Dealers of Lightning

t—“technology transfer,” as it was known i

If any of the researchers possessed the skills to be the next Bob Taylor, no one would ever find out

PARC management—prevented the center from spotting and nurturing management talent among the CSL staff.

” management structure, which meant that every researcher in the Computer Science Lab reported to him rather than to an intermediate level of management, had outlived its usefulness. In the old days it had served the purpose of ensuring that all the researchers pulled together in pursuit of a coherent

, here’s a thirty-five or forty-year-old man, a Ph.D., and he needs Bob Taylor to tell him how he’s going to play tennis!”

a consensus manager he was extraordinary.”

more Spencer investigated, the grimmer he found the situation. Pake’s strategy of isolating Taylor by sundering PARC in two had exacerbated the schism, not resolved it. “At every staff meeting power grabs and disputes over resources dominated the discussion,” he observed. “Computer resources, office space, budget—you name it, they fought over it. It was so acrimonious and divisive that the center had ground to a halt while people spent all their time defending their turf.”

probes. It was his old problem at Ford (“Not much of your stuff gets on a car, does it, Jack?”),

the economics of product development—the indispensable second half of “R&D.”

Tribus realized within a few weeks of his arrival in Rochester that Xerox executives did not define their business as making copiers, but rather as making money.