The Silicon Jungle by David H. Rothman
3. Motivated them by explaining how their new computer skills would make
1037 words | Chapter 77
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:
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