Book Review: The Soul of a New Machine
Yes, that’s right: leave it to me to review a book that is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its original publication. I had heard of Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine before and it finally made its way to the top of the pile on my nightstand. Kidder’s book tells the story of a small group of managers and engineers at Data General corporation who, in 1979-1980, designed and built the company’s first 32-bit minicomputer, a machine that essentially saved the company (for the time being). There is probably little point in writing a full-fledged review of this now-famous study of leadership, engineering, and technology, but I will share a couple of quick reflections:
First of all, it is evident to anyone who reads this book that in twenty-five years we have come an awfully long way in our understanding of computers and the expansion of the role that they play in our lives defies description. Kidder devotes entire paragraphs to explanations of computer terms that are understood by second-graders today. The word “software” actually appears in quotes the first time it appears in the text, as though it is some obscure technical term understood by only a tiny cadre of specialists - which, at the time, is exactly what it was. Reading this book, one has the sense of traveling back in time to a period at the end of innocence, the final year or two before we came to know the TRS-80, Apple II, and IBM PC. Towards the end, Kidder recounts speaking with one of the Eagle team members in a cafe in Manhattan and observing the world outside:
“Sitting there, observing the more familiar chaos of a New York City street, I was struck by how unnoticeable the computer revolution was…. Computers were everywhere, of course — in the cafe’s beeping cash registers and the microwave oven and the jukebox, in the traffic lights, under the hoods of the honking cars snarled out there on the street (despite those traffic lights), in the airplanes overhead — but the visible differences somehow seemed insignificant.”
I suppose it’s safe to say that those changes aren’t so invisible anymore. I would imagine that that same cafe in midtown today features wi-fi hotspots and a number of patrons clicking away at laptops, talking on cell phones, and working their Blackberries and Palms. And the interesting thing is that all of those people know so much more about these complex tools than did their predecessors, but they think nothing of it.
To view Soul of a New Machine only as a book about computers, though, is to miss the forest for the trees. In fact, I first heard about Kidder’s work in a book that I was reading for a graduate school course on educational administration. It’s really about how organizations function to achieve a goal, how a leader can help a small group of people working within the context of a large and sometimes stifling organizational structure to come together and produce something that is greater than the sum of the parts. In that respect, this story about engineers working in a Massachusetts basement in 1979 resonates in the faculty rooms of 2006. This was a group of men (the only woman mentioned in the book is the group’s secretary) who, in return for relatively low salaries and little recognition, threw themselves into a project that many outsiders felt could only end in failure. More importantly, it is the story of how their boss, a folk-singer-turned-computer-engineer named Tom West, was able to channel their passion in such a way as to get a machine built and out the door, while he himself harbored tremendous doubt and anxiety.
After reading the book, one appreciates how organizational culture can bolster or inhibit creativity and productivity. To what extent do you allow people to play and experiment? How do you deal with interpersonal conflict? How does a group of people work together to complete a project that is too large and complex for any one of them to understand by him or herself? Working with very rudimentary tools - only logbooks and telephones - these engineers collaborated to create a powerful machine that would define the state of the art. Why can’t a group of 60 teachers work together to revise a curriculum or help a struggling student get to the end of the year? Corporate/School comparisons always leave me uneasy but I think there is much for educational leaders to learn from Kidder’s book.
Presumably, the “new machine” in the title of the book is the Data General Eclipse MV/8000. But, when one considers the passion of the people who created it, their crazed desire to push the envelope and to do so on their own terms, the way that they owned that computer, the “soul” that is being described might just as well be that of the machine I am sitting at right now and the millions of others like it that have transformed the way we work and play. It’s worth reading this book to understand how we got here and how a group of people can work together to turn an ambitious dream into an everyday reality.
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