The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 45

Shockley was still estranged from Bardeen and Brattain, but the atmosphere was cordial when they convened with their families in Stockholm for the awards ceremony. The chair of the Nobel committee used his speech to highlight the combination of individual genius and teamwork that was involved in the invention of the transistor. He called it a “supreme effort of foresight, ingenuity and perseverance, exercised individually and as a team.” Late that night, Bardeen and Brattain were having drinks at the bar of the Grand Hotel when, shortly after midnight, Shockley walked in. They had barely spoken to him for six years, but they put their differences aside and invited him to join their table.

When Shockley returned from Stockholm, his head was swelled but his insecurities were undiminished. In a talk to coworkers, he noted that it was “about time” that his contributions were recognized. The atmosphere at the firm “deteriorated very rapidly,” Last observed, until it began to resemble “a big psychiatric institute.” Noyce told Shockley of the “general feeling of resentment” that was accumulating, but his warning had little effect.⁶⁵

Shockley’s unwillingness to share credit made it hard for him to create a spirit of collaboration. When some of his employees wrote papers to be presented at the American Physical Society in December 1956, the month after he had received his Nobel, Shockley required that his name be listed on them all as a coauthor. The same was true on most patent applications coming out of his firm. Yet he insisted, somewhat contradictorily, that there was truly only one real inventor of any device, because “there’s only one light bulb to go on in somebody’s head.” Any other people involved, he added, were “mere helpers.”⁶⁶ His own experience with the team that invented the transistor should have disabused him of such a notion.

Shockley’s ego caused him to clash not only with subordinates but also with his nominal boss and owner, Arnold Beckman. When Beckman flew up for a meeting about the need to control costs, Shockley surprised everyone by declaring in front of the entire senior staff, “Arnold, if you don’t like what we’re doing up here I can take this group and get support any place else.” He then stormed out of the room, leaving his owner humiliated in front of the staff.

Thus Beckman was attentive when he was called in May 1957 by Gordon Moore, who had been tapped by other restless colleagues to present their grievances. “Things aren’t going well up there, are they?” Beckman asked.

“No, they really are not,” replied Moore, who assured Beckman that the top staff would stay if Shockley quit.⁶⁷ The reverse was also true, Moore warned; if Shockley was not replaced by a competent manager, the staff would likely leave.

Moore and his colleagues had recently seen The Caine Mutiny, and they started plotting against their own Captain Queeg.⁶⁸ Over the next few weeks, in a series of secret meetings and dinners with Beckman and seven disgruntled top staffers led by Moore, a deal was hammered out to move Shockley into a senior consulting role with no management duties. Beckman took Shockley to dinner and informed him of the change.

At first Shockley acquiesced. He would allow Noyce to manage the lab and confine his own duties to offering ideas and strategic advice. But then he changed his mind. It was not in Shockley’s nature to cede control. Plus, he had qualms about Noyce’s executive ability. He told Beckman that Noyce would not be an “aggressive leader” or decisive enough, and there was some merit to that criticism. Shockley may have been too driven and decisive, but Noyce, who was naturally congenial and accommodating, could have benefited from a dose of toughness. A key challenge for managers is how to strike a balance between being decisive and being collegial, and neither Shockley nor Noyce got the calibration precise.

When forced to choose between Shockley and the staff, Beckman got cold feet. “With one of my misdirected feelings of loyalty, I felt I owed Shockley and should give him enough of a chance to prove himself,” Beckman later explained. “If I had known what I know now, I would have said goodbye to Shockley.”⁶⁹ Beckman stunned Moore and his supporters with his decision. “Beckman essentially told us, ‘Shockley’s the boss, take it or leave it,’?” Moore recalled. “We discovered a group of young PhDs couldn’t push aside a new Nobel Prize winner very easily.” A revolt became inevitable. “We were just completely sandbagged, and we realized then we had to leave,” said Last.⁷⁰

Abandoning an established enterprise to start a rival was rather unusual back then, so it took some courage. “The business culture that existed in this country was that you go to work for a company, and you stay with that company, and you retire with that company,” observed Regis McKenna, who became a marketing maven for technology firms. “This was what traditional East Coast—and even Midwestern—American values were.” That’s no longer true, of course, and the Shockley rebels contributed to the cultural shift. “It looks easy nowadays because we have a tradition—largely set in motion by those guys—where it’s accepted in this town,” said Michael Malone, a historian of Silicon Valley. “You’re better off to go out and start your own company and fail than it is to stick at one company for thirty years. But that wasn’t true in the 1950s. It must’ve been scary as hell.”⁷¹

Moore rallied the rebel contingent. There were seven of them at first—Noyce had not yet enlisted—and they decided to form their own company. But that required funding. So one of them, Eugene Kleiner, wrote a letter to his father’s stockbroker at the venerable Wall Street brokerage firm Hayden, Stone & Co. After describing their credentials, he declared, “We believe that we could get a company into the semiconductor business within three months.” The letter ended up on the desk of Arthur Rock, a thirty-year-old analyst who had been succeeding with risky investments since his days at Harvard Business School. Rock convinced his boss, Bud Coyle, that it was worth a trip west to investigate.⁷²

When Rock and Coyle met with the seven in San Francisco’s Clift Hotel, they found one thing missing: a leader. So they urged the rebels to recruit Noyce, who was resisting because of his feeling of commitment to Shockley. Moore was finally able to persuade him to come to the next meeting. Rock was impressed: “As soon as I saw Noyce I was struck by his charisma, and I could tell he was their natural leader. They deferred to him.”⁷³ At that meeting, the group, including Noyce, made a pact that they would all leave together to form a new firm. Coyle pulled out some crisp new dollar bills, which they signed as a symbolic contract with each other.

It was hard to get money, especially from established corporations, to start a completely independent company. The idea of seed funding for startups was not yet well established; that important innovation would have to wait, as we shall see, until the next time Noyce and Moore leaped into a new venture. So they searched for a corporate sponsor that might set them up as a semiautonomous division, just as Beckman had done with Shockley. Over the next few days, the cabal pored over the Wall Street Journal and came up with a list of thirty-five firms that might adopt them. Rock started making calls when he got back to New York, but to no avail. “None of them were willing to take on a separate company division,” he recalled. “They felt that their own employees would have problems with it. We had a couple of months of doing this and were about to give up, when someone suggested that I see Sherman Fairchild.”⁷⁴

It was a fine match. Fairchild, the owner of Fairchild Camera and Instrument, was an inventor, playboy, entrepreneur, and the largest single stockholder in IBM, which his father had cofounded. A great tinkerer, as a Harvard freshman he invented the first synchronized camera and flash. He went on to develop aerial photography, radar cameras, specialized airplanes, methods to illuminate tennis courts, high-speed tape recorders, lithotypes for printing newspapers, color engraving machines, and a wind-resistant match. In the process, he added a second fortune to his inheritance, and he was as joyful spending it as he had been making it. He frequented the 21 Club and the El Morocco nightclub wearing (in the words of Fortune) “a fresh pretty girl every few days like a new boutonniere,” and he designed for himself a futuristic house on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with glass walls and ramps overlooking an atrium garden with green ceramic-clad rocks.⁷⁵