Becoming a Member

Joining a team involves more than a rational decision. At best it is a mutual choice marked by some form of ritual. In the Eagle Group, the process of becoming a member was called “signing up.” When interviewing recruits, Alsing conveyed the message that they were volunteering to climb Mount Everest without a rope despite lacking the “right stuff” to keep up with other climbers. When the new recruits protested they wanted to climb Mount Everest anyway, Alsing told them they would first have to find out whether they were good enough. After the selections were made, Alsing summed it up this way: “It was kind of like recruiting for a suicide mission. You're gonna die, but you're gonna die in glory” (p. 66).

Through the signing‐up ritual, an engineer became part of a special effort and agreed to forsake family, friends, and health to accomplish the impossible. It was a sacred declaration: “I want to do this job and I'll give it my heart and soul” (p. 63).

Diversity Is a Competitive Advantage

Though nearly all the group's members were engineers, each had unique skills and style. Tom West, the group's leader, was by reputation a highly talented technical debugger. He was also aloof and unapproachable, the “Prince of Darkness.” Steve Wallach, the group's computer architect, was a highly creative maverick. According to Kidder (p. 75), before accepting West's invitation to join the group, he went to Edson de Castro, the president of Data General, to find out precisely what he'd be working on:

“Okay,” Wallach said, “what the fuck do you want?”

“I want a 32‐bit Eclipse,” de Castro told him.

“If we can do this, you won't cancel it on us?” Wallach asked. “You'll leave us alone?”

“That's what I want, a 32,” de Castro assured him, “a 32‐bit Eclipse and no mode bit.”

Wallach signed up. His love of literature, stories, and verse provided a literary substructure for the technical architecture of the new machine. Alsing, the group's microcode expert, was as warm and approachable as West was cold and remote. Alsing headed the Microkids, the group of young engineers who programmed the new machine. Ed Rasala, Alsing's counterpart, headed the Hardy Boys, the group's hardware design team. Rasala was a solid, hyperactive, risk‐taking, detail‐oriented mechanic: “I may not be the smartest designer in the world, a CPU giant, but I'm dumb enough to stick with it to the end” (p. 142).

Diversity among the group's other top engineers was evident in specialty as well as personality. One engineer, for example, was viewed as a creative genius who liked inventing an esoteric idea and then trying to make it work. Another was a craftsman who enjoyed fixing things, working tirelessly until the last bug had been tracked down and eliminated.

West buffered the team from upper management interference and served as a group “devil.” Wallach created the original design. Alsing and the Microkids created “a synaptic language that would fuse the physical machine with the programs that would tell it what to do” (p. 60). Rasala and the Hardy Boys built the physical circuitry. Understandably, there was tension among these diverse, highly specialized individuals and groups. Harnessing the resulting energy galvanized the parts into a working team.

Example, Not Command

Wallach's design generated modest coordination for Eagle's autonomous individuals and groups. The group had some rules but paid little attention to them. Members viewed de Castro, the CEO, as a distant god. He was never there physically, but his presence was. West, the group's official leader, rarely interfered with the actual work, nor was he around in the laboratory. One Sunday morning in January, however, when the team was supposed to be resting, a Hardy Boy happened to come by the lab and found West sitting in front of one of the prototypes. The next Sunday, West wasn't in the lab, and after that they rarely saw him. For a long time, he did not hint that he might again put his hands inside the machine.

West contributed primarily by causing problems for the engineers to solve and making mundane events and issues appear special. He created an almost endless series of “brushfires” so he could inspire his staff to douse them. He had a genius for finding drama and romance in everyday routine. Other members of the group's formal leadership followed de Castro and West in creating ambiguity, encouraging inventiveness, and leading by example. Heroes of the moment gave inspiration and direction. Subtle and implicit signals rather than concrete and explicit guidelines or decisions held the group together and directed it toward a common goal.

Specialized Language

Every group develops words, phrases, and metaphors unique to its circumstances. A specialized language both reflects and shapes a group's culture. Shared language allows team members to communicate easily, with minimal misunderstanding. To the members of the Eagle Group, for example, a kludge was a poor, inelegant solution—such as a machine with loose wires held together with duct tape. A canard was anything false. Fundamentals were the source of enlightened thinking. The word “realistically” typically prefaced flights of fantasy. “Give me a core dump” meant tell me your thoughts. A stack overflow meant that an engineer's memory compartments were too full, and a one‐stack‐deep mind indicated shallow thinking. “Eagle” was a label for the project, and “Hardy Boys” and “Microkids” gave identity to the subgroups. Two prototype computers received the designations “Woodstock” and “Trixie.”

Shared lingo binds a group together and is a visible sign of membership. It also sets a group apart and reinforces unique values and beliefs. Asked about the Eagle Group's headquarters, West observed, “It's basically a cattle yard. What goes on here is not part of the real world.” Asked for an explanation, West remarked, “Mm‐hmm. The language is different” (p. 50).

Stories Carry History, Values, and Group Identity

In high‐performing organizations and groups, stories keep traditions alive and provide examples to channel everyday behavior. Group lore extended and reinforced the subtle yet powerful influence of Eagle's leaders—some of them distant and remote. West's reputation as a “troublemaker” and an “excitement junkie” spread through stories about computer wars of the mid‐1970s. Alsing said of West that he was always prepared and never raised his voice. But he coolly conveyed intensity and the conviction that he knew the way out of whatever storm was currently battering the group.

West also possessed the skills of a good politician. He knew how to develop agendas, build alliances, and negotiate with potential supporters or opponents. When he had a particular objective in mind, he would first sign up senior executives.

Then he went to people one at a time, telling them the bosses liked the idea and asking them to come on board: “They say, ‘Ah, it sounds like you're just gonna put a bag on the side of the Eclipse,’ and Tom'll give 'em his little grin and say, ‘It's more than that, we're really gonna build this fucker and it's gonna be fast as greased lightning.’ He tells them, ‘We're gonna do it by April’ ” (p. 44).

Stories of persistence, irreverence, and creativity encouraged others to go beyond themselves, adding new exploits and tales to Eagle's lore. For example, as the group neared completion, a debugging problem threatened the entire project. Jim Veres, one of the engineers, worked day and night to find the error. Ken Holberger, one of the Hardy Boys, drove to work early one morning, pondering the state of the project and wondering if it would ever get done.

He was startled out of his reverie by an unexpected scene as he entered the lab.

A great heap of paper lies on the floor, a continuous sheet of computer paper streaming out of the carriage at [the] system console. Stretched out, the sheet would run across the room and back again several times. You could fit a fairly detailed description of American history … on it. Veres sits in the midst of this chaos, the picture of the scholar. He's examined it all. He turns to Holberger. “I found it,” he says. (p. 207)

Humor and Play

Groups often focus single‐mindedly on the task, shunning anything not directly work related. Seriousness replaces playfulness as a cardinal virtue. Effective teams balance seriousness with play and humor. Surgical teams, cockpit crews, and many other groups have learned that joking and playful banter are essential sources of invention and team spirit. Humor releases tension and helps resolve issues arising from day‐to‐day routines as well as from sudden emergencies.

Play among the members of the Eagle project was an innate part of the group's process. Alsing recognized that humor can foster norm‐breaking and creative thinking (Cooper, Kong, and Crossley, 2018). When he wanted the Microkids to learn how to manipulate the computer known as Trixie, he made up a game. As the Microkids came on board, he told each of them to figure how to write a program in Trixie's assembly language. The program had to fetch and print contents of a file stored inside the computer. The Microkids went to work, learned their way around the machine, and felt great satisfaction—until Alsing's perverse sense of humor tripped them up. When they finally found the elusive file, a message greeted them: “Access Denied.”

Through such play, the Microkids learned to use the computer, coalesced into a team, and practiced negotiating their new technical environment. They also learned that their playful leader valued creativity.

Humor was a continuous thread as the team struggled with its formidable task. Humor often stretched the boundaries of good taste, but that too was part of the group's identity:

[Alsing] drew his chair up to his terminal and typed a few letters—a short code that put him in touch with Trixie, the machine reserved for the use of his micro coding team. “We've anthropomorphized Trixie to a ridiculous extent,” he said.

He typed, WHO.

On the dark‐blue screen of the cathode‐ray tube, with alacrity, an answer appeared: CARL.

WHERE, typed Alsing.

IN THE ROAD, WHERE ELSE! Trixie replied.

HOW.

ERROR, read the message on the screen.

“Oh, yeah, I forgot,” said Alsing, and he typed, PLEASE HOW.

THAT'S FOR US TO KNOW AND YOU TO FIND OUT.

Alsing seemed satisfied with that, and he typed, WHEN.

RIGHT FUCKING NOW, wrote the machine.

WHY, wrote Alsing.

BECAUSE WE LIKE TO CARL (pp. 90–91).

Throughout the year and a half it took to build their new machine, engineers of the Eagle project relied on play and humor as a constant source of relaxation, stimulation, enlightenment, and spiritual renewal.

Ritual and Ceremony

Rituals and ceremonies are expressive occasions. As parentheses in an ordinary workday, they enclose and define special forms of symbolic behavior. What occurs on the surface is not nearly as important as the deeper meaning communicated below ground. With little time for anything not related to the task of building the machine, the Eagle Group intuitively understood the importance of symbolic activity. From the beginning, leadership encouraged ritual and ceremony.

As one example, Rasala, head of the Hardy Boys, established a rule requiring that changes in public boards of the prototype be updated each morning. This activity allowed efforts to be coordinated formally. More important, the daily update was an occasion for informal communication, bantering, and gaining a sense of the whole. The engineers disliked the daily procedure, so Rasala changed it to once a week—on Saturday. He made it a point always to be there himself.

Eagle's leaders met regularly, but their meetings focused more on symbolic issues than on substance. “We could be in a lot of trouble here,” West might say, referring to some current problem. And Wallach or Rasala or Alsing would reply, “You mean you could be in a lot of trouble, right, Tom?” It was Friday, they were going home soon, and relaxing, they could half forget that they would be coming back to work tomorrow. (p. 132)

Friday afternoon is a customary time at the end of the workweek to wind down and relax. Honoring such a tradition was all the more important for a group whose members often worked all week and then all weekend. West made himself available to anyone who wanted to chat. Near the end of the day, before hurrying home, he would lean back in his chair with his office door open and entertain any visitor.

In addition to recurring rituals, the Eagle Group members convened intermittent ceremonies to raise their spirits and reinforce their dedication to a shared, intensely zealous mission. Toward the end of the project, Alsing instigated a ceremony to trigger a burst of renewed energy for the final push. The festivities called attention to the values of creativity, hard work, and teamwork. A favorite pretext for parties was presentation of the Honorary Microcoder Awards that Alsing and the Microcoder Team instituted. Not to be outdone, the Hardy Boys cooked up the PAL Awards (named for the programmable array logic chips used in the machines). The first presentation came after work at a local establishment called the Cain Ridge Saloon. The citation read as follows (p. 250):

Honorary PAL Award

In recognition of unsolicited contributions to the advancement of Eclipse hardware above and beyond the normal call of duty, we hereby convey unto you our thanks and congratulations on achieving this “high” honor.

The same values and spirit were reinforced again and again in a continued cycle of celebratory events:

Chuck Holland [Alsing's main submanager] handed out his own special awards to each member of the Microteam, the Under Extraordinary Pressure Awards. They looked like diplomas. There was one for Neal Firth, “who gave us a computer before the hardware guys did,” and one to Betty Shanahan, “for putting up with a bunch of creepy guys.” After dispensing the Honorary Microcoder Awards to almost every possible candidate, the Microteam instituted the All‐Nighter Award. The first of these went to Jim Guyer, the citation ingeniously inserted under the clear plastic coating of an insulated coffee cup. (p. 250)

The Contribution of Informal Cultural Players

Alsing was the main organizer and instigator of parties. He was also the Eagle Group's conscience and nearly everyone's confidant. For a time when he was still in college, Alsing had wanted to become a psychologist. He acted like one now. He kept track of his team's technical progress but was more visible as the social director of the Microteam and often of the entire Eclipse Group. Fairly early in the project, Chuck Holland had complained, “Alsing's hard to be a manager for, because he goes around you a lot and tells your people to do something else.” But Holland also conceded, “The good thing about him is that you can go and talk to him. He's more of a regular guy than most managers” (p. 105).

Every group or organization needs a “priest” or “priestess” who ministers to spiritual needs. Informally, these people hear confessions, give blessings, maintain traditions, encourage ceremonies, and intercede in matters of gravest importance. Alsing did all these things and, like the tribal priest, acted as a counterpart to and interpreter of the intentions of the chief:

West warned him several times, “If you get too close to the people who work for you, Alsing, you're gonna get burned.” But West didn't interfere, and he soon stopped issuing warnings.

One evening, while alone with West in West's office, Alsing said: “Tom, the kids think you're an ogre. You don't even say hello to them.”

West smiled and replied: “You're doing fine, Alsing.” (pp. 109–110)

The duties of Rosemarie Seale, the group's secretary, also went well beyond formal boundaries. If Alsing was the priest, she was the mother superior. She performed the usual secretarial chores—answering the phones, preparing documents, and constructing budgets. But she found particular joy in serving as a kind of den mother who solved minor crises that arose almost daily. When new members came on, it was Rosemarie Seale who worried about finding them a desk and some pencils. When paychecks went astray, she would track them down and deliver them to their intended recipients. She liked the job, she said, because she felt that she was doing something important.

In any group, a network of informal players deals with human issues outside formal channels. On the Eagle project, their efforts were encouraged, appreciated, and rewarded outside the formal chain of command; they helped keep the project on track.

Soul Is the Secret of Success

The symbolic tenor of the Eagle Group was the actual secret of its success. Its soul, or culture, created a new machine: “Ninety‐eight percent of the thrill comes from knowing that the thing you designed works, and works almost the way you expected it would. If that happens, part of you is in that machine” (p. 273).

All the members of the Eagle Group put something of themselves into the new computer. Individual efforts went well beyond the job, supported by a unique way of life that encouraged each person to commit to doing something of significance. Their deep commitment and unwavering spirit jelled in the ritual of signing up. Both were then intensified and expanded by diversity, exceptional leaders, common language, stories, rituals, ceremonies, play, and humor. In the best sense of the word, the Eagle Group was a team, and the efforts of the individual members were interwoven with meaningful symbolic fibers. Cultural elements were the heart and soul of the group's success.

The experience of the Eagle Group is not an outlier. After extensive research on high‐performing groups, Vaill (1982) concluded that spirit was at the core of every such group he studied. Members of such groups consistently “felt the spirit,” a feeling essential to the meaning and value of their work. Bennis (1997) could have been writing about the Eagle Group when he concluded:

All Great Groups believe that they are on a mission from God, that they could change the world, make a dent in the universe. They are obsessed with their work. It becomes not a job but a fervent quest. That belief is what brings the necessary cohesion and energy to their work. (p. 1)

More and more teams and organizations, like the Eagle project or SEAL Team Six, realize that culture, soul, and spirit are the wellspring of high performance. The U.S. Air Force, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, embarked on a vigorous effort to reaffirm traditions and rebuild its culture. The air warfare arm of the U.S. military added “Cohesion is a principle of war” to its list of core values. Project Warrior brought heroes—living and dead—forward as visible examples of the right stuff. The Air Force also instituted a “reblueing” ceremony to encourage recommitment to its traditions and values.

Other organizations have taken similar steps. In 2006, Starbucks’ performance had begun to slide. By 2007, the company's stock price had fallen by 42 percent. In February, Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz sent a confidential memo to top executives linking the downturn to slippage in the firm's culture:

Over the past 10 years, in order to achieve the growth, development and scale necessary to go from less than 1,000 stores to 13,000 stores and beyond, we have had to make a series of decisions that, in retrospect, have led to the watering down of the Starbucks Experience, and what some might call the commoditization of our brand. (Schultz and Gordon, 2011, p. 23)

The “confidential” memo became public, and bedlam reigned at Starbucks. Schultz resumed his former role as CEO and took immediate steps to breathe new spirit into the company's once vibrant way of life:

• A brainstorming meeting of company leaders to ponder the question: What is the soul of Starbucks?
• A ritual closing of 7,100 Starbucks outlets nationwide for an evening to refresh baristas in the texture and magic of a perfect espresso.
• A meeting of top executives and managers to review, refine, revive, and recommit themselves to the company's values.
• A large meeting of shareholders featuring, with dramatic panache, new products, a frequent customer reward program, and a new espresso machine.
• A meeting in New Orleans of almost 10,000 Starbucks managers—a gigantic celebration with themes of “Onward” and “Believe;” a recommitment to the company's cultural history, values, and ways; and, to seal the deal, a rousing speech from Bono.

The Air Force and Starbucks confirm that too much emphasis on numbers can divert attention from sustaining and revitalizing culture. That, in turn, can jeopardize the outcomes an organization or team is trying to maximize. Team Six, Starbucks, Zappos, and other successful companies and teams understand and live this lesson. When asked, “How much of your time do you spend dealing with cultural issues?” a wise executive said, “Not enough—maybe half my time.”