“You may find a lot of controversy over how Bell Labs managed people,” John Mayo, the former Bell Labs president, says. “But keep in mind, I don’t think those managers saw it that way. They saw it as: How do you manage ideas? And that’s very different from managing people. So if you hear something negative about how John Pierce managed people, I’d say, well, that’s not surprising. Pierce wasn’t about managing people. Pierce was about managing ideas. And you cannot manage ideas and manage people the same way. It just doesn’t work. So if somebody tells you Pierce wasn’t a great manager . . . you
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