The Soul of a New Machine
Tracy Kidder, Back Bay Books, 2000 (first publication 1981)
Last Updated: 2nd February 2003 Sunday 11:07, Ankara
This is a the true story of a computer project in the late 70's. I would suggest "Death March" as a companion.
- "Adopting a remote, managerial point of view, you could say that the Eagle project was a case where a local system of management worked as it should: competition for resources creating within a team inside a company an entrepreneurial spirit, which was channeled in the right direction by constraints sent down from the top. But it seems more accurate to say that a group of engineers got excited about building a computer. Whether it arose by corporate bungling or by design, the opportunity had to be grasped. In this sense, the initiative belonged entirely to West and the members of his team. What's more, they did the work, both with uncommon spirit and for reasons that, in a most frankly commercial setting, seemed remarkably pure."
- "In The Nature of Gothic, John Ruskin describes the tendency of the industrial age to fragment work into tasks so trivial that they are fit to be performed only by the equivalent of slave labor."
- "Presumably the stonemasons who raised the cathedrals worked only partly for their pay. They were building temples to God. It was the sort of work that gave meaning to life."
- "...for even the most potentially interesting jobs to be meaningful, there must be managers who are willing to throw away the management handbooks and take some risks."
- "...West and other managers gave them enough freedom to invent, while at the same time guiding them toward success."
