Sequent's founders thought that a strong corporate culture would be the key to success. They didn't have to wait long to see if they were right.
Tell us the bicycle story," a voice called out to the man in the pin-striped suit standing at the front of the room.
"No-o, not the bicycle story," another voice moaned.
It was early on the first Friday evening of September 1984, and 90-some employees of Sequent Computer Systems Inc. and their spouses and friends, in ties and jackets and silk dresses, were sitting on the carpet like kindergartners.
"You really want to hear it?" the man in the suit asked incredulously. He had sandy hair, a beard, thick glasses, and two buttons on his lapel; one said "Sequent=Easy to Do Business With," the other, "Casey Powell." He was Sequent's president. That afternoon, the Portland, Ore., company had introduced its first product, a new type of supermicrocomputer, and Powell had just shown an abbreviated version of the slide show he had been taking around to editors and industry gurus all week. The box itself, about the size of a dorm-room refrigerator, blinked red lights from a table behind him. There was wine to drink, stuffed mushrooms to eat, and five kinds of cheesecake in the next room, yet the people in front of him were asking for what sounded like a bedtime story.
"No," yelled a chorus of voices.
Powell cleared his throat, and several people reached for their wine.
"I'll tell the short version," he said, hooking his thumbs behind his lapels.
"Boy," said Powell. "Bicycle. One hundred dollars." People laughed.
The long version began "Once upon a time," and most people at Sequent knew it by heart. It was a hokey story Powell had made up about a little boy who wanted a bicycle more than anything else in the world -- and not just any old two-wheeler, but a "very flashy bike" that cost $100. Being "a real process person," this boy set himself "measurable goals" to make sure that at the end of the year he would have enough money to buy his bicycle. He figured that, giving himself two weeks off for vacation, he needed to save $2 a week, or 40? a day, or 5? an hour to earn the money in a year.The moral, of course, was the importance of setting goals and working hard for what you want.
Powell never told the end of the story -- even the beginning had become a joke -- but it was still a company ritual. Whenever Sequent reached a goal, a nickel would be dropped ceremoniously into a special jar.
For this particular occasion, Sequent's engineers had planned to buy a bicycle, which they would pass on to the marketing group to symbolize the transfer of responsibility for the company's progress. But money was tight, so Roger Swanson, the director of software, had borrowed a Schwinn Pixie from his daughter Kris. Swanson had attached plastic bugs to the handlebars, representing the problems the software people still had to work out. When Powell was finished with the story, Swanson wheeled out the bicycle and handed it over to Barbara Slaughter, the director of marketing.
People clapped, then stood up and wandered back to the wine and the stuffed mushrooms. "No, I'm not going to ride it," Slaughter said. "I'm wearing a skirt."
For an anthropologist trying to define the "corporate culture" at Sequent Computer Systems, the bicycle story would be a good place to start. Like much of the rest of Sequent's culture, Powell's fable was manipulative, self-conscious, even silly -- and carefully thought out to focus the attention of every person in the room where management wanted it, on the achievement of yet another milestone on the company's planned path to success.
An industrial Margaret Mead wouldn't have to stop with nickels and bicycles, however. There would be all kinds of strange artifacts and rituals to examine.
Take the red light on the manufacturing floor, which gets turned on whenever anyone finds a quality problem on a production line. The entire line then shuts down, with the red light burning day and night until the problem is solved.
Or take the objects displayed in the glass case next to the computer room: the Dom Perignon bottle that was emptied after the company was named for the second time; the photo of all the dogs, kids, spouses, and employees at the company's first annual camping trip; the silver baseball bat used by Gary Fielland, Sequent's computer architect, to tap the people he needed for the second product.
Sequent even held "culture classes." Three days before the company was to ship its first product, 22 employees spent an entire working day in a local motel talking about shaping their company's culture. "No" was not an acceptable R.S.V.P., even if the software wasn't debugged yet.
But most of all, a visiting anthropologist with his or her eyes even slightly open would soon see that at Sequent -- beyond any single artifact or ritual -- the culture is the company. As Barbara Slaughter puts it, "We really believe it's how we work together, not our technology, that's going to make to break us."
At the time Sequent was launched, in the winter of 1983, few presidents of companies were making up stories about little boys and flashy bicycles, but a growing number had begun to believe that a company's culture -- its values, its environment, and the way its people interacted -- was a major factor in its success or failure. That idea was not new. Early in this century and even before, people like Tom Watson, the founder of IBM Corp., and William Cooper Procter, one of the early leaders of Procter & Gamble Co., had talked about the importance of making a company a good place to work. Until recently, however, many of their pronouncements were viewed as quirks of autocratic or paternalistic personalities rather than as useful managerial tools.
But in the 1970s, attitudes began to change. Up the Organization, Theory Z, and other best-sellers focused attention on the importance of delegating responsibility and keeping people working toward common goals. In 1982, Terrence E. Deal, then a Harvard professor, and Allan A. Kennedy, a management consultant, came out with Corporate Cultures, a book that offers a conceptual framework for looking at the web of relationships and values that influence how people work. In brief anecdotes, the book describes how certain elements of a company's environment -- most notably the values a company espouses and its corporate rites and rituals, by they formal meetings or Friday afternoon beer busts -- interact in a variety of American corporate settings. A corporate leader, Kennedy and Deal said, could manage a company's values and rituals just as he managed a marketing program to help achieve corporate objectives. They dubbed the executives who did this "symbolic managers."
