The Soul of a New Machine

The Soul of a New Machine

Tracy Kidder

Trust Networks

Large coordination emerges from small-scale trust.

It was trust. “Trust is risk, and risk avoidance is the name of the game in business,” West said once, in praise of trust. He would bind his team with mutual trust, he had decided. When a person signed up to do a job for him, he would in turn trust that person to accomplish it; he wouldn’t break it down into little pieces and make the task small, easy and dull.
Unreliable Parts

Mega-projects orchestrate unreliable elements into coherent wholes.

The hardware of modern computers is remarkably reliable, and needs to be. A computer like Eagle does a cycle of work in 220 billionths of a second. If it tended to fail only once every million cycles, it would be a very unreliable contraption indeed.
Tinkering Sanctuary

Protected spaces insulated from interference enable breakthroughs.

The managers had sealed off the team right from the start, telling every recruit not to do so much as mention the name Eagle to anyone outside the group. Although once in a while the pencil supply did grow short, the worst administrative problems never touched the Microkids and Hardy Boys. “We were buried, to the point where we were almost underground,” said one of the Microkids long afterward, adding, with the air of one from whose eyes scales have just fallen, that Rosemarie served them so well they never realized the full extent of what she did for them.