Learning To Live With Micros

In the winter of 1979, Henry Lee was forced to referee a dispute between his vice-presidents for finance and operations. As he listened to them argue the pros and cons of buying a new computer, the president of Lee Pharmaceuticals realized that he knew too little about the whole world of computers. The thought had nagged him for some time, but the discussion that day made him realize, he says, that "I was a complete ignoramus. It was like trying to run a company where all the accounting and financial people spoke a foreign language."

It is a feeling shared by many chief executive officers. The technology seems promising, but its complexity leaves them confused and on the sidelines. For a variety of reasons -- time pressure, fear of keyboards, and a reluctance to appear "unboss-like" -- few CEOs or other top managers have even begun to comprehend the benefits of microcomputers for themselves, as managers, or for their companies. And fewer have begun to master them. Lee decided to do something about his problem.

Since founding Lee Pharmaceuticals, in South El Monte, Calif., eight years earlier, he had been able to devote most of his time to research and marketing for new dental products. But as sales climbed and the $12 million company moved into such areas as pesticides and health and beauty aids, Lee was forced to spend more time administering increasingly diverse operations. And he was uneasy. "I knew I wasn't getting the right kind of information," he ways. "The chief programmer knew little about business. He was doing things the way he felt they should be done, but I didn't like the style, frequency, or even the data in his reports."

Lee purchased a microcomputer in March, brought it home, and set it up on the dining room table. Over the next few months, he spent several hours a night working through the exercise manuals. "To see the way it would crunch the numbers on tables of data had me giggling hysterically," says Lee. "And I soon began to grasp what it could do on real problems."

Within nine months, he had bought 20 identical microcomputers for the company. He learned to' use his micro as a word processor and asked his technical people to do the same for all their written reports. Gradually, the personal computers also were integrated into such critical business functions as budgeting, market analysis, and planning, which Lee says has helped upgrade the quality of data and permitted more informed, timelier decisions.

With three years' experience -- including nights and weekends -- under his belt, Lee now says he had no alternative to becoming computer literate if he wanted to remain the boss: "The CEO has to know something about computers -- you can't separate administration from them."

Lee, at age 55, seems like someone who would lead the way for other CEOs as a charter member in the club of managerial computer literates. He received his bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later earned a doctorate in physical chemistry. Working for a division of Rockwell International Corp., moreover, Lee wrote technical instruction manuals for assembly and disassembly of turbomachinery for rocket engines.

In spite of this background, though, he had never trusted computers or computer reople. His negative feelings had been shaped during the 1960s. After leaving Rockwell he was executive vice-president and research director of Epoxylite Corp., from which Lee Pharmaceuticals was spun off in 1971. "I was always having run-ins with the data processing people," he recalls. "The headings on the reports they gave me didn't make sense. The office systems didn't make sense. And it was almost impossible to track down a new customer." Nor had Lee's low opinion of computers improved much by the time he hired a financial vice-president for Lee Pharmaceuticals in 1973. He remembers giving the new man special instructions: "I know you may need a computer, but be sure you don't make it too pervasive."

Lee was uneasy as he began to investigate microcomputers for himself. One day he stopped in at a Radio Shack outlet in a shopping mall. Although he was shopping for a videocassette recorder, the store's TRS-80s caught his attention. "I was very self-conscious about sitting at the terminal," he remembers. But he had the bug. Over the next three weeks he visited three more computer stores in the Pasadena area and quizzed salesmen at each. "I didn't want to wear out my welcome," he says with a grin.

When he finally decided to buy a TRS-80 one evening on his way home from work, Lee still proceeded with caution.The thought of taking his new computer home that night, unpacking the boxes, and relying solely on the manuals to tell him how to set it up made him anxious. "I asked the salesman to take me through a complete dry run," he recalls. "It's so much easier to be shown."

Lee had already made up his mind that the new computer would stay at home until he had mastered it. "You don't want to show off your ignorance if you can help it," he says. So he worked with his new machine -- a keyboard, a central processing unit, a screen, and a cassette tape storage unit -- at the dining room table.

The learning process took some time. "At first," he recalls, "I just wanted to get a feel for what modern computing was all about." Aside from working through the exercises in his instruction manual and learning some standard BASIC computer language commands, Lee did what hobbyists had done for years.He played a lot of chess with the computer.

Occasionally he would hit a tough spot. "In the early months so much of the language and the techniques didn't make sense," he says. Since Lee couldn't make the time available to take a course covering all the material, he relied on two Radio Shack salesmen who gave him their home phone numbers. "I called them maybe once a week," Lee says. "I had determined that it was worthwhile."

Lee had told no one at the company about his purchase for the first month. After the second month, he brought the machine to work and quickly began to preach its virtues. Then he brought in a second TRS-80 for his key employees to begin testing at home or in the office.