becoming exceptionally arrogant.
If you are too arrogant, people will not go out of their way to
help you; they will probably go out of their way to sabotage you.
Figure out how to use the computer. I'm surprised at the number
of people, frequently managers, who can never find the time to
learn how to use the computer effectively. We sell the darn
things and, you know, we use them in our everyday work. You find
out that so-and-so has an account on the computer and you send
them mail and it turns out that they never read it.
You have to do a certain amount of public relations with your
manager to let him know why you're of continuing value to the
company.
An employee should never become invisible.
The product they were doing worked, sold a lot, made a profit,
and people came after them to try and get them to work on the
next project. They got listened to. They proposed things, got
promoted, got raises, and they got stock options. Now, it's a
little harder to tell. It seems that its a longer time between
engineering finishing a product or project, and when its shipped
and cleared, to determine its success. There's a longer ramp
rate, and somehow the company seems to have gotten more
self-critical, and less satisfied with its product.
Everyone on a project is 100% responsible for the product.
Somehow to be successful they need to get a mentor/advisor or
some relationship.
An employee can have trouble understanding what's important
versus what can be a problem because we expect them to figure
that out for themselves.
We tend to prefer self-directed people. We are not heavily into
managing people or telling them how to do things. We expect them
to figure it out for themselves and tell us how they're doing it.
I think I'm probably more in the "good worker" category. When we
did the whole VAX thing there was a tremendous amount of risk
there and we all accepted chunks of it. The schedules I think we
committed to were very aggressive. The objectives we had, both
in terms of a quality code we wanted to produce and the level of
compatibility.
II. PEOPLE 13
There was certainly risk in there and we could easily have blown
them. We spent a lot of long hours and weekends getting the work
done, and it was tremendously successful. I would say, for the
company as a whole, that it was an incredibly risky project.
Success, if achieved, produces several positive things.
Certainly there is the personal satisfaction of a success, and I
think that's a strong motivating factor for people. I think, by
and large, the groups around here feel that they participate in
each other's success so that, when one new project comes out,
everybody in that area feels a bit better about it and feels
pride in that accomplishment. A sense of accomplishment in a sort
of derivative sense. Another thing that comes out of it is
opportunity. Once you've succeeded, then you have the
opportunity to do something else, and people are more likely to
pick you to do the next key thing that needs to be done or to
listen favorably to a proposal for some new project.
I suppose the advice that I would give would be, try to find a
place where he can put his skills to good work, have some clear
goals about what he's going to accomplish, in terms of his project
presumably (I'll presume he's got a project to work) and to set
clear goals that agree with his project leader or manager, and then
set about achieving them. And try to do a good job of measuring
himself against the goals as he goes along. Make sure that he's
staying on track. I think having a good mastery of the technical
skills that are required, realizing what your skills are around
what your efficiencies are, technically finding a place where you
can put those to use and being able to learn from others.
Written rules can be a real obstacle to progress, and yet, trying
to carry out what their goals are is essential to success.
I suppose part of maturing is realizing that there are no oracles.
I don't worry about whether they can program or not. What I worry
about is can I work with this person? Is this person a reasonable
person? And can they learn? Are they willing to learn? Do they
want to work with me because they think there's something exciting
here and they want to be able to do that? That's what I look for.
You see a gleam in people's eyes and know immediately that that's
the right person for you. I don't train people in quality, but I
try to impress upon people when they set their schedules, how much
time have you left for writing a test system? When are you going
to run a test system? And when someone says, "I've just
implemented a new run-time library feature." You point to them
and say, "there's Kim Peterson over there. You give Kim a test
that will test that." We didn't do that in VMS.
II. PEOPLE 14
We didn't have a formal test system with VMS. We depended on
another group for the UETP. And that was unfortunate because
they became second-class citizens.
I've always had very successful challenging jobs to do and I
think that I have a tremendous amount of credibility, because
I've been successful. When I say I'm going to do something,
people say, "Oh, his track record is good. I know that he can do
that." And I think that's something I've earned. I don't think
that's a reward for success. I think the success has only been
something I've earned. I think everyone who's successful earns
it. They're not entitled to do. If you wait for success to walk
in the door, it isn't going to happen.
I think we're successful because we have set up an environment
that is conducive to doing projects.
You have to play the political game, but that doesn't mean that
you have to pay attention to all this nonsense going on.
What makes you successful at Digital is to work hard, use your
imagination, use your common sense, and do the things that you
commit to do. That's what your job is.
What do I expect from my team people? They contract with me to do
a certain job on a certain date and that's what they're judged
against. And I won't let them set an unreasonable schedule. It's
my responsibility to make sure they're not setting themselves up
for failure.
If you're in trouble you should speak up and not hide it. If you
say something about it, something may be able to be done. If
you sit in your office, nothing is going to happen.
I'd say the key to success in Digital is to set your sights on
reasonable goals, achieve those goals, and to think very
pragmatically about what you're trying to do. We're back to
products and good design. Now, what do you do to interface well
with the rest of the company? You try to use your common sense
again and be selective about what you listen to and what you
ignore. If you see something wrong, chuck a spear. That's
another good thing about working out of New England, we get very
little travel from Maynard, but boy we get a lot of attention when
we throw a spear.
We have to set it up so that the new employees know where to go
to get information. You have to encourage people to do that.
You have to encourage the people you're hiring to review their
design or review their thinking. One thing that the old
employees do is, we talk all the time. "I'm working on this."
II. PEOPLE 15
"I'm having a problem." You've got to teach new employees to do
that. Because that's how they learn. That's how they don't get
off in a corner.
I write software very, very quickly. I never write anything
down. I do it all on the terminal, and I do it so quickly that I
can do it ten times over in the same time that other people can
do it from start to finish. Now, those people are sometimes just
as successful as I am. Sometimes, more successful. And,
sometimes I'm more successful. I get the benefit of lots of
iterations over the design and they get the benefit of up-front
thinking. I try to tell my people that if you are the
up-front-thinking kind, you want to write it all down, work all
the details out and then start implementing -- that's great. But
if you are the 'lots of iterations' kind, make sure that you
have the capability to do that. So there are a lot of ways of
getting to the same thing. Don't model the way I do it if it is
not going to be successful for you. Your job is to make your
dates.
If you're experienced, you tend to propose projects that you know
can live with in the reality of manufacturing and sales. Hopefully
you can still build forward-looking products for the industry.
The good guys tend to collect more people about them and keep on
doing things. So, you can sort of see the good guys from the bad
guys if you're real perceptive about what's happening.
If you want to be successful in the company, then you've got to
do your job. You probably have to do more than you job. You
can't just take a passive role in things. You've got to take an
active role. Which means that you've got to foster ideas, maybe
new product ideas, or you've got to foster innovative
implementation ideas. You've got to do something where you're not
just saying, "I can do that. I'll do a good job at that. Just
give me a job and I'll do it." Because I don't think you can do
that and really be successful in the company. If you really want
to be successful, you've got to do that at a higher level.
You've got to put yourself in a position where you possibly could
lose.
Alliances are ambiguous, a tub of concrete. By and large, they
tend to be opposed to organizational alliances, whereby once the
organization changes, the personalities change and the alliance
drops and has to be reestablished. You operate a lot on the
basis of an understanding provided that.. it's very hard to try
to write down in words what the understanding was, you'd kill the
understanding right there.
II. PEOPLE 16
WHY DO YOU STAY
I have an opportunity to pursue things that I think are important
and going to be valuable for the company.
The company came through with their part of the bargain after my
investment in the company. I am now feeling that the company is
investing in me.
If I couldn't guide my own destiny and work on the things that I
think are important, that is mutually important for me and the
company, I wouldn't be here.
I've been treated well and I have every expectation that that
will continue. There seems to be ample opportunity to experiment
with things that I want to do as well as do things that I'm safe
to do.
WHAT TURNS YOU ON
I tend to get my jollies about getting a product out the door.
I am a product person.
VISION
I think that more attention needs to be paid to a corporate
strategy.
The last thing I want to see is the bureaucracy get any stronger.
The culture maintainers are responsible for what they do.
We're going to become more mature and responsible in the various
organizations. We won't have a Ting Guru, or a definitive oracle
who can tell us everything we need to do, but in fact, we will
have people within the various groups who will provide the kind
of technical leadership in each area to help us to move along,
and to build the kinds of products that need to be built. There
will be, I suppose, processes something like where we will try to
pull together what the different oracles are saying to be sure
that it's really coherent. That's what the Local Area Systems
people are trying to do and, in fact, they are being supported by
the operating system.
What we need to realize is that, in each of the areas, we need to
have a vision of where we're headed and a strategy to work
towards.
II. PEOPLE 17
HEROES
Being a Digital hero is being perceived as a leader on a very
successful project or product.
I've developed a reputation at this point, and I think I could
find somplace interesting to work if I wanted to change.
I'm smart. I go out and ask questions and talk to the people.
I'm practically always doing something. I don't sit in my office
twiddling my thumbs - I go read a book in the library if I don't
have anything else to do.
I'm busy. I poke my nose into a lot of areas, and I usually have
something to say about them. I'm not afraid to speak up in a
meeting. I apparently have some skills at running meetings. I'm
quite competent in a fairly broad range of stuff. I guess I
think I know what I'm doing. I can be fairly assertive or even
aggressive about getting what I want.
I think there certainly are heroes in Digital, and I think the
notion of the hero is important as a model for people. I think
there are lots of different kinds of heroes.
Heroes have incredible technical skills and prolific ability to
apply them. A second attribute is the ability to produce
products, and that's something that is recognized as outstanding
in Digital. There are other heroes around who might have
extremely strong technical gifts, not so much the product focus,
and that doesn't say they don't produce products. What they
don't have is the kind of prolific involvement with products that
some others have.
The style, the process they use, their ability to work with
people, to work with groups.
I think that the role of people at my level, who have worked for
the company for ten or fifteen years and have a lot of
experience, is to pour out all their experience and guide the
people who have a lot of energy to do their job. In addition,
people who are the senior technical people in the company have a
responsibility to drive the company in ways that make sense.
One thing that sets me apart from other people is, maybe, that I
take too much responsibility for the people. I worry a lot about
their technical work, I worry a lot about what the team is doing
technically, but I also think I have a lot of responsibility to
keep up my end of the bargain for them.
II. PEOPLE 18
QUALITY
Things that meet customer expectations.
I promote quality by trying to remind people that the customer
pays the bills. We should be concerned with customer
satisfaction instead of saving a nickel here and there in the way
we design something.
Every time our machine recovers from an error and it doesn't
crash, that's a customer who's satisfied.
If you build a perfect machine that no one can build after the
first one, you're building a prototype. Somebody has to build the
other three million of them. Someone has to assure that every one
of those three million looks like the first one and works the same
way, that's manufacturing. It's a difficult problem.
I'm in the business of building something that an awful lot of
people are going to be pretty well satisfied with. It doesn't
have to be perfect in any of the dimensions, but it ought to be
pretty good in all of them.
There's nothing you can do to put quality into something once its
created. Quality comes from the team that's doing it, from their
vision of what they're doing and how well they can execute what
their plans are.
You depend on the customer for feedback, and you want them to
tell you what they need before you give it to them.
What I don't agree with, frankly, is this whole effort to try to
teach people about quality; to try to give people methodology for
engineering quality. It's all bullshit as far as I'm concerned.
You get quality by putting teams together that do real work.
You're not going to get quality by trying to paint it on.
I think I have a sense of what quality is from a software
engineering standpoint that I've acquired over the years, but
it's going to be very hard for me to try to define it. All I
know is that when we're about to put a product out, there's a
feeling you get about whether or not it's right. And if it's not
right, we're going to hold onto it until we feel right about it.
I do feel that groups that deal with customers, like CSSE, play a
very very key role in the customer's perception of the quality of
Digital or the quality of the software. I don't think you can
measure it by the SPRs, but you can certainly get a feeling about
it.
II. PEOPLE 19
You get quality by good design and good engineering. You don't
get it by testing it at the end. Testing is fine for the five
percent of the things that you hope the customer doesn't find.
We test a business plan by looking back at our goals and
constraints and say, did we meet the constraints? Because I want
to be able to hold those constraints up when someone comes to me
and says, "How about doing X?" "I can't do X because I've
constrained myself not to do X."
I think we have quality. Our software is probably as good if not
better than anybody's. Our hardware is real good, regardless of
what customers like to say. Everything we design is designed to
work under worst-case conditions. In fact, if we didn't have to
do that, we could build things a lot cheaper. A lot cheaper.
We don't build anything that we aren't proud of. We're not going
to build anything that we think doesn't work. We're not going to
ship anything we don't think ought to be shipped.
Some things about quality can be measured. Some things can't.
Certainly, if it works the way it's supposed to work, we can
measure, and we do with both the hardware and the software
products we do here. Some of the things that are a little more
esoteric can't be measured. If they can't be measured
objectively, they can be measured subjectively.
I really can't say enough about how I disagree with this idea
that quality is measured as the difference between what you
produced and what the customer thought he needed, because that's
not quality.
The people who build it are responsible for the quality.
BURNOUT
There's certainly a lot of pressures to burn you out.
I have a personal computer at home. I don't use it for work. I
don't log in.
I sort of jealously guard my time off. I don't commit to
overtime. When the proto gets first turned on, I'll show up for
flight sessions and debug or something, but generally I tend to
come in at 8:30 and leave at 5:30 or 6:00. I don't do late night
sessions. I don't do weekends.
II. PEOPLE 20
There's a certain rhythm to the project. When you're first doing
the planning and getting up towards phase one, you can regulate
it so that things stay pretty orderly. I mean, not that you know
all the answers, but the amount of work you're doing is the
amount that fits into an average week. Clearly, when you begin
to get to the latter parts of the 1st three months before field
tests, you just have to anticipate that it is going to be a big
crunch, and, again, try to have some personal life organized to
accommodate that one way or another. Be sure you take a vacation
with your wife and kids before the big push for the field test.
That kind of thing. There's also the realization that, even when
times are worse, when you're extremely hard and things are going
very badly, that, at some point, there's going to be an end to
this. There will be a slower time. The product will get
released.
It may be very gratifying to have worked an extremely long week
and gotten a major task accomplished. That has to be done
sometimes, but one does not want to believe that that's the model
for life, that you're going to do that continuously.
One of the things that I have learned is not to mistake effort
for progress. People burnout because they're spending effort and
making no progress. Then they fail. I think burnout and failure
have a lot to do with each other.
If you lose your perspective, it's very hard to recover. What
I'm talking about is brinksmanship, you're constantly walking on
the edge of burnout. If you're working to your full potential,
you're constantly walking on that edge where you could fall off
and you stay on the edge by keeping your perspective, by making
sure you're making progress when you're making an effort.
I think Digital burns people out. People get burned out because
they work their ass off, and they finish something and they say,
"Where's the rainbow, where's the pot of gold?" And they look
around and nothing happens. Just nothing happens. And they say,
"Why did I work that hard, that long?" They don't know they're
doing this. They don't know that they really expect some praise
or glory at the end. It just isn't there, and they say, "Geez,
why should I do that again?" I think that's why people burn out,
and I've seen quite a few of them do it. And I don't think
burnout is necessary.
It tends to be, I think more on a personal level. Isolated
individuals who take the responsibility for colleagues, friends,
comrades at war.
II. PEOPLE 21
DISCIPLINE
Creativity is important, but too much of it without any
discipline is chaos.
I think there are processes, discipline processes, and if you
don't have those, you will indeed fail.
HOW TO BE SUCCESSFUL
In my particular case, I recognized it when I got here. I
started working in this office that the company had finally come
through with for me after years of being frustrated over the fact
that I was getting screwed at every turn. It took a long time
for me to overcome that, like eight years for me to realize that
the company could come through for me. Up to that point, I
always thought of myself as kind of a peon. I think a lot of the
new engineers think of themselves that way and have to overcome
it because, if you look back on your own career, you have lots of
successes that you have to identify and to buoy up to your
personality at any particular moment.
I'll also make the judgment that, if you need more than twelve
people to do a project, the project is too big; you're biting off
too much.
If you decide to work on a project and it's going to take longer
than two years, you're doing the wrong project, and taking too
much time to do too much.
I think we each have a responsibility that if we do see a
problem, to speak up about it.
I think that we're successful because we have set up an
environment that is conducive to doing projects. What gives us
grief is that we have found ourselves, after three years, to be a
bit out of touch with the day-to-day operations of the company
and what's going on, who the people are.
To be successful you should never assume that the people around
you have the answers, especially when it comes to the management.
Always know that no matter how long you've been here, or what
your title, or where you are in the pecking order, your ideas can
prevail, as long as you realize that it's 90% sweat, blood, and
tears.
II. PEOPLE 22
We have an oversupply of good ideas and bright people who can do
the 90% innovation. Our greatest resource is people who can do
the 90% innovation to the technical side of their ideas. They're
awash with good ideas. Other parts of the company might be quite
different. I'm suggesting that perhaps it should be. Somehow in
this high-tech culture, I don't just mean Digital, I mean in the
media, people have an inordinate and undue respect for the bright
idea. Einstein said it in, I forget exactly what he said, but he
had the ideas for general relativity. It took nine years to get
it written down and explained to his satisfaction. Einstein was
more than just an idea man. He was able to render those ideas
tractable to other people and his business. That's important.
EMPLOYEES SHOULD NEVER DO
The one thing that I would not like to see people do is lie about
their progress. They get in trouble and they don't tell me, then
there's nothing that I can do to help them or me. If they get in
trouble and they come and tell me, then the chances are that
there is probably somebody that did a little better than we
thought they were going to do, and we could probably have them
help the person out. But if they don't come and tell us, then
that's really a problem.
Well, one thing we should never do is take too seriously the idea
of managing our culture, because that can degenerate into
propaganda and people being cast out as heretics. We should
never stop changing. There are a variety of businesses we should
never go anywhere near. But also we should not be afraid to try
others -- those that even have a tiny chance of being exciting
for future businesses.
RESPONSIBILITY
I think everybody has responsibility. I don't think any one
person has the ultimate responsibility, but, ultimately, whoever
I report to is responsible.
The groups are the ones who are really responsible for the
product's success as far as the engineering side of it. We can't
do anything about the marketing or sales side of it. We're, in
fact, very disappointed that our last product has not done much
better, because we really thought it would. We thought it was a
really good product. From the engineering side, the project was
really a good project and very successful. From the sales side,
right now, it's not as successful as we thought it would be.
II. PEOPLE 23
III. PROCESS
WHAT IS RISK
I would say that this current project is, by Digital standards, a
very-high risk project...certainly a lot of people tell me that
it's crazy, and, therefore I infer that it must be high risk. Do
I feel it? Yeah, I guess I do. I don't think that it's stressful,
I think that's what makes the job exciting. That's why I'm here.
So I feel we need some risky projects. I guess I'd feel that I
was in over my head if I couldn't at least get some grudging
admission on the part of the skeptics that it might all work.
I think the risk is worthwhile. I'm also prepared to find, in a
year, that it isn't coming together, and maybe we ought to not do
this.
I don't see myself as primarily a risk taker. I tend to see myself
as making sure that I know that the thing is going to work.
This machine is running faster than probably anybody would have
thought it would have, mostly because I said it was going to run
that fast. I suppose that was a risk because something could
have gone wrong and it wouldn't have worked, but somehow I didn't
see it as a risk. I sat down and figured out "I think it can run
this fast, and, by God, I'm going to make it run this fast."
Then I didn't see it as a risk anymore.
One of the kinds of risks we'd face would be not doing enough. We
can be sort of complacent and slow moving, and hang on to our
current customer base, and let it grow. That's probably one of the
biggest risks we face. I think there is certainly risk when people
start out doing new things. For example, some of the projects where
we've had a lot of trouble may have been problems with the way those
projects were run, but we were trying to do some new things.
I don't know that I've taken really large risks. They don't look
like that, although there's certainly risk every time one commits
to doing a project.
There's only one kind of real risk and that's physical injury risk.
You take a risk when you go mountain climbing. Technical risk does
not exist. Technical risk can always be overcome by overwork.
I think, individually, we take risks -- small risks. I think
projects are filled with a few small risks such as another group
not finishing their product. But again, I have to trust them to
do what they think is right.
III. PROCESS 24
You're risking your livelihood and your reputation with people.
I would say that I do take risks. There are always hedge risks
-- gambles. There's no reward for failure.
POLITICS
I feel I spend an inordinate amount of time on politics, much
more than I wish I had to.
WHAT IS GOOD MANAGEMENT
A good administrative manager has to be someone who is in touch
enough with what people are saying and doing to understand the
realities of what is going on.
I think the downfall of a number of managers is convincing people
above them that they have everything under control, then
eventually the rude shock hits that things have fallen apart. I
think the failure is to continually present the impression that
things are under control while, in fact, they're quietly going to
hell in a handbasket.
A good technical manager has to do a good balancing act. Give
people enough freedom to create solutions to problems without
imposing on them, but be firm enough not to accept solutions
which that person's experience suggests will not fly. They have
to be a good sorter and they have to be able to do reasonably
well at working resolution of contrary views among their people.
Our approach has been to say, well, let's start with the
presumption that they're competent, interested, and so forth.
Start at the technical level and bring all those people into what
we were thinking about and say, "We're only going to succeed if
you help us out at this venture". By and large that's been
pretty successful. There has always been a problem area and we
said, "You know, we're going to sort that out and not presume
that those people are just a bunch of turkeys."
Managers work administrative bureaucracy. For one thing, there's
a lot of paper that needs to get filled out. The manager's tend
to work schedules, intergroup coordination, and get involved in
process sorts of things more than a technical manager. A
technical manager must try to get the best technical product they
can and to get the earliest product they can. Somehow this has
to get balanced off.
III. PROCESS 25
One of the clear management tasks is to provide charters that are
clear and crisp enough, and, if executed correctly, will produce
things that fit into the overall Digital environment.
Characteristics in a manager that are important to me are skills in
managing people, processes, and resources. I think in that order
also. It's important that a manager be able to deal with people,
and there are lots of styles that work. I certainly prefer those
that deal with people on a fairly adult, straightforward, and
humanistic way that value them as individuals. Managers should try
to deal with them and their problems, rather than just manage to
get the job done. So I think people management is very important.
Processes, I think are quite important, particularly in Digital
because of the lack of structure. Often, one has areas where a
lot of the problem is structural and it's important for the
manager to be able to identify that and to try to put in place
structures that will help people get the job done. When you have
an interface across several organizations, you need some
communication channel and working process to help both transmit
information and resolve conflict. If you can set up structure
that people can understand and the mechanism for doing that, it
is not too hard to work across organizations.
For the technical leaders, I think that the primary thing is that
the person have a good command of the technical knowledge and the
ability to communicate that knowledge to the people he's working
with. Obviously, the technical leader may need some of the
management skills as well. He can't be just technically
brilliant and have no people skills.
The process I would have in mind is getting the people who are
going to contribute to a product, whether it's designing, selling
or whatever, to write down, understand, and then write down again
what their goals and strengths are. What's the product you're
trying to build? How long will it take to do it? What is it that
will make that product successful? If it's to be a leadership
product, why is it that it's going to be overwhelmingly better than
anything else? If it's a beat-the-competition product, a clear
picture of the competition is needed to build something that's
adequate and will compete sort of on an even basis, even though it
may not dominate the competition.
I think the team leaders have to be emotionally tied to their
products.
I feel that people who work on my projects are contracting with
me to do a certain job by a certain date. They set the schedule
and I help them. But, once they set that schedule, that's what
III. PROCESS 26
I'm going to judge them by. That's another thing that we have
forgotten about, teams. We don't judge people by accomplishments
anymore. We tend to be a little easy on personal judgments and
reviews. I think we need to look at what people accomplish and
set some expectations for them. Then they know what they're
supposed to accomplish and to expect judgment on the
accomplishments. I think BJ stresses that, but I don't think we
stress it enough in smaller engineering groups.
If you use common sense and make a judgment, I'll trust that you
did the right thing.
It's my responsibility to make sure they're not setting
themselves up for failure.
I like to think of myself as a model, but then again, I don't
chastise them or judge them if they don't think the way I do. I
think that's important.
You try to let people decide for themselves that it's the right
thing. I try not to tell anybody. People always feel better
about something they have arrived at by themselves.
I think I'm very good at running projects. I have vision.
I believe managers should view their role in life as doing
everything possible to make it easier for their people to do their
job. It's not that the people are there to help the manager do his
job, because they're not. If we take the manager away, nothing
would happen. They would still be there, would still work, and
still get things done right. If you take the people away, you
leave the manager. All we have is the manager, and what can he do?
A good manager is a leader.
You've got to find a way to appeal to the emotion, the religion,
the ego, or the drive and capture it without really telling them.
What you tell them is that we are going this way. Then you head
that way, and don't even look back to see if they are coming,
because you know they are. That's a leader. A leader can always
employ a manager, but it's not clear that a manager can employ a
leader.
One of the things I do, especially at one or three in the morning,
is think about a person whom I would like to see accomplish
something. What does that person really want and how can I give it
to him. How can I combine this engineering problem I have over here
with their talents and desires? They are two separate things, I'm
looking for a combination that works.
III. PROCESS 27
I don't give very many directions. One of the things I try very
hard to do is not give people the answer they can't ask for at all,
even though I think I know what the answer is. Provoke them to
think about it in a way different from the way they've already
thought about it. Inquire as to what it is they're thinking about,
and how it is they thought about it. Sometimes it can be real
quick.
TEAMS
If I'm telling an employee to do something stupid, then I expect to
hear about it immediately and in no uncertain terms. I want it to
be real clear if I'm telling him or her something incorrect.
I think you have a better chance of getting a successful project if
the team is assembled top down. If the team builds itself, I think
the team has to grow or evolve or something -- not be placed by
external forces. You need to start with a nucleus and grow it.
I think sometimes there is a tendency, both in Digital and
elsewhere, to emphasize the hero in what was actually a team
effort. The focus on the hero can be good to the extent of
personifying a set of values, but if the notion is given that one
person is the key to producing something that was, in fact, a large
team effort, I think that's bad for the culture.
The group is a very good group in the sense that everybody on it, I
think, feels affirmed by the group. They feel that they're
accomplishing significant things, and there's no particular feeling
that one of us must be the star and get all the credit. One of the
values that I hold very high on any project is that the project
reach agreement, generally by some kind of consensus, on what the
group standards are going to be. Once that agreement has been
reached, everyone must conform to it.
The team that I am in today is just like the team I was in when I
started. It's a small team. A team of people that I hope would
all say they knew exactly what the product is that they are
building and know exactly what their part of that product is.
You can keep track of what everybody is doing if you have a team of
twelve or less people. You can't if you have a team of hundreds.
I think the successful teams are a combination of two kinds of
people. You have some people who really understand what they're
doing and are proven winners, and you have another group of people
who are real hard workers.
III. PROCESS 28
It's important not to set up a cast system in the team. It is
important that the technical writers, product managers, secretarial
people, librarian, and junior people, if you will, all feel that
they're peers on an equal basis. There's one project leader,
there's one administrative leader. Everybody else is equal and has
an equal contribution to the product. It's critically important to
make sure that your technical writers don't feel that they're
second-class citizens and so on down the line.
If the system doesn't work, it's broken. I get upset because the
system is broken not because the person screwed up. I have a right
to yell and throw things too. I've never met anybody who's done
something bad intentionally.
The reason the team I was on failed was because we tried to do too
much.
We try to hire people who we think will fit into to the group. We
try to hire people who are aggressive, who will be able to stand
up and defend their ideas. We try to hire people who are
ambitious. We don't want to necessarily hire people whose goal in
life is to aspire to management, because, there's no future for
them here because there isn't hardly any management.
It's more like a family. No rules means that you can do anything
you want to do that is socially acceptable. But your responsibility
is to do your job. That's your first responsibility.
Our management structure is as flat as we can get it, and we're
going to stay with that management structure until it absolutely
just breaks, and it's not broken yet.
There is a cast system, but the cast system is formed from
technical excellence. It's formed by experience and what you've
achieved, so it's not one that's formally placed. It's just
there from the achievements the people have.
CONFLICT
Person A thinks this is the way it ought to be done and person B
thinks that's the way it ought to be done. My process tended to
be,...you and you sit down and either tell me how it is you've
worked out a solution or I will tell you a solution that will
work that neither of you may like.
III. PROCESS 29
CUSTOMER
I don't feel as closely in touch as I would like to be.
A Digital customer is someone who considers quality to be a feature
more than some of our competitors, who consider that "it does more for
you to be a feature, even though it doesn't do it hte same way every
time". There is a different person who comes to Digital.
It used to be that when a machine came out, we'd go out and give
marketing presentations, talk to the customers, deal with real
people, and sometimes learn things from them. Over the years, we
seem to have been doing less and less of that. And we're getting
more of our input from various marketing groups.
I go to see customers all the time. It's our collective
responsibility to make sure that we're doing the right product
for the customer.
I really like to hear what customers say is good, and I also like
to hear what their complaints are.
But I like to talk to customers, because I think we can solve
their problems. For instance, Thursday, we had a customer who
just wanted to have his hand held. He sent us a list of
questions he wanted answered. All he had to do, really, is read
the book, but we're going to give him half a day just to hold his
hand because it's the right thing to do.
I think the people we're dealing with today are just like the
people we were dealing with in 1975. I think we're still selling
to customers who are exactly the same. Anyway, all this talk
about expanding our market isn't true. We've just found more
people who are Digital customers over the years.
Well, the engineers here have done a tour of duty and talked to
customers, to observe what happens out there and also to do some
teaching, basically, to the folks on the front line, what it is
we've just done to them and what it is they're gonna get calls
about. We also send people to Europe, Canada, Australia, and
Brazil. Sometimes, if we're having trouble figuring out the
customer's problem, we'll just give him a call and ask him.
We have a project manager who goes out and talks with customers.
The customer base seems to be less technical then it used to be.
Therefore, we tend to design things that are simple to put together
and need less fiddling with. To me, that doesn't seem like a
fundamental issue -- it's still a computer and still does most of
the same things but, we make some trade-offs a little bit more than
we used to.
III. PROCESS 30
DIGITAL MECHANISMS
Digital is obviously kind of a loose and open environment. You
see all kinds of mail as it gets forwarded thirdhand, or things
that are argued about in Notes files, and so on. I don't think
there is reason for anybody who is an individual contributor and
whose interested in what's going on to feel they're totally in
the dark.
HOW TO GET A PRODUCT STARTED
If you've got a good enough idea, it's got to be a good idea. If
it's in the strategy, or something that fits into the strategy,
then it's easier to sell than something that doesn't fit. But if
you came up with an idea that you could show had real potential,
as far as money or return on investment, the idea should be
explored, unless it was something we didn't want to get into.
III. PROCESS 31
IV. COMMENTS
COMPETITION
Actually, we have eleven competitors. One through seven is IBM.
Number eight is either Japan, all of it, or AT&T. Number nine is
the other of those two. Number ten is everybody else from Apollo
to Data General -- all the rest.
And who is number eleven? Digital
THE INDUSTRY IN GENERAL
The shakeout is always coming and it is always here.
I think it's customary at Digital to pick on marketing.
TRUST
I think that there's trust in Digital among people who have
learned that they can trust somebody else.
I think people have their personal networks of people they trust
and, otheer than that, I wouldn't trust anybody. Trust in this
sense would be something like trusting them to meet their
commitments.
IV. COMMENTS 32
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A STUDY IN CORPORATE CULTURES
DIGITAL EQUIPMENT COMPANY
THE MYTH:
A CULTURAL OPERATING MANUAL
BY
REESA E. ABRAMS
STEPHAN P. HEISER
NOVEMBER 1984
REVISED FEBRUARY 1988
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
THE CULTURE
ASSUMPTIONS
VALUES
EXPRESSIONS
THE DIGITAL DANCE
PERSONAL ISSUES
VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DIGITAL
WHERE THE CREATIVE ENERGY FLOWS
DILEMMAS
RESOURCES
WHAT IF YOUR CULTURAL EXPERIENCE DOES NOT MATCH THIS
DESCRIPTION AND YOU WISH IT WOULD
WHO CAN INITIATE CHANGE IF IT IS NEEDED
WHO CAN PROPOSE NEW PRODUCTS OR SERVICES
MESSAGES TO DIGITAL EMPLOYEES FROM DIGITAL HEROES
TOMORROW
OBSERVATIONS ABOUT DIGITAL'S FUTURE, CULTURE, AND CHALLENGES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INTRODUCTION
I have been exposed to the culture in many ways. I have worked
as an employee. I have read official documents and memos,
newsletters, and other people's opinions. While I have always
worked in Engineering, I have made an effort to talk to employees
and customers in all areas of the company to broaden my view.
What I have tried to produce is something that can be used over a
period of time by all employees to help them work their way
through the culture. I expect that some of the material in this
work will also provide new meanings to the reader as perspective
changes through the course of a career.
My goal is to provide as much INFORMATION to the employee as
possible about how to be successful in the Digital culture so
informed decisions can be made. This will bring more personal
success with less frustration thereby profiting the company
through the freeing of energy and time spent worrying about the
culture and how to work it. Having the rules of the culture is
only one step in the secret to success. Making the rules work for
you to the company's advantage is the key.
I cannot say that I have followed all the messages I am
presenting here. I have been aware of the messages and my
awareness of the culture has made my way within Digital easier.
I hope it helps you.
THE CULTURE
ASSUMPTIONS
The following list are some of the assumptions that support the
culture. Remembering these can often make clear why Digital does
business a certain way. These are not necessarily all the
assumptions about the company. They are limited to beliefs about
people, relationships, and business at the operating level. They
were adapted from the works of Scorzoni, Dyer, and Schein.
WE ARE ALL ONE FAMILY
Digital is a company where appropriate sub-cultural differences
are encouraged, failure among members is tolerated to some
extent, promotions are from within the company, people are
encouraged to express their feelings and to give candid feedback
when approached, all doors are open, informality and working
through people (instead of memos) is encouraged, verbal
commitments are to be kept.
PEOPLE ARE CREATIVE, HARD WORKING, SELF-GOVERNING, AND CAN LEARN
People are encouraged to learn from experience, do-it-yourself
career, learn by the sink or swim method with some support, be a
self starter, create a job that is greater than a formal job
description, push at the system from your position (bottom-up),
respect the differences of others, find a way to enjoy work, take
ownership, do the right thing.
THE TRUTH & QUALITY COME FROM MULTIPLE VIEWPOINTS, FREE ENTERPRISE
People are all working at Digital to help the company produce good
products and services and thus make money for the company.
Individuals in the process of governing themselves have different
ideas about how to proceed. Some people view this as conflict.
Indeed there is some conflict. The basic idea is that we are all
in this business to win, that requires buy-in from key areas,
selling ideas to get support, confronting ideas that are not
considered good for the final outcome, taking risks, tolerating
mistakes (but not big ones), and accepting that this is a political
world. Top management feels that they are not smart enough to know
every detail. Top management is able to sort out ideas.
SURVIVAL EQUALS RESPONSIVENESS TO CHANGING ENVIRONMENT
Working at Digital is fast paced, there are constant
re-organizations, the matrix is the basis of management, things
need to happen if you are to succeed, you will be judged by the
results you obtain, you are expected to build and work within
teams, proposals are to be clear and brief, there are turf issues
to be worked through the management layers, to get success you
have to solve cross-functional problems and time to market
problems as well as produce.
VALUES
Some Digital values are:
DO THE RIGHT THING
This term is a catch-all at Digital. It means to decide what is
right for the corporation, the organization you are working in,
and for yourself -- to commit to that right thing and to do it.
It is possibly the most common phrase used in the corporation.
INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM
People have the freedom to be themselves and to find out the best
way of getting their work done. Sometimes a person's individual
freedom conflicts with another's or an organization's needs.
These are the places where negotiations take place. Individual
freedom implies individuals taking responsibility for themselves.
ENTREPRENEURS
This is the basic building block of the culture. The individual
is an entrepreneur in a free enterprise system. Digital uses
individual strengths for the good of the company by running many
small businesses producing specific products. It is these
products which Digital markets as single business to a free
enterprise system, the world marketplace.
RISK-TAKING
Individuals take risks to try out new ideas or to find solutions
to a problem they see. There are ways to minimize risk or to
ensure a greater degree of success. Once a commitment is made to
risk there are ways to minimize failure.
HONESTY
A person's word is all it takes to make a commitment for work in
this company. A person's word is taken seriously. You are
assumed to be honest until you prove otherwise. This value is a
hiring criteria.
QUALITY
Digital has always believed that the quality of its products have
been its great strength. There are customer audits which
substantiate this. Belief in quality is a hiring criteria.
PROFIT
Digital is in the business of making money. It has always made
money. Profit leads to growth but growth is not a value in
itself. Profit leads to a variety of interesting jobs. Profit
leads to company security and success.
PERSONAL EXCELLENCE
Excellent work is what makes heroes. It is valued in people, in
products, and in services. People want to produce excellent work
and be praised by their peers for it.
EXPRESSIONS
The following is a list of terms used at Digital. They are a
clue to the nature of the way the culture works and the skills
needed to operate within it. I assume that you already know the
dictionary definition so I will provide the Digital viewpoint.
APPRENTICESHIP
An informal process that occurs at all stages of people's careers
when they try to do something new. They are encouraged to walk
around and see what others are doing and what needs to be done.
They develop relationships with people they contact and learn
from them. Eventually they find how they can contribute. By this
time they should have developed enough personal relationships to
help if they get stuck. Everyone is expected to contribute to
that process. People will even tell you who is and is not helpful.
Management jobs use the same process. This is the way planning,
budgeting, and other administrative information is passed on. The
development of the necessary political skills to survive is a
part of this process.
You have succeeded in your apprenticeship when you usually get
what you want. You have failed in your apprenticeship if you
find that people start ignoring you, resources get harder and
harder to obtain, and no one likes your ideas. Most people fall
somewhere in the middle of the continuum.
BEAT-UP
A person gets beat-up when they are overpowered by the person
with whom they are interacting. It is not a pleasant experience.
BUY-IN
The process of talking with interested parties to gather support
for a project. When a party expresses interest in the job,
buy-in can be achieved. Buy-in can be more powerful if the
interested party provides 'real' support by being a part of a
committee, providing resources or working difficult political
situations. Sometimes buy-in requires horse-trading. Once buy-in
is acheived periodic check-in with the interested party should be
done to insure continued support.
BURNOUT
A person is considered burned out when they are unable to
contribute. Working too hard, worrying too much, stress,
frustration, etc. cause burnout. Many times the manifestations are
serious to the person involved. This person might also be called
one of the 'walking- wounded'. Burnout will damage a personal
reputation as people want to be sure they can rely on an individual.
COALITION
An alliance of a group of people who are motivated with the same
objective.
COMMITTEES
Committees support a person in the performance of their task -
they consist of interest parties from any organization. A
committee is made up by invitation of the person who is
responsible for the work. There is a belief that sitting on the
right committee is important for buy-in and horsetrading in
future projects as well as the one that is the subject of the
committee. The work done by a committee can be of many kinds;
brainstorming new ideas for a product, a dry run of a
presentation, the writing of a document, testing out a new idea,
designing the requirements of a product, etc. There is a belief
that your product is as good as the committee you pick or who
will sit on your committee. Committees only exist as long as
they are needed and then they are disbanded. Other corporations
would call this a task force.
COST CENTER
Where your budgetted funds reside to support tasks to be done.
CUSTOMER BASE
Your customer base can mean two things. First there is the
external customer base for a given product or service. There
are, however, some people, like the internal technical
consultants, who maintain an internal customer base for their
consulting relationships.
DEC
A slang name of the company.
'digital'
Official slang name of the company.
DO-IT-YOURSELF CAREER
An employee at Digital is expected to make their own career plans
and to pursue them. The company is not responsible for creating
your career path for you. Careers are made by having your ticket
stamped. A service manager once told me that he and Ken Olsen had
one basic thing in common, they both had gone as far in the
company as they wanted to go and were happy with the job they
each had.
DOTTED-LINE
In matrix management the dotted-line is an expression for
defining all the indirect people an individual reports to in the
process of doing their job. The dotted-line reports are often
people who require buy-in because they have some related
responsibility to the product being developed.
DOWNLOADING
Delegating.
EMPIRE
See turf.
FALLING INTO THE VALLEY
Feeling bad.
FIRST NAME
Digital is an informal company. People are referred to by their
first name. Informality is a support of self-direction. In
Digital, people are more equal than in most companies.
FIT
This is the term used to describe how well a person and a task or
organization match skills. A good fit is when a person is happy
in their organization and likes their task and produces.
GROUP
The primary operating unit the people are formed in to get the
basics of administration accomplished. This is ususally the
center of secretarial support, budget, paychecks, and
appraisals. This is a person's primary committee. Most groups
perform one basic function.
HORSE-TRADING
When someone needs a resource or requires buy-in they may strike
a deal with a person who they think is important to their project
in terms of support or to obtain resources. Horse-trading means
providing resources or support to someone in exchange for
something (resources or support) that is needed for the success
of the project. For example, you may provide a person to consult
to a group in exchange for that group adding a feature to their
project required to interface with your product.
INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTOR
An individual contributor is a person who uses only their skills
to produce for the good of the system.
LATERAL
A horizontal job transfer.
LOSING
Being unsuccessful, failure.
LOW BADGE NUMBERS
Badge numbers are assigned upon the day of employment in
ascending sequential order. Those people with low badge numbers
have been around for a long time and are given some respect for
survival and accumulated knowledge.
MATRIX
Digital is a matrix organization. This matrix organization is
supported by committees and networking. An individual may find
that they report to one person for one thing and to another for
another product. Managing ambiguity is often necessary when
dealing with more than one manager.
MILL
Corporate headquarters, an old woolen mill in Maynard,
Massachusetts.
NETWORKING
A person creates individual support networks both in person and
over the established automated networks for a variety of reasons.
They are a way that gossip is spread throughout the company. They
provide personal friendship support. They provide political
safety and support. They are the way that understanding of the
culture is spread. Networks are also a way to find out who
requires buy-in on your project and to keep political
associations current.
NOP
This term actually means no operation. It is used to refer to
people or teams who are perceived as not producing as well as
they could or who are not considered to be producing a product
that is for the good of the company.
OPEN-DOOR
The door of anyone in this company is open to anyone who wants to
discuss anything about the company or its products. The key to
using the open-door is in making sure that you need the person
behind the door and that they will need to hear what you are
discussing.
ORGANIZATION
Organizations are made up of groups. This is the way one refers
to generic areas of the company; ex., sales organization,
marketing organization , engineering organization.
ORIGINAL EQUIPMENT MANUFACTURER (OEM)
OEMs take the products that Digital produces and make them a part
of their own system and sell it to a customer. Sometimes these
OEM systems are in competition with Digital systems. That is
accepted by the company. OEMs were the first major customer base
Digital had and still comprise a large customer base.
OUTPLACEMENT
When you find that your job has disappeared seemingly overnight
and you have to find a new one immediately. This is usually done
to someone who has a bad reputation within a group. Sometimes
the person finds that they have been given to another group
without their consent.
OWNERSHIP
You own the piece of work for which you are responsible. This
applies to every job, no matter how small. It is your
responsibility to decide how to get the information you need and how
to satisfy your objectives and produce. You are also responsible
for letting those who depend upon your work know in reasonable time
what problems you encounter and how they can be solved. There is a
lot of latitude given (individual freedom) to you to support you in
your responsibility. You own your own success or failure. A
Digital manager once said, "If you learn nothing else at this
company, learn that you can do a competent job. No one does that for
you. No one can keep you from doing your job."
OVERLOAD
When a person takes on too much responsibility. Continuing in this
state for long will bring burnout. One way out of this state is
downloading. Sometimes perspective is all that is needed to
redefine the load.
PERSONAL REPUTATION
In Digital your personal reputation opens the doors you need to
obtain the resources and support you need to accomplish your task.
Your personal reputation can get bad marks when you are associated
with a project that failed or when you burn out. Some other causes
of a bad reputation are lack of honesty, not being supportive, only
being a taker, failure to produce, and being negative. Some causes
of a good reputation are consistently producing, quality, honesty,
being supportive, good people skills, and reliability. It is a good
idea to make sure that you produce something tangible often to
assure that your personal reputation is kept clean.
PRE-SELL
Getting support for an important idea through informal meetings
before the formal presentation of the idea to assure it will be
well received and that all the problems have been worked out.
This is a way of reducing risk.
PROMOTION
A vertical job transfer.
PROPOSAL
The way to get your ideas presented to someone for buy-in. These
can be formal or informal depending upon the situation. They are
expected to be simple and clear.
PUSH BACK
When a person is presenting their ideas and another person reacts
with their response, the reacting person is pushing back.
Another meaning is when an idea is presented to a superior and
given no support, the proposer might push back by going around
the superior using the open door to continue selling the plan
hoping to get support at a higher level. Pushing back means to
get a communication and to react to it through action.
PUSH/PULL
A term used to describe the interactions which take place between
people at Digital in the process of exchanging ideas about the work.
RESPONSIBILITY
Individuals at Digital are responsible for their own actions and
for the production of the work they committed to do. See
ownership.
RIDING THE WAVE
At Digital when you do something that is perceived by people as
successful they will approach you for your support of their work or
ideas. This could come in the form of an offer to work in their
group. Often it comes in the form of internal consultation,
networking, or committee requests. Since individuals are
responsible for deciding how they will spend their time, you will be
encouraged to support some of these requests to expand your sphere
of influence. As you are more successful and well known you get
more and more requests. Hence the term riding the wave. The secret
to riding the wave is to find a way to say no gracefully when you
need to and to take the opportunities that will further your ends as
well as the company's. The volume can be overwhelming. This is one
of the causes of burnout. It is a good idea to manage this area
closely.
RISK-TAKING
There are two kinds of risk in this company. First is the risk
that individuals take when they see something that they want to
work on and they signup to work on it. If their work is
successful, then they may be given more and more resources and
the risk becomes greater. There are people now below them who are
betting you will be successful and they with you. Also as you
grow the stake that the company places in your work is greater so
there is risk involved there. There are ways to minimize risk.
You can use buy-in to assure that there is a large base
supporting you. You can use your networks for review to assure
that what you are producing is going to be well received. Some
people perceive a situation as risky where others do not. Risk
seems to be a state of mind. As one gets higher up the ladder the
risks are greater. Overload may be an important factor to
consider.
SAFETY-NET
This is a concept that if you make a mistake or find yourself in
a job that is a bad fit that you will be taken care of. This net
is real. I have seen it used to support an employee who burned
out and one who made a bad political mistake. I have also seen
it work to get someone out of a bad job fit. People in one's
network seem to be the basic element of the safety net. But it
fans out from there into the secondary relationships of the
networks of the people in the person's primary network.
SELF-DIRECTION
Digital believes that people should propose what they are going
to produce and have the responsibility for seeing that the
product is produced. The person is given quite a lot of latitude
in the process of production of the product -- from getting the
resources, obtaining buy-in, developing the correct organization,
and organizational structure to support the product, etc. This
is self-direction.
SELLING
The primary activity an employee is engaged in when they are
trying to get buy-in.
SIGN-UP
This is the process a person goes through individually when they
commit to a project and give more than the standard work energy
to it. Sign-up means that they are committed to their work
emotionally and and will work that extra bit to make their
contribution the right thing. Managers try to get sign-up from
their people because they believe it makes the final outcome more
successful with higher quality.
SINK OR SWIM SURVIVAL
A new employee is left to their own devices often for months and
is expected to sink or swim, i.e., find something that is the
right thing to do. It is considered a compliment in some areas
of the company if your boss leaves you alone. It may mean you
are swimming fine and are being left to your own devices.
SLOT
Job position, used when there is an opening that needs to be filled.
SOLID LINE
The manager to whom you report directly and the people who report
directly to you. This is usually your group.
SPACE
To give individuals the necessary freedom and support to work out
their own problems their own way.
SPEAR THROWING
Attacking the ideas of another employee through criticism or
negative comments made behind their back.
STOCK OPTION
The ultimate reward for success. These are unpublished and much
sought after. They are considered to be a good indicator of an
individual's value to the corporation over time. Discussion of
who gets what is a taboo subject. Receiving an option for the
first time can be seen as a sign of acceptance of the value of
the individual's worth.
TASK FORCES
See committees.
TEAM CONTRIBUTOR/MEMBER
A person who works with others to produce a product. Cooperation
and good people skills are required as part of the job to keep the
team producing quality products in a timely manner for the company.
TICKET STAMPING
One way of building your personal reputation is to get your ticket
stamped. That means to work in a variety of areas to learn what
function they have to the company and to be able to speak
authoritatively about what their needs are so that you will reduce
the risk of producing a product or service that no one wants. Each
new area in which you work is worth one stamp on your ticket. The
actual ticket is mythological. It can be thought of as an internal
resume of your work at Digital. The value of a ticket varies with
the quality of the experience behind the stamps.
TIN CUPPING
Asking for funds to support your project.
TRANSITION
A state of employment when the employee has no formal job but to
look for another job within the company. The outgoing group
manager manager the employees in this state separately until a
new job is found. This often includes retraining.
TURF
A person's sphere of direct influence. This can be people,
resources or a technical area.
UNFUNDING
Your resources are taken away from you.
WALKING WOUNDED
This is an alternate term for burnout. It is used more often
when the reference is that the system is the cause of the burnout
rather that the individual.
WINDOW-IN-THE-DOOR POLICY
There is a myth that a couple was found engaging in activities
that are frowned upon by the corporation behind closed doors,
thus there is now a policy that all doors will have windows.
WINNING
Being successful.
WOODS MEETINGS
This is the term for meetings held off site so a group of people
can discuss an important issue without being disturbed. They are
not necessarily held in the woods.
WORKING AT HOME
Many employees have some equipment in their home so they can work
at home when they need to. Reasons for working at home include:
needing a quiet place to be uninterrupted, the ability to work at
night without having to go to a facility, the ability to continue
contributing when you are unable to come to work for some reason,
personal preference, trying out a system as if you are a customer.
WORKING THE SYSTEM
A person works the Digital system when they engage in trying to
get their idea sold. It is especially interesting is when
customers work the system better than the employees.
THE DIGITAL DANCE
-----------------
Every person within Digital can be thought of as a customer to
everyone else. Every person within Digital can thought of as an
entrepreneur to everyone else selling their product or service to
everyone else.
Employees trade technical skills and form teams, hence the terms,
buy-in, tin-cupping, horse-trading, etc. Outside customers are a
part of the system and they have their own networks, getting the
employees to sign-up to work their issues. The reverse is also
true. Employees get customers to sign-up to work issues.
PERSONAL ISSUES
VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DIGITAL
I have seen, experienced, and heard many references to the scenario
called the 'valley of the shadow of Digital'. Figure 1 provides an
illustration of this cultural myth. This experience seems to happen
not just to new hires, but to anyone who tries out a new idea.
The scenario works as follows:
Individuals enter at point A. They have just been hired into a
group or are going to try out a new task. They receive a lot of
encouragement. This is called the 'walk on water' point of entry.
For a while they vacillate in area AB while learning the
environment, deciding exactly what they will do and what they will
propose first. Finally they reach point B, 'decision'. They have
decided what they will do and have presented a proposal.
Feedback is given to the employee. Not all the feedback is
positive. The employee may even be beat-up.
Some people did the right homework before their proposal and do
not fare too badly. They go on, selecting the feedback that is
relevant to them and proceed to begin their task without falling
into the valley.
For others, however, the experience was not so good. They may have
been inexperienced in the Digital system and made a proposal that
was not well received. Others may have made their presentation too
soon or did not do the right homework. This can happen easily in a
do-it-yourself atmosphere. For whatever reason, the meeting was
not fun and the employee falls into 'the valley', point C.
Time passses. Perspective is gained. The employee is beginning to
think about what they could have done to avoid making the same
mistakes. Point D, 'initial recovery', is gained. The employee
does not have to do much to get to this point. Just the passage of
time will cause some better feelings. Ususally, other employees
will console the injured person telling their own experiences which
serve to let the employee know they are not alone.
What is crucial at this time are the decisions that the employee is
making about the company and their role in the future. Some people
do not risk again. Some people choose to update their resume and
leave the company, point F. The attrition rate is low. Most people
get to point E, 'full recovery', and find better ways to interact
with the system, a wiser employee.
I personally have experienced the valley. I am aware of how my
assumptions about business caused me to misread the Digital system. I
have since done more homework about buy-in and other forms of support
within the Digital culture. This has helped me avoid extreme
negative experiences. All negative experiences do not go away.
However, they can be tempered with wisdom making recovery easier.
FIGURE 1
VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEC
,-----, ,-----, / ,-----,
| | | | / | |
-------| A |~~~~~~~~~| B |/_____ | E |
| | | |\ | |
`-----' `-----' \ `-----'
\ \ /
\ /
\ /
\ /
\ /
\ /
\ /
\ /
\ /
\ ,-----,
\ | |
\ /| D |
\ / | |
\,-----, / `-----'
| | / \
| C |/ \
| | \
`-----' \
\
\
\
\
\
\
\
\
A: WALK ON WATER \
,-----,
B: DECISION TO RISK | |
| F |
C: VALLEY | |
`-----'
D: RECOVERY
E: FULL RECOVERY
F: ATTRITION
WHERE THE CREATIVE ENERGY FLOWS
In looking at the Digital culture I found recurring patterns of
effective and ineffective behavior. Describing each pattern by
stating its extremes made each one clear. The various patterns
interract with each other.
The flow of energy and interactions are constantly changing. Most
people show responses from both sides of the list -- they fall
somewhere in the middle ranges. The secret to success is to keep
most of your energy positive and directed toward whatever it takes
to produce quality work. I have also found that I can use my peaks
and valleys to direct myself to improved performance within the
culture.
It is important to understand that these are not necessarily the
energy patterns that a person would experience in interacting with
another culture.
PRODUCTIVE RESPONSES NON-PRODUCTIVE RESPONSES
-------------------- ------------------------
Produces good quality work May or may not produce with
questionable quality
Teamwork - working to positive Conflict - work faltering
ends
Supporting people through Beating up people
constructive criticism
Gets paid to play and call it work Works for a living
Acceptance of differences - Judgment of differences-
Individuals doing what they My way is the only way
need to succeed
Being responsible - do the right Being a victim -"not knowing
thing what is the right thing"
Takes care of self Something always seems to
wrong with self
PRODUCTIVE RESPONSES NON-PRODUCTIVE RESPONSES
-------------------- ------------------------
Takes initiative Doesn't act - might consume
the time of others negatively
Development of systems of Development of products that
integrated quality products are not compatible with
systems
Development of systems that Development of systems that
are appropriate to the customer are inappropriate to the
base customer base
Chooses which waves to ride and Rides all (burnout) or no
how far waves (NOP)
Lets safety net keep valleys Falls deep into valleys - keeps
shallow - learns from mistakes making the same mistakes
Can work the matrix - manages Gets stuck in contradictions
ambiguity among managers and peers
DILEMMAS
The following dilemmas are real to an employee within Digital.
These dilemmas are complicated by the fact that old responses
from other experiences in more structured environments (work,
school, etc.) may not be appropriate here. There are no right
answers. These dilemmas do occur. Expect to deal with them.
You see a task you would like to do. You have the time. How do
you go about getting the assignment?
You have been working very long hours for some time, and yet feel
you are only able to keep you head above water. You know you
cannot carry on like this for much longer. What do you do?
You feel strongly that some process or philosophy in your group
is not appropriate. Your supervisor and manager disagree with
you. What do you do?
You are given a task but no resources or authority to handle work
as you see it. How do you succeed?
You have an idea but no one listens to you. You're convinced it
is good. What do you do?
You see a task you would like to do. You are working to the max
now. You do not like what you are doing as much as the other
task. What do you do?
You are working on your task and find a problem in as associated
area. How do you deal with your knowledge?
You do not believe in the assignment you are given. You think it
is basically wrong. You are told it is important. How do you
handle this?
You've been on the job a few weeks and still do not know what you
are supposed to do. Punting has gotten you nowhere. You are
told to make a proposal. How do you get the information you need
to make it successful? How do you get the support you need to
get it accepted?
Your manager moves on to another job. You felt that many doors
were open to you as a result of this person's credibility. You
feel that now the success of your work may be in jeopardy. How
do you go about reopening the doors you require to keep your task
moving in a positive direction?
There's been a reorganization again. How do you go about finding
out what will mean to you in your task?
RESOURCES
---------
WHAT IF YOUR CULTURAL EXPERIENCE
DOES NOT MATCH THIS DESCRIPTION
AND YOU WISH IT WOULD?
The following advice has been given to me by a number of Digital
managers. There are many subcultures within Digital. The
experience a person has with one may not be the same in another
part of the company. If you are feeling that you have missed the
essence of the cultural advantages to your creativity in your
group then you should begin by asking yourself the following
questions:
What would you like to have that you do not have now?
Can it come from the area where you currently work?
What do your peers think?
What do your managers think?
What's the roadblock?
Is it a 'fit' problem?
What actions can you be responsible for to make the changes
you desire?
Interacting with the environment is the best way to gain
knowledge on how to make it work for you. Give it a try.
WHO CAN INITIATE CHANGE IF IT IS NEEDED?
You can.
WHO CAN PROPOSE NEW PRODUCTS, PROCESSES, OR SERVICES?
You can.
MESSAGES TO DIGITAL EMPLOYEES
FROM DIGITAL HEROES
In November, 1981 a memo called 'talking values' was prepared
from some published speeches and interviews of early architects.
It gives a clear description of what is valued in a Digital
employee. This section contains exerpts from this paper.
"A DEC type is someone who is innovative, somebody who is
enthusiastic, someone who is willing to work here, somebody who
isn't hung up on structure, somebody who has absolutely no
concern with educational background."
"We demand an awful lot of our people and they demand an awful
lot of themselves."
"A core of the environment is individual commitment to whatever
you are doing and a lot of integrity to achieve a very high level
of expectations for yourself."
"We are all learning, we are all going to make mistakes and the
only important thing is to know you made a mistake, know what you
did wrong so you can go on."
"He who plans executes. You propose a plan and when you fail,
you know you fail; but at least it was your plan and you don't
fail against somebody else's plan."
"You should always be selling your plans and programs as opposed
to saying: Do it! People should always be allowed to ask why."
"We want people to feel free to go and openly challenge a
decision without feeling that they will be fired."
"Hassle is the price of an organizational structure as we have
it. For those people who don't like it, it's very frustrating.
It depends where you want your frustration: upfront where you
get people to agree with you, so that you have support, or later
because you've got so many people upset with you."
"If you wrap those 3 or 4 things together (openness, honesty,
success, fairness) you can sum it up in one word and it is
caring. Caring about your job. Caring about the people that
work for you. Caring about yourself."
TOMORROW
OBSERVATIONS ABOUT DIGITAL'S FUTURE, CULTURE, AND CHALLENGES
This section includes comments from employees who see a vision of
Digital as it grows and evolves into its second 30 years.
"Digital's work force has been changing rapidly due to the
company's continuing growth and evolving business and shifts in
society as a whole. These changes call for increased emphasis on
our traditional values, greater flexibility in the ways we
attract and retain employees, and more management focus on
international, cross-cultural and cross-organizational issues."
"Digital's business is becoming more service-oriented. At one
time a large segment of Digital's employee population consisted
of hourly employees in manufacturing. Now, the manufacturing
business is much less labor-intensive, and its service business
is expanding."
"Digital's business is becoming more international. Next year,
revenues from outside the U.S. may exceed U.S. revenues for the
first time in the company's history.... International concerns
will be more important not just to senior managers, but to middle
managers as well."
"In the company's first 30 years. only 1000 people retired. It
may take less than five years to reach 2000 retirees."
"We have gone from being a matrix organization to a networking/
networked organization."
"The lines between our employees, suppliers, and customers are
blurring. The lines between regular and temporary employees and
contractors/consultants are blurring. The distinctions between
technologies are blurring, as are those between workspaces:
office, conference room, classroom are becoming metamorphic, and
thus interchangeable."
"Information is no longer hoarded, it is shared. Knowledge is not
exclusive, it is inclusive. Expertise is not concentrated, it is
dispersed."
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The following bibliography is a selection of the many articles
written about the Digital culture which may be of interest to
someone wanting to pursue the subject further.
Abrams, Reesa, "A Study in Corporate Cultures, Digital Equipment
Comany, The Myth: The Philosophy", Digital Equipment Company
October 84
A description of the messages that the philosophy gives to
employees.
Abrams, Reesa, "A Study in Corporate Cultures, Digital Equipment
Corporation, The Reality: Herospeak", Digital Equipment Company
September 1985, Revised February 1988
A summary of quotes about the Digital culture from
successful heroes.
Belle Isle, David, DEC Culture, Videotape, HF5386.d4, 1977
Discusses the problems new employees have upon entering the
company. Gives information about the culture and what an
employee can do to survive.
Brown, Donald H., Digital Equipment Corporation, Tactics and
Strategies, The Gartner Group, Second Printing August 1981
Gives a comprehensive description of the matrix and how it
operates. Additionally, it gives a comprehensive view of
the company, where it came from and where it is going.
Cassidy, Frank, Interoffice Memo on Manufacturing Culture,
Digital Equipment Corporation, August 18, 1983
Gives the results of a values poll among the various levels
of personnel within manufacturing.
DECWORLD, September 1982, Volume 6, Number 4
Twenty-fifth anniversary issue filled with memorabilia.
Dyer, W. Gibb, "Culture in Organizations: A Case Study and
Analysis", Sloan School of Management, MIT, 1982, unpublished
thesis
Depth background work in defining the assumptions of the
culture used by others, (Scorzoni, Abrams, Schein)
Epstein, Karen A., "Socialization Practices and Their
Consequences: The Case of an Innovative Organization",MIT Sloan
School Of Management, 2/11/83
Characterizes the socialization process which occurs in
Digital acccording to 7 socialization criteria.
Geist, John, "Talking Values", Digital Equipment Company, 1981
A summary of quotes from early architects about the company
organized into topics.
Glick, L. J., Kennedy, P. A., Scorzoni, John, "Digital
Philosophy", A White Paper, Digital Equipment Corporation, Draft,
5/82
Presents the basic assumptions, values, and general
expectations of employees and managers. This is a myth paper.
Gumpert, David, "Rags to Riches", The Wall Street Journal, 7/18/78
Gives the secrets to Digital's success.
Holland, Kathee, Knowing Your Competition in Manufacturing, 2nd
Edition, Digital Equipment Company, 1982
Gives description of Digital and competition from the
manufacturing perspective.
Johnson, Bill, Speech on Digital Culture, 7/22/83
This is one of a few speeches he has given on this subject.
It gives his views of the culture and how it works.
Kanter, Rosabeth Moss, The Changemasters, Simon and Schuster, 1983
'Chipco' is Digital. This book is designed to encourage
companies to allow more employee freedom around risk taking.
Digital is used as a positive example.
King, Heidi, Taylor, Mary,"The Influence of Corporate Culture on
the Assessment of 'Fit' in Personnel Recruitment and Selection at
Computer Industry Group", Term Paper, Simmons Colege,
unpublished, July, 1984
Computer Industry Group is Digital. Gives a short
description of the culture. Shows the interviewing
tactics of personnel officers in picking new employees.
Kunda, Gideon, "Engineering Culture: Culture and Control in a
High-Tech Organization", MIT Doctoral Disseration, 1986
A study of how engineering works through its
cultural constructs.
Levering, Robert, Moskowitz, Milton and Katz, Michael, The 100
Best Companies to Work For In America, Addison Wesley, 1984
Lists Digital as an 'eden for engineers' and describes
the high morale of the company.
Marchilonas, Barbara A., Manager's Perceptions of Power in a High
Tech Corporation, Doctoral Dissertation, Harvard University,
June, 1983
An analysis of managerial perceived influence and power
at Digital.
Mgmt Memo, Digital Equipment Company, Office of the President,
Volume 2 Number 6, June 1983
State of the Company Issue. Synopsis of June 1983 State
of the Company meeting with speeches by management.
Mgmt Memo, Digital Equipment Company, Office of the President,
Volume 2, Number 11, November 1983
Ken written article telling about short-term problems
and long-term strengths.
Mgmt Memo, Digital Equipment Company, Office of the President,
Volume 7 Number 1, February 1988
Shows a vision of the future Digital as it is evolving
after 30 years of success.
McClellan, Stephen T., The Coming Computer Industry Shakeout,
Wiley 1984
Gives a good description of the corporations recent
problems and still lists us as number 2 after the shakeout.
Monosson, Sonny, Monosson on DEC, "A Demonding Matrix: Why is
Digital so Successful and So Confusing", April 1981
Discusses the matrix and how it works.
Monosson, Sonny, Monosson on DEC, "The Struggle for Simplicity in
the 'New DEC'", Issue 22, April 1983
Discusses the recent reorganization from an outsider's
perspective.
Northern Business Information Incorporated, DEC: A Strategic
Analysis, New York, December 1982
Gives an analysis of the strategies used to run Digital.
Of special interest are the strengths of the Digital matrix
(p30) and an analysis of DEC as a theory Y company (p32).
Olsen, Ken, "Ken Olsen Discusses the Corporate Philosophy",
videotape, EEE-16212-05, 1980
The corporate philosophy from the founder's perspective.
Olsen, Ken, "A Discussion with Ken Olsen", videotape, EJ90325-05,
1977
Ken discussing the company with engineering managers.
Gives some history, values, and his beliefs.
Olsen, Ken, "Digital Equipment, The First Twenty-five Years",
Speech delivered at Newcomen Society of North America, 9/21/82
The first 25 years from Ken's perspective.
Plant Managers Creed, Digital Equipment Company, 1976
Details responsibility of the individual.
Peters, Thomas J., Waterman, Robert H. Jr., In Search of
Excellence, Harper and Row, 1983
Discusses 8 characteristics of excellent organizations.
Digital is included with some cultural stories.
Schein, Edgar H., Organizational Culture, Jossey Bass, In Press,
October, 1984
Discusses the issues involved in studying organizational
culture. ACTION is Ditigal. Gives some interesting
insights to the way we do business from someone who has
watched us alot.
Scorzoni, John, "Addressing Culture in the Design and Start-up of
Digital Organizations", Digital Equipment Corporation Organization
and Employee Planning and Development, June, 1982
Gives a flow diagram of the actions by some successful
organizations at start-up during the 81-82 time period.
Sussman, Harris, Internal Corporate Memo, Digital Equipment
Corporation, Strategic Information Group, Corporate Personnel,
December, 1987
On the end of the thirtieth anniversary year of the
corporation this memo gives a view of Digital going
into the next decade of operations.
Wilkoff, Marcia Valeria, Organizational Culture: A Grounded
Theory Approach, Doctoral dissertation, University of
Pennsylvania, 1982
Gives a model for studying the Digital culture. Discusses
in-depth the consensus mechanisms which operate.
A STUDY IN CORPORATE CULTURES
DIGITAL EQUIPMENT CORPORATION
THE REALITY:
HEROSPEAK
A summary of what some Digital heroes have to say
about the culture.
The subject of this paper is Differentiation.
By
Reesa E. Abrams
Stephen Heiser
September 1985
Revised February 1988
@copyright 1985, DIGITAL EQUIPMENT CORPORATION
INTERNAL USE ONLY
Table of Contents
Introduction................................................1
I. Digital..................................................4
II. People.................................................11
III. Process...............................................21
IV. Comments...............................................27
Table of Contents iii
INTRODUCTION
The purpose of this series of papers is to show what the Digital
Culture is, has been, and is becoming in the world of the
employees who have been successful. This paper portrays six
successful engineers who emerged in the first twenty five years.
These six are preceded by myths about their accomplishments.
These are not the only six heroes of Engineering.
Heroes are very important to a culture. They provide important
information about what behavior is valued in the culture. Heroes
provide the models used by younger employees in deciding career
moves. Heroes show what is possible. Heroes become larger than
life. Every characteristic is something to be examined and
followed, especially if it gives validation to who you are and
provides you with the direction you are seeking.
There are a number of ways to study the heroes of a culture. The
way chosen was to give information about some working Engineers
in their own words. This gives the perspective of a successful
person. Rather than showing each person individually, we created
a composite of their perspectives. This hints at an accepted
Digital perspective. What is most interesting is which
perspectives were similar and which were not.
Some people may take exception to my use of the word "hero".
There is a maturity level in us all that is reached in our adult
life when we finally realize that we are the heroes of the next
generation. Our behavior is the model that will be followed.
Thus, each of us is responsible to those around us in some way,
not just for the Digital of today, but also for the Digital of
tomorrow. This is the way organizations evolve. Additionally,
in the life of an engineer, there is a difference between being
considered successful by our peers and finally considering
ourselves a success. What I noticed about the six people I
interviewed was that they had achieved the success as well as the
maturity level. This is what a hero is all about. Furthermore,
the six heroes in this paper have continued, long-term technical
success as well as the repect of the people across all levels of
the corporation.
I had to decide who to study. This study is being funded by Bill
Johnson, so I asked him to pick six people in Engineering for the
study.
INTRODUCTION 1
What is interesting is what they had in common. They were each
clear about their technical skills and accomplishments. They
each were quick to tell me how important teams were to building
successful products. Additionally, each knew clearly their own
strengths and weaknesses. They each told me that Digital is a
production-oriented company. You must produce and keep producing
to be continually successful. Each told me about the value of a
mentor or some management person who kept the path clear for them
to keep producing. I also heard from them how important it is to
them personally that Digital is an engineering-driven company.
Each of them in his own way put me through my paces to make sure
I was safe to talk with.
What is also interesting about these six people is their
differences. Their styles, for example, cover a broad range of
characteristics. Some work lots of hours and weekends, others a
regular week. Some like the intensity of New England and others
want to be left alone to produce. Some think process is
important, others think that getting the work out is more
important than rules. They disagreed on what quality is. Some
believe that it is customer-driven. Others feel that a quality
product is more esoteric and that you know it when you see it.
Some are arrogant, others embarrassed by all this attention. Some
are affiliative, some are not. Some are introverted, some more
extroverted. What stood out is that each individual has figured
out what works personally. This reinforces my personal theory
that one characteristic about Digital is that each person is
valued as an individual. Dealing with each person is an
experience in culture shock.
After I had spoken with each of the six heroes, I had a
conversation with Bill Johnson to summarize his philosophy about
heroes and why he had sent me after these six. The text of that
interview follows:
1. Why did you pick the six people you picked?
"Largely, because believe that within Engineering they were
viewed as people who had made significant contributions over
time, that they had involvement in either successful projects
or products continuously, or had brought some new method or
technology in to the company."
2. These are clearly the heroes of the old Digital. Where is
Digital going?
INTRODUCTION 2
"First of all, they are heroes of the old Digital up to 1978.
Before 1978, we had this strategy that said, there are so
many markets we can go into. We are going to have so many
market areas for us to go after, it is important for us to
differentiate what we're doing internally and externally.
Therefore, having a clear, viable objective different from
anybody else at Digital was important. Differentiation was
the real key to becoming a hero in the past.
"The key to becoming a hero in the future, since 1978, has
been integration which means trying to make things look the
same, just spaced differently."
3. "How do you get heroes in place?
"You get heroes by getting management to say and value what
they do. I suggest to you that the reason why there aren't
any new heroes is because there really aren't any senior
managers who value that integration. We talk about one
product, one company, one message, one strategy. What we
really need is one really good product, and one really good
company that carries with it its own message.
"Heroes can exist at all levels. I think there are
management heroes that exist.
"What is interesting to me is the consistency of the messages
delivered by six heroes."
Reesa Abrams
September, 1985
INTRODUCTION 3
I. DIGITAL
WHAT IS GOOD ABOUT DIGITAL
I tend to value Digital because of the competition or the
tendency toward anarchy or the lack of central structure, and I
regard that as a valuable trait.
One of the most positive things to me has been the sense of
working with peers.
I think we're solemnly committed to building quality products,
and we have, if not a precise, at least a strong definition of
what quality means, and there's a strong desire throughout the
company to build high-quality products. We have aggressive goals
about what we're trying to achieve.
I feel a substantial sense of ownership for some of our products
and for things that have been accomplished, and I think that's
true of many of my professional peers around here. After you've
done something that you think is good, the company has put it in
to production, and it's widely used and accepted, and people are
pleased with it, then you know you did the right thing. That's
tremendously reinforcing.
Another thing that's important to me about Digital is the notion
that it's an engineering company. I really do have the sense that
the reason we're strong is because of the quality of the
engineering we do, and that provides a lot of the direction for
what we're going to do.
It's got something to do with the way the company not just says
"the people" but somehow puts its mind where its mouth is. I
don't really mean money in dollars, I mean the actions that we
all subscribe to have something to do with the fact that this is
people, even though we create machines.
If you can take it in a broad continuum, it is paying attention
to people: to the employees as people first, workers second;
customers as people first, bill paying customers second. Even
some of the things that the company does in the community have to
do with people rather than the politics of the community so much.
You sort of have a feeling that when you come through that front
door there are people who work here. That's probably the most
important thing. It translates into little things like the
creative engineering types with whom I'm most familiar. I'd give
them their head even if it is a wild goose chase or an idea that
is going to wind up costing more than it's going to benefit,
because we don't presume to know what is going to happen anyway,
so we have a little latitude in what we do.
I. DIGITAL 4
There is a reluctance to formulate rules. We try to operate on a
minimum number of rules. We all know that once you create a rule
that concerns human behavior then the next day you're going to
have to make exceptions and eventually deviate from the
established structural guidelines. I think the one thing that is
most important at Digital is that somebody can stand up with
ideas, follow through with ideas, build products, and be the
person who guides his own destiny. That's what I really like
about Digital, and that's why I'm still here.
People like to say we're better at producing products that have
higher quality than other people, and I think that's true. I
think that is the reason we've been able to introduce new
computer architectures like the VAX and the PDP-11, that were in
the forefront.
I perceive that Digital is an atmosphere that I can excel in, and
it's an atmosphere in which I can work with good people.
We tend not to follow all the rules, and we don't chastise people
for not following the rules.
When I needed the company to come through for me, they did.
DIGITAL GIVENS
There are no absolutes.
DIGITAL CHARACTERISTICS
Running a company can be hard on people at times - a sort of ever
present fear of losing.
I don't think Digital is particularly unsafe, certainly in a
macro sense. You're probably not going to get fired or anything.
It's certainly worse other places. I think it does build up a
lot of tension.
We have indicated to our product management people that we want
to go out and talk to customers. They give us wonderful things
about how they will have the time to work on this, set up groups,
go out and talk to customers, and let us know what they say.
They're sure we're too busy to want to do this. My perception is
that there are a lot of design decisions that we need to make
that could be influenced by the customer. Existing and
prospective customers for this type of product are hard to get
because I don't know who to call.
I. DIGITAL 5
We're operating in a vacuum. I'm guilty of this when I presume
that our customers look like us. Many people have failed on that
presumption.
We only make computers, we don't use them.
NOW VS THEN
Chances were good, if you're a middle-level technical person,
that there were only a few other people who were working in your
particular area. You have the opportunity to become a project
leader, more or less immediately, and if you do well in one or
two projects, you have the opportunity to rise and be recognized.
Very quickly. That's a lot harder at Digital these days in the
sense that we're a much larger company. We have more established
technical people, and we're also doing harder, more complicated
things. There's not that opportunity to immediately do the
technical thing and bubble to the top.
At that time we didn't try to heap so much responsibility on
product or project leaders as we do now. We didn't have the
complexities of having program managers and umpteen product
managers, and we didn't have a whole bunch of products. We
didn't have the whole company trying to inject requirements into
all the plans. Most of the products in those days were directly
related to some product line. And much of the input came from
that product line or maybe a few other product lines. There's a
lot of input now versus very little before.
HOW DIGITAL COULD BE BETTER
Digital has some legitimate superstars, but I don't consider
myself a superstar in that sense. I think there are plenty of
people who make substantial contributions who aren't superstars,
but who have something really of value to be communicated and
emulated. The company would be better off if more people were
aware of that.
I've seen examples of situations where the product is perceived
to be in trouble and a lot of turnover happens.
Projects that are somebody else's idea have a much higher failure
rate than projects that are the idea of the person who is leading
the project. One of the problems that we often have is when we
haven't identified an appropriate group to undertake a task.
Instead, we have four or more groups sitting around hacking at
the task from their own perspective.
I. DIGITAL 6
I'm not sure how good we are at identifying those kinds of
failures and bringing them to a quick merciful end. I think
they'll tend to muddle on for a while and finally the whole thing
may just kind of collapse. One of the things around here is that
you probably end up both blaming and praising the wrong people.
Following the letter of the law is not going to make a successful
software project. There are plenty of failed projects that had
nice, thick project plans and functional specifications. They
didn't look any worse than lots of other projects and yet the
thing didn't come off at all. They did not really put the
process to work in an effective way. There are people who have
been quite successful by breaking lots of "rules", though I
don't think there are people who have been highly successful who
have just totally ignored what phase reviews were about.
Frustrations are usually based on something that is keeping me
from doing what I believe to be the common sense thing to do.
Periodically, when we build teams to do certain things, we don't
use out heads. We build teams to give value to things and to
people who are proven losers.
Today, I'm very frustrated about the fact that it takes so long
to get certain things done within the company. People are so
preoccupied with pettiness they don't seem to want to worry about
the big things anymore. Therefore, they don't want to worry about
what projects are going on and so on.
I think one of the frustrating things is that I'm a senior person
in the corporation and I don't even get those memos.
The management is a cast system set up around the management
people at senior group and vp level. They tend to have their
staffs and the engineering people seldom, if ever, hear about
certain developments.
I just wish people would use their common sense and trust me to
use common sense. I think sometimes when the poison pen memos
are flying back and forth, it is because we don't trust each
other to use our good judgment. The biggest single problem with
the corporation today is that, in engineering, people don't trust
each other. Engineering people don't trust the sales force to do
the right thing with products and the sales force doesn't trust
engineering, so we have a terrible situation.
Another thing that we've done over the years is forgetting our
roots in that we have abandoned some markets that we were "king"
in. An example is a lab market. We have just let MassCom take
the lab market from us. Those are the people who ran the lab
business from Digital so there's no reason in the world we
should've forgotten about that.
I. DIGITAL 7
I think that today's teams are too big.
I think people have lost track of how to meet schedules because
we haven't trained the people running a software or hardware
project how to schedule.
I think there are a lot of people who can learn about scheduling
and about how to run a software project. We don't teach them in
a general way, but I think they can learn. I think that the
people who are working on my project right now are learning what
I believe to be a fool-proof method of how to schedule a project
for success.
Someone was asked what's different about the company; why aren't
we seeing more ideas come to product? The answer is because you
can never get somebody to decide whether that's important or not
important. We need to be able to stand up and say, "That idea is
lousy. I don't want you to work on that." On the other hand, we
need to be able to recognize good ideas and say, "that's a very
important product for this company to be building, put a team
together and do it."
The reason personnel is frustrated is because they read that darn
orange book. They follow the rules and don't use common sense.
They're working with people, but they're not solving people
problems in people ways.
The company could help engineering get its job done by setting up
a workable structure around engineering to do the things like
budgeting.
When we started the VAX project, the VAX VMS, it was clearly
known that we were building a team to do a specific job. And
there was corporate commitment to that. We don't have corporate
commitments anymore. If I was trying to get a project going now,
it would be a lot easier if there was a commitment by someone who
just wanted to take a stand and say, "That's important. We
should do that. Go do it."
I think that the mentality of the corporation is to be all
entrenched and defensive right now. But we've got to get out of
that, because what made us really great was not being defensive.
We're playing catch-up all the time here. We're catching up on
the hardware projects we're doing: we're catching up on the
software projects we're doing.
We think we can do anything, but we are terribly constrained by
realities of the corporation.
I. DIGITAL 8
I'm not sure we do anything very consciously.
Well, we have a couple of workstations. But the problem was at
that time that we had to produce the absolute Cadillac
workstation that would never exist anywhere and beat the
competition hands down. And consequently, we didn't get anything.
I think the competition is a little better at getting a product
idea formulated and into a product than we are. We've got to
change that.
If only there were some kind of a marketing strategy that lasts
more than one quarter. It takes two years worth of strategy to
market what we are seriously going after in a particular market.
Furthermore, there must be a series of coordinated factors by
which we will accomplish the goal and strategy we set out for. If
not, it's disorganized.
Interactions with customers are easy compared to Digital, in
getting anything done. Customers will love you to death. Digital
people will shoot you to death if you have an original idea. I'm
not kidding, this company really was not invented here. It's
riddled with feifdom, it's riddled with people posturing, trying to
make heroes of themselves at the expense of us. We don't applaud
each other's ideas at all. We attack them until, well I guess, the
person is either devastated or can take anything.
If anything, we have too many good ideas, and we don't have
effective ways of concentrating on choosing some of them, instead
of trying to do them all, thereby not doing any well enough.
Digital is really really good at building goods, but we are
hopeless at using them.
CHANGES IN THE CULTURE OVER TIME
There's certainly more overt competition between projects (than
in earlier times). I guess in a sense Digital has become more
dangerous. I think it is adversely affecting the culture. I
think it drives people towards less sharing of information,
toward less willingness to take chances. Certainly less trust.
It does seem as though there is less tendency today to break up
teams and form new teams, that there is more of a tendency
towards empire building, maintaining groups and that sort of
thing. There's good and bad to that. In some sense it's good to
maintain a stable nucleus and build on experience and all that.
On the other hand, there also seems to be a tendency to do that
even when you don't have a really well working group to maintain.
I. DIGITAL 9
Because Digital is more mature, we also have the wealth and the
luxury of having experienced people. Nowadays, when we start a
compiler project, it would be most unusual to have the team
leader be someone who has not done a large, successful compiler
project for Digital before, either as the project leader or
certainly as the first assistant project leader. When I first
came here, we were much smaller. The language group fit into
about two offices, and we didn't have that luxury, so some of us
just started off being, with some brief experience at Digital and
then there you are, you're the project leader of this compiler
project.
STRENGTH
One of the crucial things in the success of the VAX was that it
was put together as a project team or a task team and drew from
diverse groups within the company that were necessary in order to
pull off the first VAX product, and the whole family. We got
together a group that had focus, the authority to do what it
needed to do, and had the resources. in my judgment, this is
probably the best technical team, perhaps, that Digital has ever
put together in the sense of the number of quality people that it
had, and was able to draw on. In fact, it had people who had
been successful in previous related endeavors, mostly the
operating system or hardware design.
One of Digital's selling successes is that we are not IBM, and
people will buy from Digital because we are not IBM. They can
see through IBM's propaganda, just as anybody else could.
DO THE RIGHT THING
One of our early catch phrases for VAX was "this time we're going
to do it right" and, in fact, we had a lot of fun with that
because at various times we'd punctuate it differently.
Sometimes it was, this time we're going to do it, with right in
big capital letters and an exclamation point. Sometimes it was,
this time we're going to do it right, period. Sometimes it was,
this time we're going to do it, right?
We're engineers. We've trained ourselves as engineers through
sound schooling. Some of us have put in a dozen years at the
company and we know how to do this job. We've learned a lot.
The ones who are successful and still here have a lot of common
sense about what's good and what's bad. Trust those people and
trust yourself to make common sense decisions. So the right
thing is to use and trust each other. You know why Digital is
losing some of its good people? Because other companies know
I. DIGITAL 10
that Digital people who are successful are very good at what they
do. And it's very hard...we get calls from headhunters all the
time and they have very lucrative offers. What they don't offer,
ususally, is something that's appreciably different. I mean, it
might be more money, but it's the same old problem.
HISTORY
If people understood in a real gut way what that process was and
how it worked, I think that can be used in a lot of places. It
doesn't guarantee that every time we'll pull off a VAX, there are
only a certain number of times when (a) you're that successful
and (b) when there's such a wonderful opportunity.
Like it used to back in 1970 when we worked on small teams in
isolated parts of the mill, making our own decisions on a very
localized basis, ignoring the people we wanted to ignore,
shooting spears out when we needed to shoot spears out. Between
1976 or 1977 and 1981 we really lost that. Groups just grew
tremendously. All of a sudden we had huge groups doing projects.
And they didn't have any direction. They were meandering. They
were perceived to be spending a lot of time watching people do
their jobs rather than letting people do their jobs. And in some
sense I think that was a reaction to managing the tremendous
growth that occurred when VAX came out. But we really didn't do
a good job at that. We put in the structures that really didn't
work. Software Engineering is a good example. It was very hard
to get things done. It was very hard to spend time working
because you were spending half your time going to meetings.
Everybody wanted to have a task force and the fact of the matter
is that some of those task forces were important. But come out
of New England and you don't get invited to any task forces and
out production level has come up tremendously. What I know now is
that some of those task forces are just a waste of time.
In the old days, which was back ten years ago, this company was
absolutely run by engineering. And I say absolutely in the sense
that it was engineers that spawned all the ideas about the
products. Once in a while, marketing would say something about,
"Well maybe we ought to have this." But engineering would spawn
the idea and engineering would go ahead.
CULTURE CHARACTERISTIC
We tend to be very proprietary about our own products and want to
hold all the cards.
I. DIGITAL 11
WHAT SHOULD WE STOP DOING
Internally we should stop the 'cover your ass' mentality, where
everyone is worried about their own turf and about their own
project in a very short-sighted way. And this gets back to the
idea of trust. If you're going to start a project or if you're
going to work on a project you have to depend on the other people
to do their best and succeed. So we should stop being so
entrenched.
I. DIGITAL 12
II. PEOPLE
HOW DO YOU SUCCEED AS AN EMPLOYEE
Good people make themselves. It will become evident to everyone
that they're good without their becoming exceptionally arrogant.
If you are too arrogant, people will not go out of their way to
help you; they will probably go out of their way to sabotage you.
Figure out how to use the computer. I'm surprised at the number
of people, frequently managers, who can never find the time to
learn how to use the computer effectively. We sell the darn
things and, you know, we use them in our everyday work. You find
out that so-and-so has an account on the computer and you send
them mail and it turns out that they never read it.
You have to do a certain amount of public relations with your
manager to let him know why you're of continuing value to the
company.
An employee should never become invisible.
The product they were doing worked, sold a lot, made a profit,
and people came after them to try and get them to work on the
next project. They got listened to. They proposed things, got
promoted, got raises, and they got stock options. Now, it's a
little harder to tell. It seems that its a longer time between
engineering finishing a product or project, and when its shipped
and cleared, to determine its success. There's a longer ramp
rate, and somehow the company seems to have gotten more
self-critical, and less satisfied with its product.
Everyone on a project is 100% responsible for the product.
Somehow to be successful they need to get a mentor/advisor or
some relationship.
An employee can have trouble understanding what's important
versus what can be a problem because we expect them to figure
that out for themselves.
We tend to prefer self-directed people. We are not heavily into
managing people or telling them how to do things. We expect them
to figure it out for themselves and tell us how they're doing it.
I think I'm probably more in the "good worker" category. When we
did the whole VAX thing there was a tremendous amount of risk
there and we all accepted chunks of it. The schedules I think we
committed to were very aggressive. The objectives we had, both
in terms of a quality code we wanted to produce and the level of
compatibility.
II. PEOPLE 13
There was certainly risk in there and we could easily have blown
them. We spent a lot of long hours and weekends getting the work
done, and it was tremendously successful. I would say, for the
company as a whole, that it was an incredibly risky project.
Success, if achieved, produces several positive things.
Certainly there is the personal satisfaction of a success, and I
think that's a strong motivating factor for people. I think, by
and large, the groups around here feel that they participate in
each other's success so that, when one new project comes out,
everybody in that area feels a bit better about it and feels
pride in that accomplishment. A sense of accomplishment in a sort
of derivative sense. Another thing that comes out of it is
opportunity. Once you've succeeded, then you have the
opportunity to do something else, and people are more likely to
pick you to do the next key thing that needs to be done or to
listen favorably to a proposal for some new project.
I suppose the advice that I would give would be, try to find a
place where he can put his skills to good work, have some clear
goals about what he's going to accomplish, in terms of his project
presumably (I'll presume he's got a project to work) and to set
clear goals that agree with his project leader or manager, and then
set about achieving them. And try to do a good job of measuring
himself against the goals as he goes along. Make sure that he's
staying on track. I think having a good mastery of the technical
skills that are required, realizing what your skills are around
what your efficiencies are, technically finding a place where you
can put those to use and being able to learn from others.
Written rules can be a real obstacle to progress, and yet, trying
to carry out what their goals are is essential to success.
I suppose part of maturing is realizing that there are no oracles.
I don't worry about whether they can program or not. What I worry
about is can I work with this person? Is this person a reasonable
person? And can they learn? Are they willing to learn? Do they
want to work with me because they think there's something exciting
here and they want to be able to do that? That's what I look for.
You see a gleam in people's eyes and know immediately that that's
the right person for you. I don't train people in quality, but I
try to impress upon people when they set their schedules, how much
time have you left for writing a test system? When are you going
to run a test system? And when someone says, "I've just
implemented a new run-time library feature." You point to them
and say, "there's Kim Peterson over there. You give Kim a test
that will test that." We didn't do that in VMS.
II. PEOPLE 14
We didn't have a formal test system with VMS. We depended on
another group for the UETP. And that was unfortunate because
they became second-class citizens.
I've always had very successful challenging jobs to do and I
think that I have a tremendous amount of credibility, because
I've been successful. When I say I'm going to do something,
people say, "Oh, his track record is good. I know that he can do
that." And I think that's something I've earned. I don't think
that's a reward for success. I think the success has only been
something I've earned. I think everyone who's successful earns
it. They're not entitled to do. If you wait for success to walk
in the door, it isn't going to happen.
I think we're successful because we have set up an environment
that is conducive to doing projects.
You have to play the political game, but that doesn't mean that
you have to pay attention to all this nonsense going on.
What makes you successful at Digital is to work hard, use your
imagination, use your common sense, and do the things that you
commit to do. That's what your job is.
What do I expect from my team people? They contract with me to do
a certain job on a certain date and that's what they're judged
against. And I won't let them set an unreasonable schedule. It's
my responsibility to make sure they're not setting themselves up
for failure.
If you're in trouble you should speak up and not hide it. If you
say something about it, something may be able to be done. If
you sit in your office, nothing is going to happen.
I'd say the key to success in Digital is to set your sights on
reasonable goals, achieve those goals, and to think very
pragmatically about what you're trying to do. We're back to
products and good design. Now, what do you do to interface well
with the rest of the company? You try to use your common sense
again and be selective about what you listen to and what you
ignore. If you see something wrong, chuck a spear. That's
another good thing about working out of New England, we get very
little travel from Maynard, but boy we get a lot of attention when
we throw a spear.
We have to set it up so that the new employees know where to go
to get information. You have to encourage people to do that.
You have to encourage the people you're hiring to review their
design or review their thinking. One thing that the old
employees do is, we talk all the time. "I'm working on this."
II. PEOPLE 15
"I'm having a problem." You've got to teach new employees to do
that. Because that's how they learn. That's how they don't get
off in a corner.
I write software very, very quickly. I never write anything
down. I do it all on the terminal, and I do it so quickly that I
can do it ten times over in the same time that other people can
do it from start to finish. Now, those people are sometimes just
as successful as I am. Sometimes, more successful. And,
sometimes I'm more successful. I get the benefit of lots of
iterations over the design and they get the benefit of up-front
thinking. I try to tell my people that if you are the
up-front-thinking kind, you want to write it all down, work all
the details out and then start implementing -- that's great. But
if you are the 'lots of iterations' kind, make sure that you
have the capability to do that. So there are a lot of ways of
getting to the same thing. Don't model the way I do it if it is
not going to be successful for you. Your job is to make your
dates.
If you're experienced, you tend to propose projects that you know
can live with in the reality of manufacturing and sales. Hopefully
you can still build forward-looking products for the industry.
The good guys tend to collect more people about them and keep on
doing things. So, you can sort of see the good guys from the bad
guys if you're real perceptive about what's happening.
If you want to be successful in the company, then you've got to
do your job. You probably have to do more than you job. You
can't just take a passive role in things. You've got to take an
active role. Which means that you've got to foster ideas, maybe
new product ideas, or you've got to foster innovative
implementation ideas. You've got to do something where you're not
just saying, "I can do that. I'll do a good job at that. Just
give me a job and I'll do it." Because I don't think you can do
that and really be successful in the company. If you really want
to be successful, you've got to do that at a higher level.
You've got to put yourself in a position where you possibly could
lose.
Alliances are ambiguous, a tub of concrete. By and large, they
tend to be opposed to organizational alliances, whereby once the
organization changes, the personalities change and the alliance
drops and has to be reestablished. You operate a lot on the
basis of an understanding provided that.. it's very hard to try
to write down in words what the understanding was, you'd kill the
understanding right there.
II. PEOPLE 16
WHY DO YOU STAY
I have an opportunity to pursue things that I think are important
and going to be valuable for the company.
The company came through with their part of the bargain after my
investment in the company. I am now feeling that the company is
investing in me.
If I couldn't guide my own destiny and work on the things that I
think are important, that is mutually important for me and the
company, I wouldn't be here.
I've been treated well and I have every expectation that that
will continue. There seems to be ample opportunity to experiment
with things that I want to do as well as do things that I'm safe
to do.
WHAT TURNS YOU ON
I tend to get my jollies about getting a product out the door.
I am a product person.
VISION
I think that more attention needs to be paid to a corporate
strategy.
The last thing I want to see is the bureaucracy get any stronger.
The culture maintainers are responsible for what they do.
We're going to become more mature and responsible in the various
organizations. We won't have a Ting Guru, or a definitive oracle
who can tell us everything we need to do, but in fact, we will
have people within the various groups who will provide the kind
of technical leadership in each area to help us to move along,
and to build the kinds of products that need to be built. There
will be, I suppose, processes something like where we will try to
pull together what the different oracles are saying to be sure
that it's really coherent. That's what the Local Area Systems
people are trying to do and, in fact, they are being supported by
the operating system.
What we need to realize is that, in each of the areas, we need to
have a vision of where we're headed and a strategy to work
towards.
II. PEOPLE 17
HEROES
Being a Digital hero is being perceived as a leader on a very
successful project or product.
I've developed a reputation at this point, and I think I could
find somplace interesting to work if I wanted to change.
I'm smart. I go out and ask questions and talk to the people.
I'm practically always doing something. I don't sit in my office
twiddling my thumbs - I go read a book in the library if I don't
have anything else to do.
I'm busy. I poke my nose into a lot of areas, and I usually have
something to say about them. I'm not afraid to speak up in a
meeting. I apparently have some skills at running meetings. I'm
quite competent in a fairly broad range of stuff. I guess I
think I know what I'm doing. I can be fairly assertive or even
aggressive about getting what I want.
I think there certainly are heroes in Digital, and I think the
notion of the hero is important as a model for people. I think
there are lots of different kinds of heroes.
Heroes have incredible technical skills and prolific ability to
apply them. A second attribute is the ability to produce
products, and that's something that is recognized as outstanding
in Digital. There are other heroes around who might have
extremely strong technical gifts, not so much the product focus,
and that doesn't say they don't produce products. What they
don't have is the kind of prolific involvement with products that
some others have.
The style, the process they use, their ability to work with
people, to work with groups.
I think that the role of people at my level, who have worked for
the company for ten or fifteen years and have a lot of
experience, is to pour out all their experience and guide the
people who have a lot of energy to do their job. In addition,
people who are the senior technical people in the company have a
responsibility to drive the company in ways that make sense.
One thing that sets me apart from other people is, maybe, that I
take too much responsibility for the people. I worry a lot about
their technical work, I worry a lot about what the team is doing
technically, but I also think I have a lot of responsibility to
keep up my end of the bargain for them.
II. PEOPLE 18
QUALITY
Things that meet customer expectations.
I promote quality by trying to remind people that the customer
pays the bills. We should be concerned with customer
satisfaction instead of saving a nickel here and there in the way
we design something.
Every time our machine recovers from an error and it doesn't
crash, that's a customer who's satisfied.
If you build a perfect machine that no one can build after the
first one, you're building a prototype. Somebody has to build the
other three million of them. Someone has to assure that every one
of those three million looks like the first one and works the same
way, that's manufacturing. It's a difficult problem.
I'm in the business of building something that an awful lot of
people are going to be pretty well satisfied with. It doesn't
have to be perfect in any of the dimensions, but it ought to be
pretty good in all of them.
There's nothing you can do to put quality into something once its
created. Quality comes from the team that's doing it, from their
vision of what they're doing and how well they can execute what
their plans are.
You depend on the customer for feedback, and you want them to
tell you what they need before you give it to them.
What I don't agree with, frankly, is this whole effort to try to
teach people about quality; to try to give people methodology for
engineering quality. It's all bullshit as far as I'm concerned.
You get quality by putting teams together that do real work.
You're not going to get quality by trying to paint it on.
I think I have a sense of what quality is from a software
engineering standpoint that I've acquired over the years, but
it's going to be very hard for me to try to define it. All I
know is that when we're about to put a product out, there's a
feeling you get about whether or not it's right. And if it's not
right, we're going to hold onto it until we feel right about it.
I do feel that groups that deal with customers, like CSSE, play a
very very key role in the customer's perception of the quality of
Digital or the quality of the software. I don't think you can
measure it by the SPRs, but you can certainly get a feeling about
it.
II. PEOPLE 19
You get quality by good design and good engineering. You don't
get it by testing it at the end. Testing is fine for the five
percent of the things that you hope the customer doesn't find.
We test a business plan by looking back at our goals and
constraints and say, did we meet the constraints? Because I want
to be able to hold those constraints up when someone comes to me
and says, "How about doing X?" "I can't do X because I've
constrained myself not to do X."
I think we have quality. Our software is probably as good if not
better than anybody's. Our hardware is real good, regardless of
what customers like to say. Everything we design is designed to
work under worst-case conditions. In fact, if we didn't have to
do that, we could build things a lot cheaper. A lot cheaper.
We don't build anything that we aren't proud of. We're not going
to build anything that we think doesn't work. We're not going to
ship anything we don't think ought to be shipped.
Some things about quality can be measured. Some things can't.
Certainly, if it works the way it's supposed to work, we can
measure, and we do with both the hardware and the software
products we do here. Some of the things that are a little more
esoteric can't be measured. If they can't be measured
objectively, they can be measured subjectively.
I really can't say enough about how I disagree with this idea
that quality is measured as the difference between what you
produced and what the customer thought he needed, because that's
not quality.
The people who build it are responsible for the quality.
BURNOUT
There's certainly a lot of pressures to burn you out.
I have a personal computer at home. I don't use it for work. I
don't log in.
I sort of jealously guard my time off. I don't commit to
overtime. When the proto gets first turned on, I'll show up for
flight sessions and debug or something, but generally I tend to
come in at 8:30 and leave at 5:30 or 6:00. I don't do late night
sessions. I don't do weekends.
II. PEOPLE 20
There's a certain rhythm to the project. When you're first doing
the planning and getting up towards phase one, you can regulate
it so that things stay pretty orderly. I mean, not that you know
all the answers, but the amount of work you're doing is the
amount that fits into an average week. Clearly, when you begin
to get to the latter parts of the 1st three months before field
tests, you just have to anticipate that it is going to be a big
crunch, and, again, try to have some personal life organized to
accommodate that one way or another. Be sure you take a vacation
with your wife and kids before the big push for the field test.
That kind of thing. There's also the realization that, even when
times are worse, when you're extremely hard and things are going
very badly, that, at some point, there's going to be an end to
this. There will be a slower time. The product will get
released.
It may be very gratifying to have worked an extremely long week
and gotten a major task accomplished. That has to be done
sometimes, but one does not want to believe that that's the model
for life, that you're going to do that continuously.
One of the things that I have learned is not to mistake effort
for progress. People burnout because they're spending effort and
making no progress. Then they fail. I think burnout and failure
have a lot to do with each other.
If you lose your perspective, it's very hard to recover. What
I'm talking about is brinksmanship, you're constantly walking on
the edge of burnout. If you're working to your full potential,
you're constantly walking on that edge where you could fall off
and you stay on the edge by keeping your perspective, by making
sure you're making progress when you're making an effort.
I think Digital burns people out. People get burned out because
they work their ass off, and they finish something and they say,
"Where's the rainbow, where's the pot of gold?" And they look
around and nothing happens. Just nothing happens. And they say,
"Why did I work that hard, that long?" They don't know they're
doing this. They don't know that they really expect some praise
or glory at the end. It just isn't there, and they say, "Geez,
why should I do that again?" I think that's why people burn out,
and I've seen quite a few of them do it. And I don't think
burnout is necessary.
It tends to be, I think more on a personal level. Isolated
individuals who take the responsibility for colleagues, friends,
comrades at war.
II. PEOPLE 21
DISCIPLINE
Creativity is important, but too much of it without any
discipline is chaos.
I think there are processes, discipline processes, and if you
don't have those, you will indeed fail.
HOW TO BE SUCCESSFUL
In my particular case, I recognized it when I got here. I
started working in this office that the company had finally come
through with for me after years of being frustrated over the fact
that I was getting screwed at every turn. It took a long time
for me to overcome that, like eight years for me to realize that
the company could come through for me. Up to that point, I
always thought of myself as kind of a peon. I think a lot of the
new engineers think of themselves that way and have to overcome
it because, if you look back on your own career, you have lots of
successes that you have to identify and to buoy up to your
personality at any particular moment.
I'll also make the judgment that, if you need more than twelve
people to do a project, the project is too big; you're biting off
too much.
If you decide to work on a project and it's going to take longer
than two years, you're doing the wrong project, and taking too
much time to do too much.
I think we each have a responsibility that if we do see a
problem, to speak up about it.
I think that we're successful because we have set up an
environment that is conducive to doing projects. What gives us
grief is that we have found ourselves, after three years, to be a
bit out of touch with the day-to-day operations of the company
and what's going on, who the people are.
To be successful you should never assume that the people around
you have the answers, especially when it comes to the management.
Always know that no matter how long you've been here, or what
your title, or where you are in the pecking order, your ideas can
prevail, as long as you realize that it's 90% sweat, blood, and
tears.
II. PEOPLE 22
We have an oversupply of good ideas and bright people who can do
the 90% innovation. Our greatest resource is people who can do
the 90% innovation to the technical side of their ideas. They're
awash with good ideas. Other parts of the company might be quite
different. I'm suggesting that perhaps it should be. Somehow in
this high-tech culture, I don't just mean Digital, I mean in the
media, people have an inordinate and undue respect for the bright
idea. Einstein said it in, I forget exactly what he said, but he
had the ideas for general relativity. It took nine years to get
it written down and explained to his satisfaction. Einstein was
more than just an idea man. He was able to render those ideas
tractable to other people and his business. That's important.
EMPLOYEES SHOULD NEVER DO
The one thing that I would not like to see people do is lie about
their progress. They get in trouble and they don't tell me, then
there's nothing that I can do to help them or me. If they get in
trouble and they come and tell me, then the chances are that
there is probably somebody that did a little better than we
thought they were going to do, and we could probably have them
help the person out. But if they don't come and tell us, then
that's really a problem.
Well, one thing we should never do is take too seriously the idea
of managing our culture, because that can degenerate into
propaganda and people being cast out as heretics. We should
never stop changing. There are a variety of businesses we should
never go anywhere near. But also we should not be afraid to try
others -- those that even have a tiny chance of being exciting
for future businesses.
RESPONSIBILITY
I think everybody has responsibility. I don't think any one
person has the ultimate responsibility, but, ultimately, whoever
I report to is responsible.
The groups are the ones who are really responsible for the
product's success as far as the engineering side of it. We can't
do anything about the marketing or sales side of it. We're, in
fact, very disappointed that our last product has not done much
better, because we really thought it would. We thought it was a
really good product. From the engineering side, the project was
really a good project and very successful. From the sales side,
right now, it's not as successful as we thought it would be.
II. PEOPLE 23
III. PROCESS
WHAT IS RISK
I would say that this current project is, by Digital standards, a
very-high risk project...certainly a lot of people tell me that
it's crazy, and, therefore I infer that it must be high risk. Do
I feel it? Yeah, I guess I do. I don't think that it's stressful,
I think that's what makes the job exciting. That's why I'm here.
So I feel we need some risky projects. I guess I'd feel that I
was in over my head if I couldn't at least get some grudging
admission on the part of the skeptics that it might all work.
I think the risk is worthwhile. I'm also prepared to find, in a
year, that it isn't coming together, and maybe we ought to not do
this.
I don't see myself as primarily a risk taker. I tend to see myself
as making sure that I know that the thing is going to work.
This machine is running faster than probably anybody would have
thought it would have, mostly because I said it was going to run
that fast. I suppose that was a risk because something could
have gone wrong and it wouldn't have worked, but somehow I didn't
see it as a risk. I sat down and figured out "I think it can run
this fast, and, by God, I'm going to make it run this fast."
Then I didn't see it as a risk anymore.
One of the kinds of risks we'd face would be not doing enough. We
can be sort of complacent and slow moving, and hang on to our
current customer base, and let it grow. That's probably one of the
biggest risks we face. I think there is certainly risk when people
start out doing new things. For example, some of the projects where
we've had a lot of trouble may have been problems with the way those
projects were run, but we were trying to do some new things.
I don't know that I've taken really large risks. They don't look
like that, although there's certainly risk every time one commits
to doing a project.
There's only one kind of real risk and that's physical injury risk.
You take a risk when you go mountain climbing. Technical risk does
not exist. Technical risk can always be overcome by overwork.
I think, individually, we take risks -- small risks. I think
projects are filled with a few small risks such as another group
not finishing their product. But again, I have to trust them to
do what they think is right.
III. PROCESS 24
You're risking your livelihood and your reputation with people.
I would say that I do take risks. There are always hedge risks
-- gambles. There's no reward for failure.
POLITICS
I feel I spend an inordinate amount of time on politics, much
more than I wish I had to.
WHAT IS GOOD MANAGEMENT
A good administrative manager has to be someone who is in touch
enough with what people are saying and doing to understand the
realities of what is going on.
I think the downfall of a number of managers is convincing people
above them that they have everything under control, then
eventually the rude shock hits that things have fallen apart. I
think the failure is to continually present the impression that
things are under control while, in fact, they're quietly going to
hell in a handbasket.
A good technical manager has to do a good balancing act. Give
people enough freedom to create solutions to problems without
imposing on them, but be firm enough not to accept solutions
which that person's experience suggests will not fly. They have
to be a good sorter and they have to be able to do reasonably
well at working resolution of contrary views among their people.
Our approach has been to say, well, let's start with the
presumption that they're competent, interested, and so forth.
Start at the technical level and bring all those people into what
we were thinking about and say, "We're only going to succeed if
you help us out at this venture". By and large that's been
pretty successful. There has always been a problem area and we
said, "You know, we're going to sort that out and not presume
that those people are just a bunch of turkeys."
Managers work administrative bureaucracy. For one thing, there's
a lot of paper that needs to get filled out. The manager's tend
to work schedules, intergroup coordination, and get involved in
process sorts of things more than a technical manager. A
technical manager must try to get the best technical product they
can and to get the earliest product they can. Somehow this has
to get balanced off.
III. PROCESS 25
One of the clear management tasks is to provide charters that are
clear and crisp enough, and, if executed correctly, will produce
things that fit into the overall Digital environment.
Characteristics in a manager that are important to me are skills in
managing people, processes, and resources. I think in that order
also. It's important that a manager be able to deal with people,
and there are lots of styles that work. I certainly prefer those
that deal with people on a fairly adult, straightforward, and
humanistic way that value them as individuals. Managers should try
to deal with them and their problems, rather than just manage to
get the job done. So I think people management is very important.
Processes, I think are quite important, particularly in Digital
because of the lack of structure. Often, one has areas where a
lot of the problem is structural and it's important for the
manager to be able to identify that and to try to put in place
structures that will help people get the job done. When you have
an interface across several organizations, you need some
communication channel and working process to help both transmit
information and resolve conflict. If you can set up structure
that people can understand and the mechanism for doing that, it
is not too hard to work across organizations.
For the technical leaders, I think that the primary thing is that
the person have a good command of the technical knowledge and the
ability to communicate that knowledge to the people he's working
with. Obviously, the technical leader may need some of the
management skills as well. He can't be just technically
brilliant and have no people skills.
The process I would have in mind is getting the people who are
going to contribute to a product, whether it's designing, selling
or whatever, to write down, understand, and then write down again
what their goals and strengths are. What's the product you're
trying to build? How long will it take to do it? What is it that
will make that product successful? If it's to be a leadership
product, why is it that it's going to be overwhelmingly better than
anything else? If it's a beat-the-competition product, a clear
picture of the competition is needed to build something that's
adequate and will compete sort of on an even basis, even though it
may not dominate the competition.
I think the team leaders have to be emotionally tied to their
products.
I feel that people who work on my projects are contracting with
me to do a certain job by a certain date. They set the schedule
and I help them. But, once they set that schedule, that's what
III. PROCESS 26
I'm going to judge them by. That's another thing that we have
forgotten about, teams. We don't judge people by accomplishments
anymore. We tend to be a little easy on personal judgments and
reviews. I think we need to look at what people accomplish and
set some expectations for them. Then they know what they're
supposed to accomplish and to expect judgment on the
accomplishments. I think BJ stresses that, but I don't think we
stress it enough in smaller engineering groups.
If you use common sense and make a judgment, I'll trust that you
did the right thing.
It's my responsibility to make sure they're not setting
themselves up for failure.
I like to think of myself as a model, but then again, I don't
chastise them or judge them if they don't think the way I do. I
think that's important.
You try to let people decide for themselves that it's the right
thing. I try not to tell anybody. People always feel better
about something they have arrived at by themselves.
I think I'm very good at running projects. I have vision.
I believe managers should view their role in life as doing
everything possible to make it easier for their people to do their
job. It's not that the people are there to help the manager do his
job, because they're not. If we take the manager away, nothing
would happen. They would still be there, would still work, and
still get things done right. If you take the people away, you
leave the manager. All we have is the manager, and what can he do?
A good manager is a leader.
You've got to find a way to appeal to the emotion, the religion,
the ego, or the drive and capture it without really telling them.
What you tell them is that we are going this way. Then you head
that way, and don't even look back to see if they are coming,
because you know they are. That's a leader. A leader can always
employ a manager, but it's not clear that a manager can employ a
leader.
One of the things I do, especially at one or three in the morning,
is think about a person whom I would like to see accomplish
something. What does that person really want and how can I give it
to him. How can I combine this engineering problem I have over here
with their talents and desires? They are two separate things, I'm
looking for a combination that works.
III. PROCESS 27
I don't give very many directions. One of the things I try very
hard to do is not give people the answer they can't ask for at all,
even though I think I know what the answer is. Provoke them to
think about it in a way different from the way they've already
thought about it. Inquire as to what it is they're thinking about,
and how it is they thought about it. Sometimes it can be real
quick.
TEAMS
If I'm telling an employee to do something stupid, then I expect to
hear about it immediately and in no uncertain terms. I want it to
be real clear if I'm telling him or her something incorrect.
I think you have a better chance of getting a successful project if
the team is assembled top down. If the team builds itself, I think
the team has to grow or evolve or something -- not be placed by
external forces. You need to start with a nucleus and grow it.
I think sometimes there is a tendency, both in Digital and
elsewhere, to emphasize the hero in what was actually a team
effort. The focus on the hero can be good to the extent of
personifying a set of values, but if the notion is given that one
person is the key to producing something that was, in fact, a large
team effort, I think that's bad for the culture.
The group is a very good group in the sense that everybody on it, I
think, feels affirmed by the group. They feel that they're
accomplishing significant things, and there's no particular feeling
that one of us must be the star and get all the credit. One of the
values that I hold very high on any project is that the project
reach agreement, generally by some kind of consensus, on what the
group standards are going to be. Once that agreement has been
reached, everyone must conform to it.
The team that I am in today is just like the team I was in when I
started. It's a small team. A team of people that I hope would
all say they knew exactly what the product is that they are
building and know exactly what their part of that product is.
You can keep track of what everybody is doing if you have a team of
twelve or less people. You can't if you have a team of hundreds.
I think the successful teams are a combination of two kinds of
people. You have some people who really understand what they're
doing and are proven winners, and you have another group of people
who are real hard workers.
III. PROCESS 28
It's important not to set up a cast system in the team. It is
important that the technical writers, product managers, secretarial
people, librarian, and junior people, if you will, all feel that
they're peers on an equal basis. There's one project leader,
there's one administrative leader. Everybody else is equal and has
an equal contribution to the product. It's critically important to
make sure that your technical writers don't feel that they're
second-class citizens and so on down the line.
If the system doesn't work, it's broken. I get upset because the
system is broken not because the person screwed up. I have a right
to yell and throw things too. I've never met anybody who's done
something bad intentionally.
The reason the team I was on failed was because we tried to do too
much.
We try to hire people who we think will fit into to the group. We
try to hire people who are aggressive, who will be able to stand
up and defend their ideas. We try to hire people who are
ambitious. We don't want to necessarily hire people whose goal in
life is to aspire to management, because, there's no future for
them here because there isn't hardly any management.
It's more like a family. No rules means that you can do anything
you want to do that is socially acceptable. But your responsibility
is to do your job. That's your first responsibility.
Our management structure is as flat as we can get it, and we're
going to stay with that management structure until it absolutely
just breaks, and it's not broken yet.
There is a cast system, but the cast system is formed from
technical excellence. It's formed by experience and what you've
achieved, so it's not one that's formally placed. It's just
there from the achievements the people have.
CONFLICT
Person A thinks this is the way it ought to be done and person B
thinks that's the way it ought to be done. My process tended to
be,...you and you sit down and either tell me how it is you've
worked out a solution or I will tell you a solution that will
work that neither of you may like.
III. PROCESS 29
CUSTOMER
I don't feel as closely in touch as I would like to be.
A Digital customer is someone who considers quality to be a feature
more than some of our competitors, who consider that "it does more for
you to be a feature, even though it doesn't do it hte same way every
time". There is a different person who comes to Digital.
It used to be that when a machine came out, we'd go out and give
marketing presentations, talk to the customers, deal with real
people, and sometimes learn things from them. Over the years, we
seem to have been doing less and less of that. And we're getting
more of our input from various marketing groups.
I go to see customers all the time. It's our collective
responsibility to make sure that we're doing the right product
for the customer.
I really like to hear what customers say is good, and I also like
to hear what their complaints are.
But I like to talk to customers, because I think we can solve
their problems. For instance, Thursday, we had a customer who
just wanted to have his hand held. He sent us a list of
questions he wanted answered. All he had to do, really, is read
the book, but we're going to give him half a day just to hold his
hand because it's the right thing to do.
I think the people we're dealing with today are just like the
people we were dealing with in 1975. I think we're still selling
to customers who are exactly the same. Anyway, all this talk
about expanding our market isn't true. We've just found more
people who are Digital customers over the years.
Well, the engineers here have done a tour of duty and talked to
customers, to observe what happens out there and also to do some
teaching, basically, to the folks on the front line, what it is
we've just done to them and what it is they're gonna get calls
about. We also send people to Europe, Canada, Australia, and
Brazil. Sometimes, if we're having trouble figuring out the
customer's problem, we'll just give him a call and ask him.
We have a project manager who goes out and talks with customers.
The customer base seems to be less technical then it used to be.
Therefore, we tend to design things that are simple to put together
and need less fiddling with. To me, that doesn't seem like a
fundamental issue -- it's still a computer and still does most of
the same things but, we make some trade-offs a little bit more than
we used to.
III. PROCESS 30
DIGITAL MECHANISMS
Digital is obviously kind of a loose and open environment. You
see all kinds of mail as it gets forwarded thirdhand, or things
that are argued about in Notes files, and so on. I don't think
there is reason for anybody who is an individual contributor and
whose interested in what's going on to feel they're totally in
the dark.
HOW TO GET A PRODUCT STARTED
If you've got a good enough idea, it's got to be a good idea. If
it's in the strategy, or something that fits into the strategy,
then it's easier to sell than something that doesn't fit. But if
you came up with an idea that you could show had real potential,
as far as money or return on investment, the idea should be
explored, unless it was something we didn't want to get into.
III. PROCESS 31
IV. COMMENTS
COMPETITION
Actually, we have eleven competitors. One through seven is IBM.
Number eight is either Japan, all of it, or AT&T. Number nine is
the other of those two. Number ten is everybody else from Apollo
to Data General -- all the rest.
And who is number eleven? Digital
THE INDUSTRY IN GENERAL
The shakeout is always coming and it is always here.
I think it's customary at Digital to pick on marketing.
TRUST
I think that there's trust in Digital among people who have
learned that they can trust somebody else.
I think people have their personal networks of people they trust
and, otheer than that, I wouldn't trust anybody. Trust in this
sense would be something like trusting them to meet their
commitments.
IV. COMMENTS 32
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