The Silicon Jungle by David H. Rothman

them happier—and richer, since he paid them more, once their productivity increased. Esther King, his middle-aged office manager, a bright, down-to-earth high school graduate, actually may have been as responsible for his training methods as he was. She tried to hire only people who’d benefit from some quick lessons followed by intensive self-instruction. “Sometimes I’ll have them sit down at the computer,” she said of her employment interviews, “and I just turn it on and tell them to type. A lot of people, they’re afraid they’re going to hurt it. And you’re not going to hurt it. You can’t hurt it. So you mess up, and you get the wrong thing, and it says you made a ‘fatal error.’ So you just start over, and that’s the only way you’re going to learn—is sit down and not be afraid of it.” Jeanette Counsellor, at the time an employee of Hunt’s, didn’t just type on computers. She also knew how to juggle around thousands of dollars on electronic spreadsheets. And King herself boasted the ability to use computers to help project building costs, a useful skill since Hunt at the time was finishing construction of a water-theme park in North Carolina. What’s more, on the Apple, King helped Hunt do company tax work. By telephone—I talked to Hunt and his people several times—I asked point-blank why he’d been so successful in getting staffers running on computers. “I told them,” he said, “how it would be useful for the rest of their careers to be able to say, ‘I’ve worked with a computer and I’ve word processed.’” His people didn’t mess with BASIC, just skills directly useful in their work. “I showed them,” said Hunt, “how computers could save them a lot of time and trouble in the amount of rewrites I do. I put it to them as a challenge.” “I was ready to learn,” said Counsellor, who had taken a data-processing course at a community college but had never before used a computer. “I was looking for a job that would train me to do this sort of thing.” Although your people may need more guidance than Hunt’s staffers in learning computer skills, you can take heart in the results of a poll reported in _InfoWorld_. Of 500 personnel managers and over 500 clerical employees, 87 percent said “on-the-job training to learn new technologies” is important. Micros and the Data-Processing Department Bertini and the employees in Hunt’s office were lucky—the powers-that-be were encouraging the introduction and use of micros. Within American corporations, however, many data-processing departments have looked askance at small computers. They’ve seen them as a threat to their power. So American executives have bought millions of dollars of “typewriters” and “adding machines” from computer stores, hoping to fool Data Processing (DP) and bookkeepers. One man lost his job after Data Processing wouldn’t let executives buy micros and he falsified an expense voucher to smuggle in an Apple. Dishonest? Yes. But a micro martyr, too. This atmosphere may be changing, of course. As early as 1983 _Computerworld_ reported that of 220 data-processing managers replying to a poll, 62 percent said they would encourage the use of personal computers. Beware of the De Mille Syndrome, however. It’s the fondness of many data-processing managers for what one consultant calls a “Cecil B. De Mille production” with “a cast of thousands, millions of dollars and years in the making.”[32] Footnote 32: _Computerworld_, March 28, 1983. The poor, ignorant people outside Data Processing, meanwhile, can’t enjoy all the micros or advice they need. “Last year,” went a plaintive letter to a computer columnist, “we purchased a microcomputer and VisiCorp’s VisiCalc software for the company accounting office. The micro was idle for about six months until someone decided to figure out how to use it. Since then, half a dozen people in our office and at least as many in other offices keep the system tied up.” But the firm’s computer people wouldn’t budget more machines even though the $5,000 micro in the accounting office had “paid for itself many times over.” The excuse from the computer pooh-bahs was this: several accounting systems were on the way that would do the job, and why allow micros to proliferate? “Money,” said the letter to the columnist, “has never been a question.”[33] Power, apparently, was. In that sense also, many data-processing biggies are like De Mille. Footnote 33: _Computerworld_, March 28, 1983. “Programmers in general are pretty control oriented, pretty methodical in nature,” said Adam Green, “and usually the most methodical, the most control-oriented person becomes the head of DP.” “If they like you, they’ll help you; if they don’t, they won’t,” said my friend Michael Canyes, who himself served time in data processing in government and private industry. And it isn’t just the De Mille desire for control that has dashed many an executive’s hopes for an office micro. It’s also their sheer ignorance at times. “Some data-processing managers started out ten or fifteen years ago when the field was growing,” Canyes said, “and stayed with their companies while more able people moved to others. They just were in the right revolving door at the right time. Many don’t know enough to get a job elsewhere. And they don’t understand the capabilities of micros and are afraid of them.” At United, Bennett’s executive micro course was geared toward the nontechnical, and yet he commendably wanted his top data-processing people included, too. “Many of them,” he said, “hadn’t touched a computer console or terminal for ten years and were quite surprised as to what a modern microcomputer can do.” They didn’t learn faster as a group, in fact, than did the other United executives. “If they’ve never used a word processor,” Bennett said, “why would they learn it faster than the guy next door?” ■ ■ ■ ‘How What do you do if you need Data Processing’s favor to buy a micro or set up an office network of them? Bennett has the good sense not to “tell somebody how they could do something in a political environment that I’m not familiar with.” Here, however, is my own reckless scenario for you. Do not sue if this advice makes you a micro martyr: