But Sequent was neither large nor established.
Roger Shelton first heard that the hardware schedule was in serious trouble in early November. Like most of the other hardware engineers, Shelton had spent the previous few months buried in the design of his own piece of the machine, and although he was vaguely aware that "things were not happening as quickly as we had thought," he had not stopped to worry about the bigger picture.
Shelton, like everyone else at Sequent, had a computer terminal on his desk. Important messages were announced by the terminal with a little beep, then green letters would run across the screen in a ribbon like a news flash on television. Although most of the messages had something to do with food -- the morning cookies have just come in, or there is popcorn in the kitchen -- the message that Friday afternoon announced an ad hoc, allemployee meeting in the cafeteria.
There were not enough chairs, so most people stood. Powell was direct: They were behind. They were approaching a big, externally visible milestone -- their first anniversary, a key board of directors meeting, and the deadline for providing the first physical proof that the company could do what it said it would do. If they kept moving at their current rate, the hardware would not be up and running until February 15, which was not good enough. They were starting to go out for their second round of financing, and beginning to talk to customers. They had to have working hardware by January 17.
Powell had talked to Gibson, Wade, and Rodgers, and they all thought it could be done. But it was going to take the help of every person in the company. This was not some big corporation where, if they were a month late, they were a month late. If this hardware wasn't finished on time, their desks and chairs might go away. The bank might come for their terminals and their CAD machines.
To keep attention focused on the problem, Powell had had buttons made up. He and Gibson and Wade and most of the rest of the company would wear green "How Can I Help?" buttons. Rodgers and the engineers on the critical path would get red "Priority" buttons. People with green buttons were to do anything to remove obstacles for the people on the critical path, whether it was getting them coffee, registering their cars, or talking to the vendors that were supposed to be supplying them with parts and services. These were all obstacles, he said, all the same. All obstacles had to be removed.
Powell passed out the buttons, and everyone went back to work. The whole thing took less than 15 minutes. The buttons cost $73.50. And every person in the company now knew what had to be done.
Shelton went back to his desk with a red "Priority" button pinned to his shirt. Although Powell had presented the buttons as a device to make the rest of the company aware of the gravity of the situation, Shelton and the other hardware engineers got another not-so-subtle message. "I think it was a way to make sure we understood how important what we were doing was," explains one engineer.
"We were already working hard," says Shelton, "but now there was this sense of 'Gee, we really need to get done."
It was symbolic management in action. Powell hadn't solved the problem; in fact he hadn't even defined it. (Rodgers had done that in his regular meetings with the director of hardware and his wanderings around the engineering cubicles.) He had merely clarified the company's priorities and driven a stake into the ground.
Powell didn't even go to the second meeting, scheduled for the next day, a Saturday. Neither did Gibson or Wade. This meeting, which lasted three hours, was for the hardware engineers; their director, Walt Mayberry; their vice-president, Dave Rodgers; and two guests, Barbara Gaffney and Roger Swanson. Gaffney was there because she knew the people in the company well enough to suggest who might help. Swanson was offering the services of the software group.
Mayberry, a quiet man with glassess and carefully trimmed hair, started by presenting the historical data -- how they had fallen behind -- and the new schedule, which he described as "reasonably aggressive, but possible." But Shelton and most of the other hardware engineers thought the situation was out of their control. A hardware engineer designing a circuit board first develops a set of schematics that describe the logic of the board, then designs the placement of the components on the board. Then, at a small company like Sequent, he sends this design out to a layout vendor, which lays out the design to scale and makes a "physical interconnect" for the photographic mask from which the physical boards are fabricated. Shelton had sent out a board to a California vendor in September, and although the standard layout time was four to six weeks, the board had still not come back. Another vendor had laid out another engineer's design incorrectly and sent Sequent a chip that didn't work. The company would fix the chip, it said, but it would probably take another eight weeks.The engineers didn't see anything they could do.
What Powell, Gibson, Rodgers, and Wade were telling them, said Mayberry, was that the whole company was going to pitch in. It was OK to take risks, OK to spend money to get things done, OK to insist that the vendors deliver what was promised. Rodgers was working on the design. Gibson had volunteered to talk to vendors. But they needed the engineers to tell them where they could help.
One engineer said that if someone else could design a piece of test software, he could concentrate on a more critical task. Another engineer had once seen boards laid out in a week, but he was pretty sure it had cost a lot of money. They spent an awful lot of time in meetings, another engineer pointed out. As the engineers offered suggestions, Mayberry wrote them down. After the meeting was over, everyone went back to work.
