They came in on Sunday, too. People had been working 12 hours a day, six days a week; now they came in seven days, and instead of going home at midnight, they stayed until two in the morning. Gone were the days when they could grab a sandwich and a couple of video games at the Inner Space Deli down the street. They had to look at their watches to figure out what day of the week it was. "Sometimes you'd be in a meeting and you'd find out the guy next to you hadn't been home for 24 hours," Mayberry says. People actually wore their buttons, and if a person with a "Priority" button had a question for a person with a "How Can I Help?" button, the "How Can I Help?" person dropped whatever he was doing.
Gibson flew down to talk to the layout vendor, and decided to start another company working on the same design. He visited other vendors, telling them Sequent's life depended on them. He offered cash bonuses to get them to complete the work in record time -- 2 weeks instead of 4 or 6 weeks, and once even 2 weeks instead of 12 weeks. When a vendor came through on a particularly tough schedule, Gibson sent the company a singing telegram.
Rodgers took off his tie, sat down in front of a terminal, and only got up to go to the bathroom and to find out what was going on. Every afternoon around four o'clock, he and Mayberry would stroll by the cubicle of each person with a red button and ask what that person had done that day. Was it what he had said he would do? Was it the most important thing?Did he have any problems? Could anyone help? It made an engineer think twice about talking for more than 30 seconds over a cup of coffee, or taking off more than 24 hours for Christmas.
The visits helped draw attention to the task that needed to be done -- but they worked because the help offered was not just symbolic. When he had problems, Shelton says, "I told them what they were, and they fixed them. I'd say, 'We really need another logic analyzer, and it costs $18,000.' Or, 'We're standing around waiting to get onto the engineering workstations, and they cost $60,000 or $90,000.' In 18 hours they'd get us a rental, and then if we really needed another one, they'd buy it. The people who control the money at most companies don't even know what the problems are."
Soon it was apparent that the group was catching up.
It was dark inside the cake, and Casey Powell was shivering.
The date was January 17, 1984, Sequent's first anniversary, and Powell had lost a bet.
By the end of December, when the hardware engineers were clearly making up lost time, Barbara Gaffney had decided the time was ripe for a small wager, which became known as "The Challenge." As keeper of the culture, Gaffney was partially responsible for seeing that company milestones were celebrated with all the ceremony the occasions warranted. She talked to Dave Rodgers, who was all in favor of the idea, provided the stakes were more humiliating than the usual dinner or lunch.
If the hardware group met its deadline, Rodgers suggested, they should make their president jump out of a cake with "due pomp, circumstance, and little else." Gaffney had the proposal drawn up with scrolls and flourishes. The document was signed by the hardware engineers and presented to Powell at a company meeting.
The deadline had been met. Now the hardware engineers -- with a crowd of other Sequent employees, about 50 in all -- were waiting in the manufacturing area to see him jump naked out of this cake.
"Wheel me out," Powell yelled. "I am not going to do this."
"I have a small piece of attire for you to use," said Dave Rodgers. The top of the cake was cracked open, and in floated a paper towel. Powell could hear the hardware engineers laughing.
"Will it cover?" Rodgers asked.
"Wheel me out," Powell yelled.
"No," Rodgers said."This is it."
Flashbulbs popped, a videotape rolled, and one of the women looked away as Rodgers lifted the top of the cake, then opened the sides. The president of Sequent Computer Systems stood up wearing the red yarn wig, the bulbous red nose, and the puffy suit of Bozo the Clown.
"The real Casey Powell!" someone called out through the applause.
Lights reflected off Powell's glasses. He pushed up the mask, shook the hands of the hardware group, and said he had never had more pleasure losing a bet in his life. A champagne cork popped.
The hardware challenge was just the first of many. Sequent went on to complete its second round of financing for $7.5 million. There was a software challenge, and it was Roger Swanson's turn to buy the pizzas. In September, the company unveiled its first product, the Balance 8000, and began shipping units out for independent testing. In December, it shipped its first boxes for revenue. One potential investor called the testing companies and told Sequent that the evaluations he got were the best he had ever heard. Last March, Sequent completed its third round of financing for $10 million.
By this time, members the sales force were working on yet another challenge, which would turn them into "bound serfs" at the next anniversary party if they didn't meet their sales goals. And Powell's Bozo wig had long since taken its place in the artifacts case, next to the Dom Perignon bottle.
"Was it really a motivator?" Mayberry reflects. "No. We did wheel in a cake. Casey did jump out. It was something to talk about. Some people thought it was a bit hokey. But it was a focus.
"In retrospect, it was an event in the corporate culture."
