Free Hooking Up by Tom Wolfe

division, the problem was not routed up a hierarchy to a layer of executives who oversaw both departments. Instead, “councils,” made up of people already working on the line in the divisions that were affected, would meet and work it out themselves. The councils moved horizontally, from problem to problem. They had no vested power. They were not governing bodies but coordinating councils.
    Noyce was a great believer in meetings. The people in each department or work unit were encouraged to convene meetings whenever the spirit moved them. There were rooms set aside for meetings at Intel, and they were available on a first come, first served basis, just like the parking spaces. Often meetings were held at lunchtime. That was not a policy; it was merely an example set by Noyce. There were no executive lunches at Intel. Back East, in New York, executives treated lunch as a daily feast of the nobility, a sumptuous celebration of their eminence, in the Lucullan expense-account restaurants of Manhattan. The restaurants in the East and West Fifties of Manhattan were like something out of a dream. They recruited chefs from all over Europe and the Orient. Pasta primavera, saucisson, sorrel mousse, homard cardinal, terrine de legumes Montesquieu, paillard de pigeon, medallions of beef Chinese Gordon, veal Valdostana, Verbena roast turkey with Hayman sweet potatoes flown in from the eastern shore of Virginia, raspberry soufflé, baked Alaska, zabaglione, pear torte, crème brûlée—and the wines! and the brandies! and the port! the Sambucca! the cigars! and the decor!—walls with lacquered woodwork and winking mirrors and sconces with little pleated peach-colored shades, all of it designed
by the very same decorators who walked duchesses to parties for Halston on Eaton Square!—and captains and maître d’s who made a fuss over you in movie French in front of your clients and friends and fellow overlords!—it was Mount Olympus in mid-Manhattan every day from 12:30 to 3 p.m., and you emerged into the pearl-gray light of the city with such ambrosia pumping through your veins that even the clotted streets with the garbagemen backing up their grinder trucks and yelling, “’Mon back,’mon back,’mon back,’mon back,” as if talking Urban Chippewa—even this became part of the bliss of one’s eminence in the corporate world! There were many chief executive officers who kept their headquarters in New York long after the last rational reason for doing so had vanished … because of the ineffable experience of being a CEO and having lunch five days a week in Manhattan!
    At Intel lunch had a different look to it. You could tell when it was noon at Intel because at noon men in white aprons arrived at the front entrance gasping from the weight of the trays they were carrying. The trays were loaded down with deli sandwiches and waxed cups full of drinks with clear plastic tops, with globules of Sprite or Diet Shasta sliding around the tops on the inside. That was your lunch. You ate some sandwiches made of roast beef or chicken sliced into translucent rectangles by a machine in a processing plant and then reassembled on the bread in layers that gave off dank whiffs of hormones and chemicals, and you washed it down with Sprite or Diet Shasta, and you sat amid the particle-board partitions and metal desktops, and you kept your mind on your committee meeting. That was what Noyce did, and that was what everybody else did.
    If Noyce called a meeting, then he set the agenda. But after that, everybody was an equal. If you were a young engineer and you had an idea you wanted to get across, you were supposed to speak up and challenge Noyce or anybody else who didn’t get it right away. This was a little bit of heaven. You were face-to-face with the inventor, or the co-inventor, of the very road to El Dorado, and he was only forty-one years old, and he was listening to you. He had his head down and his eyes beamed up at you, and he was