Fatal Assumptions: Markets Change and So Should Your Mission

I was interviewed a while back by BMC’s E-Business Director, Mike Smith. He helped me dig up some of the reasons I dove into the computer software field and I remembered some important lessons from early in my career that have stuck with me.

My high school in Hampton Virginia actually had a computer on the campus which was rare in those days, the early ‘70s. I developed a date matching program on FORTRAN for a fundraiser and fell in love with computer science.

I enrolled at Cornell and the first day I looked for a professor in the engineering school and told him “I want a computer science degree.” Few schools had that kind of specialization then, but Cornell had a college scholar curriculum where I worked with an academic sponsor to combine some engineering classes with computer programming classes.  I was among the first to graduate with a computer science degree. A guy in my fraternity designed course work in agriculture, botany and some chemistry and ended up with one of the first degrees in winemaking.

I graduated with a BA and a “checked box Master’s degree”. That was the consolation prize for those who didn’t perform a dissertation for a Doctorate. That was fine with me. I enjoyed all the esoteric theories of computer science, but I wanted to apply the systems in the real world. A Bell recruiter who was one of my professors looked me up and, of course I was blown away (late ‘70s speak) and was hired on the spot.

The first task I was given at Bell Labs was to develop a patch in a running C program. At Bell, you could never take the switch down. If you take the switch down, no phone calls will occur in that neighborhood, “not gonna happen” (‘80s lingo).

It took us a couple of months. We modified the operating system, modified the micro system, the stacks. It was a perfect problem, it covered multi-disciplines. I had to look across the whole set technical areas, how the compiler works, how assemblers work, how linkage editors work, how the process image sits in the memory during run time.

We got our solution patented in record time, just 18 months. The Bell attorney said it was the fastest patent he’d every worked on. It was my first patent, and one I’m still proud of. I worked at Bell for a total of 12 years. I thought I’d be a 35-year employee, and I’d never leave, I loved the management solutions we created.  About six years into my career, divestiture hit. We were split up. We had to search for other business models. Bell/AT&T next went into the computer business.

Western Electric did all the manufacturing in phenomenal facilities in Okalahoma City. Engineers from across around the world would study the plant. Bell designed things well, with Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) in mind.  We designed equipment to last 15, 20, even 30 years. That extra engineering would improve the TCO with a dramatic drop in service and recall issues downstream. For example, our engineers would use 100 mil gold coating on switches. That type of quality helped build Bell into the world’s best telephone system, but this was a new world. Computers have a 3- to 5-year life span, so gold plating standards are 10 mil. Meanwhile, back at the OK ranch, the top engineers wouldn’t budge. They had the power to say “We use 100 mil plating and that’s it!

It was part of the organization’s DNA.

We did the market research to find out what we could sell our computers for and found that we would lose more than $100 on each unit. Our products couldn’t compete.  The economics had changed. So the state-of-the-art Oklahoma plant was shut down. The very values that created the mighty company became fatal.

That has stuck with me. Be mindful of the DNA of your organization. I have a filter now running a program in my head. Among the first things I’ve looked into here at BMC was to ask, “What are the givens? And why?” Be very mindful of your company’s answers. Do those values and mission statements still serve us or do they harm us?

If you have a few minutes, visit TalkBMC and listen the “Hidden Podcasts”, Part 1 and Part 2. I think you’ll enjoy them and get something out of them. Let me know what you think.