Today, some three years later, Mellinger's "country" exists. It is everything he envisioned and more. On an island in the Caribbean, four hours by air from New York City, Mellinger has imported the workers, the customers, the capital, the infrastructure. He's established a partnership with the island itself that suggests how a tiny developing nation can leapfrog right over the industrial stage of economic evolution into a global, technology-based, knowledge-driven future.
And still, while it's not every day that someone conjures a world, what matters most here is not the country Mellinger invented; it's the organizational model he created to invent the country: what you might call the antiheroic organization. His achievements may have folks who know him already making comparisons to the likes of Jobs and Scott McNealy and Gates--but meet Doug Mellinger and what you'll see is not the magnetically formidable leader that most entrepreneurial legends seem to be, but an ordinary guy, the founder as boy next door--the antihero's CEO.
Mellinger's greatest invention, it turns out, is an approach to business that helps us suddenly understand the limitations of the "heroic" organizations in which we all work, organizations fueled by the personal energy and vision of a single individual. His approach helps us see why getting our organizations to get things done--even the most mundane things--seems so hard. Why we too often feel that, damn it, we should have more to show for our efforts at the end of the day, month, quarter, or year. A bigger impact.
It's an approach to business that illuminates the great management question of the 1990s and beyond: We know how great things can be accomplished by a heroic leader, but how can--hell, forget the "how." Can organizations get great and important things done without a hero at the top?
To answer that question--to answer it definitively--one need only visit the country that Mellinger invented. Welcome to Barbados. Welcome to the 21st-century high-tech nation.
"IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME."
The programmers have arrived. Pamela Alleyne from Malaysia. Leslie Farquhar from Manitoba. Jawahar Desai from Bombay. In the past two years, more than 300 software engineers have immigrated to Barbados from all over the world. "Soon we will be 400," says Srinivasan Viswanathan ("Vishy," he insists), the president of PRT's island subsidiary, PRT/Barbados.
On first encounter, the place to which they've come is your standard-issue coral-and-limestone island--this one located at the southeastern extreme of the Caribbean, just wide of the hurricane track that has other West Indians boarding up their windows through late summer and fall. Beyond that, though, you and I wouldn't recognize the Barbados where PRT's new employees land. Nor would the locals. Nor would the tourists who room on the west-shore beaches (Pavarotti's favorites) for $600-plus a night. Because unlike the rest of us, PRT's crew gets The Life. Which is as good a place as any to start describing why, at an economic moment when their skills could get them jobs anyplace on earth, PRT's programmers come here.
"We always knew we'd have to provide the basics for them," says Mellinger of The Life. "Housing, transportation. But we had no idea where it was going to take us. It just grew."
Where it took them was toward the creation of an information-age company town. A place to live? Arranged for. Furnished? Natch. Medical care, insurance, legal concerns, banking affairs? All taken care of.
But what most of the new town's citizens are quickest to describe about the island is their arrival there. "The fridge, everybody loves the fridge," says Sabrina Fernandez. "Oh, and it's just so nice to be met," says Renuka Moilly. Aware of how disoriented most of the newcomers feel upon touching down (the majority of them after a 20-hour journey from Asia), PRT devised an arrival procedure that redefines the phrase "Pick you up at the airport." Your PRT host finds you, gets your bags, guides you through immigration, gives you a cash advance, and chauffeurs you to your freshly prepared home. There you receive greetings from neighbors, social invitations for after you've had some rest, and an instructional tour of the house's facilities, supplies, and appliances--with said tour ending at the refrigerator, which you find already stocked with your favorite foods. Welcome to Barbados.
Welcome to the worry-free, ready-built, turnkey life.
"I don't want them to have to think about anything but having fun and writing killer code," Mellinger likes to say now. And indeed, the setup looks comprehensively, well, " maternal," as Alleyne puts it. Even before the newcomers leave home, travel arrangements are handled for them, and careful advice is given about what they shouldn't forget to bring (a pressure cooker, spices, family photos). Later, on the island, employees' bills are paid. They get free transportation. Their savings pile up in the bank. (Although programmers' salaries are less than what they could make in a market like New York City, the "savings rate" for Barbados-based engineers equals what they could expect to net anywhere in the world, thanks to all the perks and benefits of the turnkey life.)
"In the mornings we play tennis," says a man from Bangalore. "Then we create software."
