181 Quotes by Tracy Kidder

No one keeps track of the hours we work,” said Ken Holberger. He grinned. “That’s not altruism on Data General’s part. If anybody kept track, they’d have to pay us a hell of a lot more than they do.” Yet it is a fact, not entirely lost on management consultants, that some people would rather work twelve hours a day of their own choosing than eight that are prescribed. Provided, of course, that the work is interesting. That was the main thing.

He would come to feel that history, even more than memory, distorts the present of the past by focusing on big events and making one forget that most people living in the present are otherwise preoccupied, that for them omens often don’t exist.

Because if you’re going to make a small inexpensive computer you have to sell a lot of them to make a lot of money. And we intend to make a lot of money.

Often, they said, it is the most talented engineers who have the hardest time learning when to stop striving for perfection. West.

Business is an excuse to build a team and product is what the team does. You have to pay salaries so you need to earn a profit.

Adopting a remote, managerial point of view, you could say that the Eagle project was a case where a local system of management worked as it should: competition for resources creating within a team inside a company an entrepreneurial spirit, which was channeled in the right direction by constraints sent down from the top. But it seems more accurate to say that a group of engineers got excited about building a computer.

It was the sort of work that gave meaning to life.

So many people, he thought, don’t listen to the content of what you say but only to the noises you make.

IBM and other mainframe companies spent more money selling their products and serving their customers than they did in actually building their machines. They sold their computers to people who were actually going to use them, not to middlemen, and this market required good manners. Microcomputer companies sold equipment as if it were corn, in large quantities; they spent most of their money making things and competed not by being polite but by being aggressive.