The Soul of A New Machine

That fall West had put a new term in his vocabulary. 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

West had a saying: “The game around here is getting a machine out the door with your name on it.”

West never passed up an opportunity to add flavor to the project. He helped to transform a dispute among engineers into a virtual War of the Roses. He created, as Rasala put it, a seemingly endless series of “brushfires,” and got his staff charged up about putting them out. He was always finding romance and excitement in the seemingly ordinary. He

“One never explicitly plays by these rules.” And West remarked that there was no telling which rules might be real, because only de Castro made the rules that counted, and de Castro was once quoted as saying, “Well, I guess the only good strategy is one that no one else understands.”

“West’s not a technical genius. He’s perfect for making it all work. He’s gotta move forward. He doesn’t put off the tough problem, the way I do. He’s fearless, he’s a great politician, he’s arbitrary, sometimes he’s ruthless.”

West invented the term, not the practice—was “signing up.” By signing up for the project you agreed to do whatever was necessary for success. You agreed to forsake, if necessary, family, hobbies, and friends—if you had any of these left (and you might not if you had signed up too many times before). From a manager’s point of view, the practical vir

Deliberately, somewhat surreptitiously, he separated his team from the rest of the company. “We’re building what I thought we could get away with,” West said.

Kludge is perhaps the most disdainful term in the computer engineer’s vocabulary: it conjures up visions of a machine with wires hanging out of it, of things fastened together with adhesive tape.

there’s no such thing as a perfect design. Most experienced computer engineers I talked to agreed that absorbing this simple lesson constitutes the first step in learning how to get machines out the door. Often, they said, it is the most talented engineers who have the hardest time learning when to stop striving for perfection. West was the voice f