Sublime

I have earlier argued that the sheer number of minds to be coordinated affects the cost of the effort, for a major part of the cost is communication and correcting the ill effects of miscommunication (system debugging). This, too, suggests that one wants the system to be built by as few minds as possible.

Taylor was the epitome of the leader as facilitator. He understood the wisdom of an observation that Xerox’s chief scientist and PARC advocate Jack Goldman had clipped from a newspaper and hung in his office: “There are two ways of being creative. One can sing and dance. Or one can create an environment in which singers and dancers flourish.”

he went to extraordinary lengths to build safety, clarity, meaning, dependability, and impact into each team he coached.

Fixing a defect has a substantial (20 to 50 percent) chance of introducing another.

“You had a set of folks running these machines who were the priesthood of hardware, and the rest of us were railing against it,” says Chris Brown, a software-development manager at the time. “We wanted a playground where we could go to freely try things out.”

Its twenty-eight pages, replete with organization charts, set forth the future design of the corporation now known in the famous corporate aphorism "decentralization with coordinated control."

In the lower right-hand corner of Fig. 1.1 stands the programming systems product. This differs from the simple program in all of the above ways. It costs nine times as much. But it is the truly useful object, the intended product of most system programming efforts.

Process, assembly, and test operations can be readily applied to other very different kinds of productive work.

Firth had just begun to study programming, but the error was “just obvious” to him. Remembering this incident years later, Firth said that the engineer had probably been “programming by rote. He wanted to make his program look like programs he’d seen before, and that clearly wasn’t gonna work.” Firth always tried to avoid such an approach. “I like