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

did. Of the thirty engineers who took the test, only two registered as “supportives” and two more were “analyticals.” The rest were “controllers.”
    The second test required Clark’s engineers to answer 250 questions designed to further parse their psyches. The results were laid out on a pie chart with twelve slices. Again, each slice of pie represented a different personality type. The psychologist had odd little names for these, too: “humanistic,” “optimistic,” “vague,” and so on. When the chart was completely filled in, eleven of the categories remained empty. The names of all the engineers were crammed into a single sliver of pie. “Highly oppositional,” it was labeled. (That is when it occurred to the engineers where their new CEO got his lingo.)
    Afterward each engineer was required to explain his psychological profile. That is where tempers finally flared: the charge that they were “highly oppositional” actually pleased a lot of Clark’s engineers. To this day it pleases them. For instance, Tom Davis, one of the seven founding engineers who had followed Clark out of Stanford, says, “Their definition of oppositional was basically someone who stuck to his guns. That’s clearly a bad trait if you stick to your guns when you’re clearly wrong, but at the time it was probably the best group of engineers I’d ever seen assembled, and everyone knew that they were almost always right. From my point of view, they had exactly the right qualities to produce great products—they were almost always right, and if you disagreed, you had a big argument to change their minds. But if you were right, after some struggle they almost always would. If somebody insists that 2 + 2 = 5, I’ll never back down, no matter how bad it makes them feel. I think that the shrink thought that you should. In nonengineering areas where things are a lot fuzzier, giving in more often is clearly a reasonable thing to do.”
    The psychologist ran the subsequent three-day drill like an AA meeting. He asked each of Clark’s engineers to stand up, explain how he scored on his test, and tell everyone else how he planned to change. The second test, which the shrink kept calling “the instrument,” had reduced each engineer’s personality to a three-dimensional “shape,” which turned out to be a piece of paper with warts and divots and ridges. One of the company’s founders grabbed his shape and led off. He rose and said that he had spent his whole life getting himself to the point where he could tell someone he was an idiot and that he had no intention of changing that now. Did anyone want to fight about it? The other engineers cheered. Another engineer said that he had figured out how the questions related to the profile, and he wanted to take the test again so he could get a perfect score. The shrink insisted that there was no such thing as a perfect score. “He went on and on and on how there is no right answer,” says Rocky Rhodes. “How this was just for us to get to know each other better. That there were no bad people and no bad shapes. That there was nothing judgmental about it. It was just a shape. You sat in front of the group on a little chair and held up your shape. One by one. Then Greg Chesson walks up and the shrink almost gasps. He says, ‘Wow! that’s perfect!’”
    One way of viewing Silicon Graphics in the mid-1980s is as an answer to a pair of questions. The first question was: If an extraordinarily willful human being with great technical aptitude is permitted to create a large business organization, how will that organization behave? By 1984 everyone understood that it would behave like Jim Clark, which is to say that it would behave as no big, successful American company had ever behaved. It would be a loose collection of argumentative, brilliant, bullheaded engineers who might or might not make money but almost certainly would build something wonderful.
    The second question was: How would