Free Hooking Up by Tom Wolfe Page A

absorbing it all. He wasn’t a boss. He was
Gary Cooper! He was here to help you be self-reliant and do as much as you could on your own. This wasn’t a corporation … it was a congregation.
    By the same token, there were sermons and homilies. At Intel everyone—Noyce included—was expected to attend sessions on “the Intel Culture.” At these sessions the principles by which the company was run were spelled out and discussed. Some of the discussions had to do specifically with matters of marketing or production. Others had to do with the broadest philosophical principles of Intel and were explained via the Socratic method at management seminars by Intel’s number-three man, Andrew Grove.
    Grove would say, “How would you sum up the Intel approach?”
    Many hands would go up, and Grove would choose one, and the eager communicant would say, “At Intel you don’t wait for someone else to do it. You take the ball yourself and you run with it.”
    And Grove would say, “Wrong. At Intel you take the ball yourself and you let the air out and you fold the ball up and put it in your pocket. Then you take another ball and run with it, and when you’ve crossed the goal you take the second ball out of your pocket and reinflate it and score twelve points instead of six.”
    Grove was the most colorful person at Intel. He was a thin man in his mid-thirties with tight black curls all over his head. The curls ran down into a pair of muttonchops that seemed to run together like goulash with his mustache. Every day he wore either a turtleneck jersey or an open shirt with an ornamental chain dangling from his neck. He struck outsiders as the epitome of a style of the early 1970s known as California Groovy. In fact, Grove was the epitome of the religious principle that the greater the freedom—for example, the freedom to dress as you pleased—the greater the obligation to exercise discipline. Grove’s own groovy outfits were neat and clean. The truth was, he was a bit of a bear on the subject of neatness and cleanliness. He held what he called “Mr. Clean inspections,” showing up in various work areas wearing his muttonchops and handlebar mustache and his Harry Belafonte shirt and the gleaming chainwork, inspecting offices for books stacked too
high, papers strewn over desktops, doing everything short of running a white glove over the shelves, as if this were some California Groovy Communal version of Parris Island. Grove was also the inspiration for such items as the performance ratings and the Late List. Each employee received a report card periodically with a grade based on certain presumably objective standards. The grades were superior, exceeds requirements, meets requirements, marginally meets requirements, and does not meet requirements. This was the equivalent of A, B, C, D, and F in school. Noyce was all for it. “If you’re ambitious and hardworking,” he would say, “you want to be told how you’re doing.” In Noyce’s view, most of the young hotshots who were coming to work for Intel had never had the benefit of honest grades in their lives. In the late 1960s and early 1970s college faculties had been under pressure to give all students passing marks so they wouldn’t have to go off to Vietnam, and they had caved in, until the entire grading system was meaningless. At Intel they would learn what measuring up meant. The Late List was also like something from a strict school. Everyone was expected at work at 8 a.m. A record was kept of how many employees arrived after 8:10 a.m. If 7 percent or more were late for three months, then everybody in the section had to start signing in. There was no inevitable penalty for being late, however. It was up to each department head to make of the Late List what he saw fit. If he knew a man was working overtime every night on a certain project, then his presence on the Late List would probably be regarded as nothing more than that, a line on a piece of paper. At