Free The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story by Michael Lewis

Graphics. He and Clark taken together were proof of the limits of physiognomy. To look at them, they could have been brothers—tall and blond with wire-rimmed spectacles perched on surprisingly delicate features. To watch them in action, you would think they came from different planets. Hewlett-Packard was the closet thing in the Valley to an enormous gray corporation, and Ed McCracken was the Valley’s version of the Organization Man. He had mastered the unnaturally sincere tone of voice of the Professional Man. When he wished to indicate seriousness, he dropped his chin down into his throat. When he took you aside to have a word, he looked and sounded as if he was giving a speech to an audience of a thousand people. To stress his points, which were rarely pointed or stressful, he’d press his thumb against his index finger as if he had just caught a fly by its wing. He wore suits. He hated strife. He loved consensus, or at any rate the idea of it.
    For many of the founding engineers it was the first experience with a Serious American Executive, and with the vaguely phony emotional postures that seem to be, for whatever reason, necessary for the success of the leader of a large organization. “He came off as being awkward and manipulative,” says Mark Grossman. “There was no idle chitchat.” “He had a weird way of using silence in conversation,” says Kurt Akeley. “Ed was one of those people who likes to design questionnaires for others to fill out,” a third engineer says. McCracken liked to deal with people indirectly, through intermediaries. As yet another of the engineers who left Stanford with Clark to found Silicon Graphics puts it, “Ed had this phrase for all our problems. He said we were ‘highly oppositional.’” It was that phrase—“highly oppositional”—that stuck in people’s minds.
    In late 1984 McCracken took over the company from Clark, who stayed on as chairman, whatever that meant. He looked at the books and discovered that the company had only seven million dollars left, and was running through money at the rate of two million a month, which meant it had exactly three and a half more months to run. He cast one long look at the contentious engineers and their warring opinions. He decided that Jim Clark’s corporate culture needed more than a chief executive officer. It needed a therapist.
    McCracken hired a corporate psychologist. The psychologist together with forty Silicon Graphics employees, including the senior engineers and their leader, Jim Clark, retreated for three days to a resort not far outside of the Valley. There they submitted to a battery of psychological tests designed to make them better Organization Men.
    Before the retreat Clark and his engineers were required to find two people to fill out psychological evaluations on their behalf, and mail them to the corporate psychologist, confidentially. Once they’d gathered together at the resort, the engineers filled out two more forms. The first was designed to classify them into one of four psychological types. These types probably said more about psychology as filtered through the American business mind than about the engineers. At any rate, the tests broke the world down into introverts and extroverts, then into right-brained versions and left-brained versions. The four types were given the following names:
    introvert + right brained = “supportive”
    introvert + left brained = “analytical”
    extrovert + right brained = “promoter”
    extrovert + left brained = “controller”
    Depending on the degree to which you possessed these qualities, you were classified as a “strong” or “weak” version of your type. Ed McCracken was a “weak analytical.” Jim Clark was a “strong controller.” (As Clark recalls it, “The psychologist determined that everyone else on the executive committee was passive aggressive and I was just aggressive.”) The engineers Clark had hired all scored pretty much the same as he