Hijacking the Summit

I worked with Nathan Zeldes at Intel some years ago; he is one of the most electric, energetic, insightful engineers I've ever had the privilege to know.  He asked a question the other day about my Medal of Defiance -- the answer I sent him is the basis for the previous post.

He has posted it on his own blog, with some contextual description, on his site.  See:
http://www.nathanzeldes.com/blog/2013/05/intrapreneurship-and-the-hewlett-packard-medal-of-defiance/

What was more fun for me was to get Nathan's response to my brief essay.  Here it is -- unvarnished:

To be honest, I'm not at all surprised that you did all that insubordination (I remember well your "Let's highjack the summit" that led to the founding of our VCRT) - but the thought that a senior manager would reward Defiance instead of punishing it is what I found particularly intriguing and very worth sharing.

"Highjack the summit?"  Me?  Maybe this is a more fun story to recall...

Well, this was circa autumn or early winter 2000.  I had become a member of the Intel technical staff after they bought Dialogic.  I actually missed the 'recruiting season' due to an enforced medical absence (I was immobilized, bedridden for a few months with a sports injury), and I was not a chip designer, so the question was 'what do we do with this guy?'    Recently back on my feet, they invited me to a conference and workshop to talk about Information Technology (IT), or so I thought.

What it turned out to be was a group of IT managers whining about how hard their job was, how slow the network was, how many Intel 'users' beefed about their slow service, and etc.  In other words, it was the typical lament of the typical IT organization, NOT a workshop to talk about possibilities for new applications and capabilities of "information technology".

Somehow, and I don't actually remember how, I had met Nathan by phone (he worked at Intel Israel), and we'd already explored what we might do with better collaboration tools.   Intel hadn't yet given up on Intel ProShare or Team Station, but the writing was on the wall.  Those systems were the best thing available at the time, but in truth they were clumsy, expensive, prone to technical difficulty, and worst of all, guaranteed to generate mistrust since you could never look the other person in the eye, only the eyelid.  Nathan and I had 'chewed the rag' on the phone several times about what might be better.

But at this conference, to which several hundred folk had flown in for several days, we were disbarred from having a session, or even a speaking gig.  Protocol meant that 'the important people' had agenda time; the troops were to listen and salute.  We poked this beast several times, and got nowhere.

I was incensed, and so was Nathan.  We talked about what to do, and I suggested that he stand up just before lunch on the second day with a 'spot announcement' -- saying something like "Hey, I know a lot of you folk are interested in collaboration tools across remote sites, and we don't have that on the agenda.  We're (that guy in the back, Chuck House, who you probably haven't met, and me) hosting a Brown Bag workshop in the next room over lunch, if you'd like to attend, we'd welcome you."

He did it.  And we got seven people.  The group met, got excited, formed a volunteer project, named it the VCRT team, and started on our own time to build some things.  VCRT stood for VIRTUAL COLLABORATION RESEARCH TEAM.  It took us a couple of years, but we built some prototypes, filed some patent applications, GOT THEM!, got noticed by management (not just in IT, but at the Exec level), and got instantiated as the Colab research team for the company.

One paper still available is titled "3D Global Virtual Teaming Environment" which shows some of the environment.  See my Research gate postings: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221338080_3D_Global_Virtual_Teaming_Environment?ev=prf_pub

Medal of Defiance

People keep asking ... what's the story on this wacko-sounding award.  So, here's a brief summary:

The HP Medal of Defiance

From the viewpoint of Dave Packard, founder

The Medal of Defiance was awarded only once in the history of Hewlett-Packard, by HP's founder , David Packard, to Chuck House in April 1982 when House began a new role as HP’s Corporate Engineering Director, sitting in an adjoining office to David Packard, chairman of the board.  Bill Hewlett, Dave’s co-founder, had the adjacent office on the other side. Packard had become concerned that the “new HP” in the computer business was becoming very bureaucratic. 

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New CEO John Young thought it key to shift resources from instrumentation to computing, and to co-ordinate all of the R&D efforts across ninety divisions into something much more efficient.  But the very appointment of a Corporate Engineering Director was evidence to Packard that a job to co-ordinate strategies, streamline development times, and strengthen productivity rather than emphasize creativity would be viewed as another “Headquarters” imposition.

House was one of those mavericks, though, from a remote division who exemplified local creativity.  He had pioneered several major programs, and helped launch a dozen divisions in his first twenty years at the company.  If anyone could meet Young’s goals, and persuade the bulk of HP engineers and managers that this was workable, it augured to be House.

Packard recalled one long-forgotten incident with House, and he concluded that an award to House at inception of this new corporate role could set a tone that emphasized innovation and creativity at EVERY level of the company.  Voilà, the Award of Defiance was conceived, created, and bestowed.
 

The history, by Chuck House (extracted from “Old Bribery”, Chapter 2 of Permission Denied: Odyssey of an Intrapreneur, InnovaScapes Institute Press, 2013)

Given a choice of several new projects, I hadn’t previously seen one that was on the list, an FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) control tower monitor.  I asked my boss, “What’s this one?”  His cryptic answer: “We don’t really know.  It’s a new request, not really an oscilloscope.  Milt Russell in our cathode ray tube (CRT) department has worked in this area; he might know something about it.”

The FAA wanted to see images of airplanes near an airport ― recall movie scenes where a control tower is tracking radar blips on CRTs (cathode ray tubes, or television tubes) that indicate planes. Our chief competitor, Tektronix, had voted ‘no,’ giving us an opening. Milt Russell, a short soft-spoken scientist, had come from General Electric, the company that built the display equipment extant at airports.  Russell was touting a new technology: an expansion mesh lens that he believed could shorten the picture tube length dramatically (from 54 inches to 18 inches).

For this project, however, there was a new requirement: the FAA wanted the CRT to show more than a radar blip. They wanted identifying flight letters next to each blip, a hard goal with an expansion mesh approach.  The prototype didn’t meet the FAA needs since it defocused the letters that identified the planes.  Russell fiddled with the focusing problem; I sought applications where focus wasn’t so important.  We probably should have gone back to our bosses and said, “Hey, this won’t work for the FAA requirement.  We should call FAA and say ‘we’re sorry’ and then cancel the project.”

The prototype was pretty intriguing.  Essentially it was a very high-speed television set.  The diagonal screen size was impressive for a ‘scope, 14 inches instead of 5 ― an 800 per cent larger display.  The joke was that we were building a much faster TV set so that you could watch the movie Gandhi in four minutes.  Other wags opined that it was a ‘scope for nearsighted long-armed engineers.

By the time that our bosses figured out that we couldn’t solve the FAA problem, I loved the pictures we could display.   Wanting to take the unit to some potential customers, I was strongly told ‘No.’ HP did not allow engineers to go alone to customers (a sales representative had to go); second, we couldn’t afford the extra travel expense; and third, HP didn’t allow prototypes to be shown to customers because that might tip our hand.

I proposed to take the box with me on a personal trip to California for the upcoming Christmas holidays, calling on customers where HP sales people set up the meeting.  This met two of the three objections ― the contacts and the travel cost.  For the third point, I argued that if we were going to cancel the project for lack of market, there was no real danger in ‘tipping our hand to competitors’.  They grudgingly acquiesced.

The box, though, was too big to put in my car.  I had to package the unit ― in an eight cubic foot box, two feet on every side ― take it to the airport, and fly it from place to place.   At each stop, I’d put my family in a motel, take the right front seat out of my vintage Volkswagen Beetle, go to the airport, get the box, bring it to the motel, unpack it, and then go to the customer. 

I met with twenty potential customers in two weeks.  It generated phenomenal excitement. Sadly, the findings weren’t persuasive back home.   At the annual division review, Packard asked us about the technology, and later, about the market.  The executives punted, saying they’d found few potential customers.   I wasn’t asked ― I was ‘just’ a designer, sans experience with marketing.  In a stentorian voice, Packard said: “When I come back next year, I don’t want to see this project in the lab.”

Told this verdict the next day, I was quite upset.  Our marketing manager, a talented, energetic voluble man, had said the sales forecast was thirty-one units, a number that enraged me.  I countered, saying that he’d missed by six percent, since he had not called my father, who wanted two units.

I argued for the applications; my R&D boss was courageous, granting an extra $60,000 for eight months to get to production.  When Packard returned a year later and saw it, he nearly had a stroke ― pounding the table, he bellowed : “I thought I said to kill this damn thing.”

I witlessly said, “No, sir.  You said when you came back, you didn’t want to see this in the lab.  It isn’t.  It’s in production.” 

The answer didn’t satisfy.

Results: Most paradigm shifts start slowly.  Three months after sales release, we had sold forty units, a pleasing if not rousing launch.  The new applications for this display box were compelling.  It became the first commercially available computer graphics CRT.  Beyond Alan Kay’s ‘personal computer’, Doug Engelbart bought one to experiment in the first demonstrated computer network in the famous “Mother of All Demos”.  It won a Hollywood Oscar for technical screen graphics, it was the surgery room display for Dr. Norman DeBakey’s first artificial heart transplant, and it was the basis for the TV space video of Neil Armstrong’s foot landing on the moon July 20, 1969.

These high-visibility successes were in the future – for the moment all we had were a few sales and a peeved CEO.

What did I learn?  Bring passion and dedication to your job, and never quit in the face of adversity.  Be willing to challenge ‘the rules’ – nothing good happens unless something happens first.