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He was a master of parsimony and the sworn enemy of its opposite, which he called “biggerism.
The governing principle of PARC was that the place existed to give their employer that ten-year head start on the future. They even contrived a shorthand phrase to explain the concept. The Alto, they said, was a time machine.
explosive creativity. One was Xerox’s money, a seemingly limitless cascade of cash flowing from its near-monopoly on the office copier. The second was a buyer’s market for high-caliber research talent.
The third factor was the state of computer technology, which stood at a historic inflection point. The old architectures of mainframe computers and time-sharing systems were reaching the limits of traditional technologies, and new ones were just coming into play—semiconductor memories that offered huge gains in speed and economics, for example, and integrated circuits that allowed the science’s most farsighted visionaries to realize their dreams for the first time.
The final factor was management. PARC was founded by men whose experience had taught them that the only way to get the best research was to hire the best researchers they could find and leave them unburdened by directives, instructions, or deadlines. For the most part, the computer engineers of PARC were exempt from corporate imperatives to improve Xerox’s existing products. They had a different charge: to lead the company into new and uncharted territory.
“It’s a lot better to work for Bob,” he observed, “than to have Bob working for you.”
Which organ provides the greatest bandwidth in terms of its access to the human brain? Obviously, the eyeball.
The daily discussions unfolded in a pattern that remained peculiar to Taylor’s management style for the rest of his career. Each participant got an hour or so to describe his work. Then he would be thrown to the mercy of the assembled court like a flank steak to a pack of ravenous wolves.
“This way I would get insights about their strengths or weaknesses that otherwise might be hidden from me,” he said. “If there were technical weak spots, they would almost always surface under these conditions. It was very, very healthy.”
But it was not to be personal. Impugning a man’s thinking was acceptable, but never his character.
The trick in refereeing among powerful faculty with their overdeveloped intellects and underdeveloped social graces was to remain unyieldingly impartial. When all else fails, split everything down the middle.
entitled “As We May Think,” which appeared in the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.
