Transcript
Transcript prepared by Bob Therriault
00:00:00 [Leslie Goldsmith]
I.P. Sharp was a fantastic experience. Those of us who were lucky enough to work there knew just how lucky we were at the time. It was a place of amazing talent. Our colleagues at IPSA became our friends or more in some cases and there were virtually limitless possibilities in an atmosphere of absolute trust and respect.
00:00:18 [Music]
00:00:32 [Bob Therriault]
I'm Bob Therriault and this is episode 90 of The ArrayCast, a slightly different ArrayCast. That was Leslie Goldsmith, the creator of 666 Box, the mailbox system that was the foundation of I.P. Sharp and Associates in the early 1980s. I.P. Sharp was a Canadian company founded in 1964. It offered services in computer time sharing to major corporations and institutions and it played an important role in bringing Canada into the digital age. As you'll hear on this episode, it was also a company founded on respect for employees and their abilities. In 1984, Whitney Smith interviewed Ian Sharp, Roger Moore and employees of I.P. Sharp for the national CBC radio program Ideas. Whitney has generously made this audio available to us and this episode will include some of that material along with recordings drawn from previous ArrayCast episodes. [01] So what is it like to join such an influential company? Lib Gibson recounts her first interview with Ian Sharp.
00:01:32 [Lib Gibson]
So I arrive.
00:01:33 [LIB]
So I arrive at the I.P. Sharp office one day for this interview and I get introduced to Ian Sharp. I go, "Oh my god, that's the name on the door!" So I was really intimidated by then. So anyways, I believe that his interview technique consisted of putting a light meter on his desk and then he would describe APL to you. And if your eyes lit up enough, if they sparkled enough, you were hired. And I guess my eyes sparkled enough at the description of APL, so I was hired. And I had just come from the civil service and I had two young kids and you know civil service pretty full of bureaucracy. And I remember asking him the question, "You know, so what happens if I get sick, you know? What's your sick day policy?" He looked really puzzled and he said, "Well, when you're sick you stay home." I said, "Oh, that's good, but you know, how long can I stay home?" And he was even more bewildered and he said, "Well, until you get better." And that was sort of one of my introductions to what I.P. Sharp was like. It was not rule-bound, it did not have procedures. It was sort of fly by what made sense.
00:02:46 [BT]
Aside from adhering to rules of common sense, one of I.P. Sharp's advantages was its flat corporate structure. Bob Bernecky, a member of I.P. Sharp's implementer group, The Zoo, describes how this structure supported development of his talents in the computing community.
00:03:03 [Bob Bernecky]
When I got to I.P. Sharp, I was hired to do ostensibly, nobody at Sharp ever had a job, well, very few people had job titles. There was Ian Sharp and there was everybody else. I learned APL using the Sharp APL system and was having trouble. This being my first APL program ever, it was really slow. And so I asked Roger Moore, who I was working for at the time. Roger's one of the people who created APL 360 for IBM. Roger was a very bright man, extremely creative. And so I said, "Roger, I've got troubles here." And we look at this thing and we keep looking at it. So he took a look at my program for a couple of minutes and it's always stuck under this dyadic iota thing, set index of primitive. And he said, "Well, maybe it's doing a stupid N-squared algorithm." And I said, "Well, yeah, that's what I thought. Now what do we do?" And he said, "Oh, can you drag me off and look at the source code?" And we looked at it and sure enough, that's what it was doing. And he said, "Okay, fix it." And that led to the first technical paper that I ever wrote on high-performance computation, which I gave at the APL Congress in Copenhagen, 1973. And it's been downhill since then.
00:04:26 [BT]
In order to be successful, I.P. Sharp required more than a flat corporate structure, the APL language, and a fancy email system. It also required a clear vision of what services it should provide to its customers. For that vision, we turned to the president, Ian Sharp.
00:04:43 [Ian Sharp]
I suppose we make money by providing through software some kind of value-added service to people who, by and large, have many more computers than we do, but perhaps have not had the software expertise, or in many cases, not the communication software expertise, to provide the software for themselves. So it's true that pretty well all of our customers have more computer resources, and probably more people in the computer department than we do. But because of the specialized areas in which we've concentrated, these companies buy out part of their requirements.
00:05:33 [BT]
Leveraging expertise allowed the company to provide services to much larger companies. But how do you get customers in the first place? Lib Gibson explains.
00:05:43 [LIB]
You know, it was interesting, because I.P. Sharp, again, was different from other companies. I remember going and bidding for business at one company, and there were three competitors in the room simultaneously. And the others had three people. They had the branch manager, the customer service manager, and the technical support people. And I was sort of there as Lib Gibson. And they would be asked questions like, "What do you do in the case of bugs?" And they said, "Oh, well, we have a procedure, and we log it in this database, and we do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And when it came my turn to answer, they said, "Well, what do you do with bugs?" And I said, "We fix them." And that was sort of typical of our young, naive approach to things. None of us had ever worked in a big company. We didn't have any of those procedures and protocols. We just said what made sense, really.
00:06:39 [BT]
Vice President Roger Moore sums up the singular vision of the company.
00:06:43 [Roger Moore]
I hope that we are not in the business of playing vacuum cleaner salesmen. We shouldn't be selling computers or computer services. What we should be selling is solutions to problems. And if we can't do that, we shouldn't be in business.
00:07:01 [BT]
So you would expect a relatively small Canadian company to be working on relatively small projects. Jane Minett, U.S. sales manager, absolves us of that misconception.
00:07:14 [Jane Minett]
Well, one rather exciting application that we've gotten involved in within the last several months is an application that we've put together for an organization called the Institute of International Finance, better known as the IIF, [02] headquartered out of Washington, D.C. And it is an association or a consortium of banks, approximately 200 banks from 40 countries around the world. Most of the world's major banks are a member of this institute. And the institute was founded last year really the motivation was as a result of the debt crisis. And what happened was these banks around the world decided that it would be in their best interest to promote international banking if they pooled economic data on the LDCs, on the lesser developed countries. So these banks got together, pooled the data. And once they had the data, they realized, we need to put this data somehow in a centralized location and then disseminate the information that we've collected back out to our members worldwide. So how are we going to do that? There were articles about it in every major newspaper in the world. And our branch managers being on the ball as they are, in mailbox, there was a flurry of messages saying, in the Helsinki Press, in the Singapore Daily, in the New York Times, there is an article talking about the formation of this institute. And it seems clear to us that they'll need a way to disseminate their data. So we all sort of had this idea simultaneously and went to speak with them. In addition to that, one of the people involved in the IIF was from Citibank. And Citibank is one of our data suppliers for another database that we carry on our system. So they, although he hadn't heard of us, he did get a recommendation through a colleague at his bank on the services that we provide. So we went to talk to the institute, introduce our services, explain that we have a communications network that spans to 600 cities around the world, that we have offices in every major financial center, that we are in the database business, and that we can write the software for them, and that they should think about using a Canadian company to do it. And they decided that they would use a Canadian company to do it.
00:09:38 [BT]
Even though IPSharp was performing on an international stage, it still had to keep in mind that it was not a large company. Once again, President Ian Sharpe in conversation with Whitney Smith.
00:09:50 [IS]
I think we have to take advantage of the fact that we are small and not pretend that we are big, so that IBM would undoubtedly fall apart if they were to be run in the same kind of cavalier fashion that we are run. And at the same time, we would fall flat on our faces if we attempted to adopt the hierarchical management structure, say, of an IBM. And I only use them as an example. Their structure works very well for their size, and it's probably necessary. They cannot have this anarchy or controlled anarchy, which we are certainly able to capitalize on.
00:10:33 [Whitney Smith]
Someone in your company described the management style as a flat management style. Is this accurate?
00:10:39 [IS]
I don't think it's a flat management style. It's a flat management structure. Yes, we do not have very much in the way of a hierarchy, because we don't need one.
00:10:53 [BT]
A flat corporate structure also has knock-on effects, such as the elimination of excess paperwork. Lib Gibson recounts Ian's feelings about bureaucracy.
00:11:03 [LIB]
Well, he's a very non-bureaucratic person. He certainly doesn't like to have a lot of paper hanging around. I can remember when I first applied to Sharp, he interviewed me, and I came in from a civil service job with a great 10-page resume full of all the details. And he essentially said, "Well, what does it say?" and sort of quizzed me about it a little bit and said, "Why don't you take it home and let it fill up your file cabinet? I don't want it in mine." And that sort of approach of not wanting to be bothered with layers of paper and layers of bureaucracy, just tell me quickly what it's about. And let me either think that the light meter is lit up and you're going to be an okay employee, or somehow there's a chemistry here, but don't fill me up with all kinds of pages of analytic facts.
00:11:57 [BT]
Avoiding bureaucracy allowed II.P. P Sharp and associates to focus on the people in the organization, which allows efficiencies. Bob Bernecky explains.
00:12:07 [BB]
I think there's two things that make the corporate structure or the, that's a lousy word, but let's say corporate structure of I.P. Sharp different from other places. One is that it's extremely flat. There's not a manager upon manager upon manager. For a long time, it was Ian and everyone else. Well, after about, after the company got to have a couple hundred people on that, that sort of got impossible. And then it was Ian and maybe 20 other people and everybody else. And now there may be, might be occasionally one more level in there, but it's basically a rather flat structure. And so what that means is that if problems develop, they tend to either get solved or they escalate rather rapidly and get solved rather rapidly.
00:13:06 [BT]
Ken Iverson, creator of APL and an employee at I.P. Sharp relates a story that tells you a lot about Ian Sharp.
00:13:13 [Ken Iverson]
Well, this, this of course is a story that's secondhand, so I can't really vouch for it, but I was told that some years ago that Ian Sharp was sitting around the London office after hours, about six o'clock, talking with one or two people and the phone rang. And it was some customer who had run into some trouble in his programming and desperately needed some advice, which Ian was able to give him. And this man was so grateful, particularly since it was after hours, that he said, said, said how grateful he was and said, "May I have your name?" And he said, "Yes, it's Ian Sharp." The man at the other end of the phone apparently thought, thought this was just a nice joke, you know, he happened to have the same name as the, as the company. So he said, "It must be pretty nice to work for a company with the same name." And this would be a marvelous opportunity to really flatten him by saying, "Yes, I'm the president." Instead, Ian said, "Yes, I suppose it is." And hung up.
00:14:25 [BT]
Small companies often have to live by their wits, and I.P. Sharp was no exception. Ian was certainly a clever negotiator, as we hear in this story, related by Roger Moore to journalist Whitney Smith.
00:14:37 [RM]
This actually occurred in 1969, when we were exploring our way to setting up one of the earlier time-sharing ventures in Canada. And Bell Canada [03] was not at all familiar with the new computer service industry, which wanted to have large numbers of telephone lines installed, and sometimes to strange places such as Ottawa, and all the way to Ottawa. And so, Ian, always willing to explore an opportunity, was wondering whether or not he could get any volume discount for having 30 lines, and anything like this. And so, he found that that wasn't the case. "Oh, I mean, even if I put it right next to your exchange, you won't give me any discount, just because I put it so conveniently close to you." "Oh, no, no, sir. We don't do things that way." "Very well, I'll put the computer on Ward's Island, out on the other side of Toronto Harbour, and your servicemen can take the ferry boat to get there."
00:15:58 [WS]
So what did they say to that?
00:16:00 [RM]
"Well, the salesman sort of, 'Oh, no, no, same cost anywhere. You can put it on the island if you wish.' And about two months later, he got a phone call unofficially from some planning engineer in Bell Canada, 'Oh, Mr. Sharp, you weren't really planning to put the computer on the island, were you?' Some poor planning engineer in Bell Canada had been having to worry about how to get 60 pairs across Toronto Harbour to the island."
00:16:36 [BT]
A rule-bound enterprise like Bell Telephone probably had no idea how to deal with the agility of I.P. Sharp, and that sort of intelligence permeated the company. Arlene Azzarello and the Palo Alto crew witnessed Roger Moore's abilities firsthand.
00:16:53 [Arlene Azzarello]
"Roger has this incredible mind. In Palo Alto, we have what we call the R.D. Moore Insight and Recognition Memorial, and what that is is a photograph of a chalkboard. The chalkboard in his state, it was in when Roger came to visit us. The one and only time he has ever been in Palo Alto. He showed up with some members of his family and asked if he could come to our office, which we thought was rather interesting, since Roger is the vice president of the company. He wanted to know if it would be all right. And we said, 'Come on over, Roger, we'll make a new pot of coffee.' So he brought his sister and I believe it was his brother, and he'd never been to the office. So we were sort of giving a 50-cent tour, and then Roger in turn was sort of explaining to his family what APL was kind of like and what the system was sort of like. He sat down at a terminal and showed them some things. Our offices were all sort of spread out in this building, and so we took them down to what we called the other end. At the other end, there's this big green chalkboard, and there's all kinds of writing all over it. Roger looked at it and he said, 'Well, now there's an example of another language. It's assembler language.' And well, I couldn't begin to tell you what all this was about. It was a big series of statements. And he sort of paused for about what seemed like half a second and said, 'No, no, no, I think I do know what that is. That's the Boolean transpose algorithm that Larry Breed developed, you know, 10 years ago. In fact, that's Larry's handwriting.' Well, the fact of the matter, it was Larry's handwriting, and it was this algorithm, and Larry doesn't work for us. We were just stunned. How could he have, you know, that's the kind of, so Roger enjoys a great deal of respect in the company. He really makes things work. He has a terrific sense of humor.
00:19:05 [BT]
Whitney Smith questions Ian Sharp about the origins of the company culture.
00:19:10 [WS]
It's an old cliche about a company feeling like a family, but I do get that feeling around here. People are very social and relaxed. Do you have anything to say about that? I mean, has this been deliberate or how has this come about?
00:19:33 [IS]
I don't think that there's anything deliberate about it. I think people just adopt a certain style and it becomes a company style and you can't really change it. Where it comes from, who knows?
00:19:46 [WS]
Okay, I was just talking with Margaret Riley upstairs and we were talking about, I asked her, 'Why are there so many women in high positions in this company?' Because in most companies this size there aren't a lot of women who have positions of such responsibility.
00:20:08 [IS]
Well, if I know Margaret right, she probably turned that around and said, 'Why are there so many men in high positions in this company?'
00:20:16 [WS]
Well, I'll pass that on to her. No, but what, can you explain that?
00:20:24 [IS]
That's sort of like asking why are there so many people in high places in this company. We don't openly differentiate between males and females. We're looking for people with particular talents and particular ideas and some of them are female, I suppose, by the law of averages, 50% of them should be.
00:20:48 [BT]
As one of the many women in positions of authority within the company, Lib Gibson held the title of zookeeper for the infamous I.P. Sharp Zoo. [04]
00:20:58 [LIB]
I don't know if you've ever heard the expression, the zoo, about I.P. Sharp. That was a systems development language implementer team at I.P. Sharp. I was eventually put in charge of the zoo, as well as the application software people in something called our software business unit. That was really terrifying. I was completely intimidated by all those people. I was such a feeble programmer compared to all of these people I was trying to manage. I knew just barely enough to not be snowed by all of them, but I would never categorize myself as a good programmer. I was a reasonably good understander of the problem. One day, we got an opportunity to bid for some business with McGraw Hill. McGraw Hill owned the Platz oil newsletter and kept data on various indicators of the health of the oil industry. Arthur Ritney, I had attracted to Toronto by then. I asked Arthur to write a prototype to show these people what they wanted to do, a trading system for crude oil and petroleum products. Crude oil and petroleum products are pretty hard to trade. It's not like currency where you just say, "Here's a dollar, give me a euro." You have to know the specific gravity, you have to know the sulfur content, you have to know what shI.P. it was transferred across the ocean in. There's a whole lot of data. It was a fairly complicated system. Arthur was going to write a prototype to do this demo for them. A whole bunch of guys from New York were coming up. I knew they were going to be in these New York suits. I took Arthur aside the day before and I said, "You know, Arthur," by then he had adopted, by the way, the attire and personal hygiene habits of the zoo. He rode his bike to work and we had no shower at the office. I took him aside and I said, "Arthur, you have to take the subway and you have to wear clean pants and a clean shirt. You don't have to wear a suit, but you have to come clean tomorrow." He does his prototype demo and he just blows McGraw Hill away. Afterwards, there's a little group of us who were at the demo who were kind of celebrating. I said, "Did you see? Arthur even had a clean shirt on." They looked at me and said, "Did you look at his feet?" I said, "No." He had no shoes and socks on. That was Arthur's rebellion against one of the only instructions I ever gave him. I realized that with programmers, you have to be very specific.
00:23:51 [BT]
Yes, Arthur Whitney was one of the many bright talents who passed through I.P. Sharp. People like Arthur enjoyed the freedom of working on the projects that interested them. The flip side of this is that if you worked at I.P. Sharp, you had to be able to be a self-starter. Direction was kept to a minimum. Ian's personal assistant, Roseanne Wilde, explains.
00:24:14 [Roseanne Wilde]
In my own relationshI.P. to management, I can't honestly say that it's prevented me from doing anything. I've been given a tremendous amount of latitude. If anything, at the moment, I'm between projects. I've finished one area and I haven't really started another one yet. Management has been quite... Well, when you say management, in my case, it's Ian. Ian has been quite more than reasonable in terms of giving me time to figure out the next thing that I want to do, which is how I feel about my work. He's giving me time to figure out what I want to do next. I think that in a place like I.P. Sharp Associates, the success is yours and the failure is yours as well.
00:24:54 [BT]
Arlene Azzarello created and published I.P. Sharp's documents, books, and newsletters. She notes that self-direction is not easy for everyone.
00:25:03 [AA]
Some people don't deal well with direction. It bothers them. They don't know where they fit in. They need to feel as if they're getting some kind of feedback. I guess it's like children who often cry out for discipline. But the thing that I don't particularly like a lot of direction. To me, the fun is in creating and being able to come up with my own ideas and actually execute them. So that's one of the things I really enjoy about the company. And I like my colleagues. I like working in a small office and I like my colleagues. They're fun. We don't take ourselves too seriously. We're a pretty laid-back, Californian-style office.
00:25:47 [BT]
Self-direction is not something that everyone is capable of. Ken Iverson recounts the thoughts of his son Eric on how it's possible that employees at I.P. Sharp seem to have this skill.
00:25:58 [KI]
Perhaps one comment. My son made on this. He's worked for the company, I think, for about 15 years, much longer than I have. And one comment he made years ago, after I had visited here and been rather astonished by how free things were run. And I asked him, "How is it possible to run a company with more or less people working on what they want to, more or less?" And he said he thought that people selected themselves. That he had seen many people come and might be perfectly good people, but were not of the sort that were sort of self-starters and figure out for themselves what they want to make of this job. And that after a year or so, they would become so frustrated with, in effect, waiting for somebody to tell them what to do, that they would find something else. So that in a sense, as I suspect is true of any organization, it tends to select the people that fit into that, to their way of doing things.
00:27:10 [BT]
By having every employee focus on customer needs, a lot of managerial oversight is eliminated. And this is consistent with Ian's management style of employee empowerment. Arlene Azzarello had direct experience with Ian's leadership.
00:27:25 [AA]
Usually the response that you get from Ian is if you ask, you give them, tell them about an idea you have or project you want to do, you'll say, "Well, what do you think I ought to do about this, Ian? Here's this and that and the other. And what do you think I ought to do about this?" And he usually says, "Use your own judgment." About the only kind of direction that you can definitely get out of him is if he really doesn't like what you're doing, he'll tell you to stop it.
00:27:53 [BT]
And of course, IB Sharp was a company built on a foundation of the APL language, but not every employee came in knowing APL. And Lib Gibson talks about overcoming the challenges of a very steep learning curve.
00:28:09 [LIB]
I guess we'd been offering time sharing about six months. And I had joined Sharp, I had never known any computing before. Ian used to have a particular method of hiring people, which consisted of putting a light meter on the front of the desk, and he'd describe APL to you. And if your eyes lit up brightly enough, you were hired. And so, you really just had to show enthusiasm, not really a lot of previous knowledge. There weren't that many people who knew APL anyway. So I was sitting in the office about three days after I joined, and Ian came down from Toronto and started to talk and said, "How's it going?" And I said, "Oh, I'm a big boss. I have to say something interesting." So we got talking and finally, I said, "Well, is there going to be a course in APL soon?" And Ian said, "Oh yeah, there's one next week." And I said, "Oh good, can I attend the course?" And he said, "Oh, I certainly hope so. We're counting on you giving it." So within about three or four days after I joined, I had to just sort of pick up the book and learn the language and then go out and teach the course. I think it was the best course I've ever taught because in courses after that, I was always trying to sift through all this vast number of things that I knew and try to figure out what would be most interesting to the students. But that first course, I knew so little that I didn't have to choose what I would say. I could only say a few things that I knew. There was, students would ask questions and I wouldn't know the answers to them. So I'd rush up to a terminal and say, "Well, let's just try this on the terminal and see what the answer is," and then try to make up a reason why that was the logical answer. So that was one of my first introductions to Sharpe's informal style, just hoping that people will cope when you throw them in at the deep end of a pool. And in general, most people have seemed to do that quite well.
00:30:06 [BT]
The company's success is based on employees who are fully engaged in their work, so they want to work, not that they have to work.
00:30:14 [RM]
The company's success is based on employees who are fully engaged in their work, so they want to work, not that they have to work. When IPSA was founded, I believe one of the founding principles of the company was that it was supposed to provide a place where it was fun to work, where people could have fun and make money at the same time. And I believe that was one of the day one things that was done, and we've attempted to maintain that as much as we can.
00:30:40 [BT]
Arlene Azzarello explores another side to the fun-work dichotomy.
00:30:45 [AA]
I can remember situations where we're just laughing so much, you almost feel guilty, because you say, "Wait a minute. Is this work? Shouldn't I be paying them? I mean, are they really paying? Am I being paid to do this?" Because there's some things that are just extremely humorous, and you really are playing with other people's minds and other people's brains via these machines.
00:31:09 [BT]
Whitney Smith attempts to get more insight into the company culture from Ian Sharp.
00:31:14 [WS]
Why do you run the company the way you do? Now, it has been said that you don't spend a lot of time in your office. You spend a lot of time circulating and walking around. What does this say? What does this mean?
00:31:28 [IS]
I suppose the company is run the way it's run because I don't know any other way to run it. I'm not very big on the management textbooks. We just try and do it the way that makes sense for the sorts of people that we have.
00:31:42 [BT]
APL creator Ken Iverson says there is more to Ian's method than meets the eye.
00:31:47 [KI]
It just seems to me the main thing is he has a practical sense and is not baffled by a lot of talk. And if he has any maxims, it tends to be things that are slightly ironic and negative. For example, his background was in operations research. He was one of the early people in operations research, [05] which came to be called management science. So he knows what this stuff is, but he also likes to speak of management science fiction, which I think reflects the correct thing that those techniques were very much overblown and oversold, at least for a period. And so calling it management science fiction, I think is a useful term.
00:32:39 [BT]
I.P. Sharp had a focus on customer needs and employees followed the lead of their president, Lib Gibson.
00:32:47 [LIB]
Well, again, as I said, Ian never gave me, I think he gave me two words of advice and two bits of advice in my entire acquaintance with him. But what I observed was that his style of management was really twofold. One was to be extremely customer focused. We were out to solve customer problems. And if it took longer than we thought, if it was more difficult than we thought, we had said we would solve the problem. So we would. I remember one time when a project at Morgan Stanley had gone way over budget, it was costing us a fortune. And several, some people in the company said, you know, we should abandon this project. And Ian sort of went, but we told them we'd do it. You know, we shook their hand. Of course, we're going to complete it. So there was an absolute commitment to the customer. And then the second thing was his management style was to simply match up a problem with a person. So an issue would come up and he would, he would not figure so much, how could I solve this problem as who could solve this problem. And then he would dangle that problem in front of the person and they'd be excited and they would go off and do it. So rather than, and I sort of adopted that management style when, when I had programmers that I needed to do something, I would simply say something like, you know, the customer is trying to do this and they're really stuck because the software doesn't work this way. And, you know, it would be really hard to fix that. And, you know, the next morning they'd walk in with a solution. Whereas if I had said, you know, go and fix this or implement a solution for this, they, they would have been less interested, less motivated. So that was something I think that I really learned from Ian is, is just find the people and then present something to them as a challenge that they find irresistible. Because it was, I would say there was a lot of leadership at I.P. Sharp, but virtually no management.
00:35:05 [BT]
Ken Iverson on Ian's management style.
00:35:09 [KI]
There's one part of that style, it seems to me that Ian is definitely does. And that is to not spend time in his office, but to wander around. And as a consequence, he does know what's going on. And he does have a great deal of opportunity to plant ideas like this. And I, I was fortunate enough to see this style once before in the professor at Harvard that I worked under. And it was very much the same sort of thing. He almost never stayed in his office. He was always around. And what that man knew was just incredible. You know, you don't, you don't need any communication devices or management structure or anything like that when a person has that kind of style.
00:35:47 [BT]
Once you move reiterates in Sharp's version of nerd sniping.
00:35:52 [RM]
Well, Ian has a particular style when he thinks that direction is required. And it's very much a matter of suggestion. Ian would indicate to people he finds loitering in 18th floor coffee room. Yesterday I was talking to this man who has this interesting problem or product. And Ian will spend five or 10 minutes relating what he learned the day before and inviting comments from people as to whether this thing, problem or what have you, is of interest to us. How would we use it? Is it something we wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole? Is it something on which we could trivially be involved with for very little labor? Is it worth pursuing? And Ian will tend to sort of describe things and walk away for a few days. If the idea is of any interest, secondary discussion will be generated in his absence. And they can come back in a few days and find out what several people think of it and then make his own decision to forge ahead or abandon it.
00:37:15 [WS]
So would you say that this describes a kind of management philosophy?
00:37:20 [RM]
It's certainly a style. I'm not sure if I would call it a philosophy.
00:37:25 [BT]
And what advice would you give to his successor?
00:37:28 [IS]
Oh, I don't think I would presume to give that advice. I think people have to develop or adapt their own management styles. I would not expect anybody to do business the way in which I do business. They probably do a lot better. They do, but they do it differently. Some things would be better. Some things wouldn't. Anybody who could be given and accept advice to adopt a particular style of management probably isn't management material in the first place.
00:38:01 [BT]
Lib Gibson explains the power that comes from listening to the customer.
00:38:05 [LIB]
The company, I think, is in the business of doing something technical and tends to have a lot of analytic people around. There's still a lot of intuitive, a lot of intuition takes a part in making the decisions about what we're doing. I mean, we're not a company that goes out and does a three-month market survey to decide if we should take a particular path, but we're much more likely to talk to two or three of our most innovative, demanding clients who we find in the past have been good representatives of where the market's trying to go, ask them their opinion, and then come back and think about it a bit and synthesize what we've heard and go. And we often will have something done before other people would have completed their market survey. I think a lot of times people will look at Sharp and say we've had such enormous foresight in doing something or other. I think it's very rare that we've had foresight, it's just that we have such good reaction time that hindsight can look like foresight. And I think that's one of the things that's made us successful.
00:39:18 [BT]
Keeping up with technological developments is easier said than done, as Ian points out.
00:39:24 [IS]
So the major problems at the moment are to see the way in which technology is going, to do the development, to coincide with the arrival of that technology, and hope that you're right. Now the development cycle is getting longer and the technology cycle is getting shorter, so it's becoming increasingly difficult to do these, to balance these things. I don't know if that makes any sense.
00:39:58 [BT]
One of I.P. Sharp's biggest advantages was that it was a 1970s company using emails in ways that would not look out of place several decades later. Jane Minett and Bob Bernecky give their views on using the I.P. Sharp email system 666 BOX.
00:40:16 [JM]
I think to a degree the culture of the company is a function of the fact that we use electronic mail extensively. We are, it's a cliche, a paperless company. You see paper here, but a lot of people just print their mail on TV screens. We're a paperless company, we are a memo-less company. We have almost, we have very few relative to a lot of companies, meetings or committees. We have committee by mailbox, we have memos by mailbox, we have phone conversations by mailbox. Much of the decision-making process goes on through mailbox. Much of the input to decisions, for instance, input to decisions that Ian Sharp has to make, he gathers the information perhaps for his decision-making through the use of electronic mail because some of the people involved in the decision may be on opposite ends of the earth and we can all communicate on that topic using electronic mail.
00:41:22 [BB]
That ability is certainly one of the most powerful things in the company's favor, I think, about that gives it the rapid ability to deal with problems. Someone has a problem in Stockholm. They send a message to the group called ZDIS, which deals with distributed software problems and, well, just distributed software in general. The first person to see that problem, if they can solve the problem, they'll respond and copy the rest of the group on its own so 14 other people don't run off to solve the problem as well. And what this means is that the problem gets solved rapidly, the user gets a response rapidly, and the problem is then discarded or at least filed away for permanent responses if somebody else has the same problem. And that sort of approach to things works throughout the company as a whole and I think reduces the amount of wheel spinning that goes on. So it's worked very well.
00:42:32 [BT]
Along with advantages come disadvantages. Ian Sharp discusses the challenges of email with journalist Whitney Smith.
00:42:40 [IS]
The principal disadvantage is that it doesn't have a tone of voice and there are some people who find it very difficult to use and who create the wrong impression by their inability to construct sentences. We find that people whose first language is not English do have more difficulty with it because it's quite difficult to get a tone of voice. It's very difficult to project a tongue-in-cheek attitude and the one thing that you can't do in the mailbox is smile.
00:43:14 [WS]
From some of the mailbox messages that I've read though I noticed that there are a lot of good writers in this company or at least employees who've developed the craft of writing.
00:43:24 [IS]
That's probably true. People improve their communication skills because they have to. They find that they're misinterpreted. People who are too cryptic become more long-winded. People who are long-winded find that typing is such a pain that they become more cryptic. And people's style do change over time. There's no doubt about that. I don't think that we ever made any conscious decision to run the company by electronic mail. I think that that happened of its own volition and I think that's the way that customers view electronic mail too. A lot of them use it but if you asked them if they used electronic mail they would probably say no they don't they just use the computer because it's there and because it's convenient. Probably the worst thing you can do in getting into electronic mail is to have this one to two year study of technologies that might be applicable and then on some weird criterion make a decision to go this way or that way. It's just something which should grow in a company. It's like probably never make a decision to use HB pencils rather than pencils. It doesn't much matter what you do as long as you communicate.
00:44:46 [BT]
The originator of Box 666, Leslie Goldsmith, notes that email was not always accepted by the outside world.
00:44:58 [LG]
Certainly a challenge if electronic mail was foundational for your company. That by the way was a really really hard thing to to manage. You know in in the early to mid 70s even in the late 70s there were governments of various countries. Britain's a great example. The UK where there were monopolies within the countries for controlling communication services and this typically dated back to the 16th or 17th centuries and in the case of Britain the general post office the GPO [06] had a monopolistic authority over anything that involved point-to-point communication. So where somebody was sending something to somebody else whether that was by mail or by wireless or by telegraph or whatever. So when email came out the GPO insisted on regulating and preventing I.P. sharps use of electronic mail and so did many countries in Europe. So in order to be able to offer email at the time we had to convince each country one by one and some other neighboring countries precedent wasn't good. We had to convince each country that we weren't a threat to their monopoly and in many cases the the argument which was promulgated by Ian and by other locals the the backroom finessing that they managed to pull off was based on the fact that in the end we would be using telecommunications capabilities that they were as a result of their monopoly in charge of anyhow. So we weren't denying anyone anything. In the end the services relied on existing services over which they unequivocally had control. But it was a real uphill battle. In some cases we just used email behind the scenes even if we said we weren't going to. Eventually countries capitulated and we had we had the generally accepted right to use it everywhere but it was a it was a hard slog. So we were definitely breaking new ground on many fronts at the time and Ian was quite well known in the industry. He was a very very good speaker and you know he was funny and he was always on point and as a result he got to talk about computer business in general, Canada's role in it, I.P. Sharp of course, at many conferences. So within a certain niche I think it's fair to say we were very well known but as far as the average person on the street was concerned of course we wouldn't have been because they wouldn't have had any opportunity to use or even to think about using computer services in those days.
00:47:28 [BT]
All good things must come to an end and unfortunately that was true of I.P. Sharp as well. For years their niche had been supplying the features of personal computing on mainframe computers but in the 1980s when actual personal computers appeared the previous tools that I.P. Sharp supplied became less important. The writing was on the wall but even as its primary business had started to fade I.P. Sharp still possessed a valuable commodity. Gitte Christensen, past CEO of Dyalog Limited and one-time I.P. Sharp employee explains.
00:47:53 [Gitte Christensen]
So I.P. Sharp was sold to Reuters because Reuters started themselves with pigeons bringing news from Paris to London and when they put electricity on that they continued to do the same thing. They just sent the data distributed to its customers and then forgot about it. So by the time the PC personal computers had started to come out and the financial analysts wanted to do historic use the historical data to do trends and analysis and stuff like that and Reuters had nothing because they'd thrown the whole thing away but I.P. Sharp had it all because they had collected all these data in their time series storage and so Reuters was interested in that data, bought I.P. Sharp and didn't discover that they had bought a software shop as well so they started spitting out the bits that they didn't like.
00:48:53 [BT]
The bits that Reuters didn't like became companies like Dyalog Limited, Snake Island Research, Affinity Systems, J Software and many others because when you develop a culture of empowerment it ripples and employees do not want to stop working on their own projects. I hope that this episode has shown that a successful company does not have to be focused only on profit. Sometimes you can be successful by just looking after your customers and your employees and using that rarest of commodities, common sense. Thanks again to Whitney Smith for making his recordings available to us and to Bob Bernecky for making us aware of those recordings. A longer version of Ian Sharp's interview is available at I.P. Sharp.org. [07] In following episodes of the ArrayCast we'll feature more of these recordings of Ken Iverson talking about his views of the APL language as well as a bit more about Ken himself in his own words and the words of some people who worked with him at I.P. Sharp. Until then, happy array programming and we will leave you with the words of Leslie Goldsmith as he remembers his days at I.P. Sharp.
00:50:07 [LG]
I.P. Sharp was a fantastic experience and those of us who were lucky enough to work there knew just how lucky we were at the time. It was a place of amazing talent. Our colleagues at IPSA became our friends or more in some cases and there were virtually limitless possibilities in an atmosphere of absolute trust and respect.
00:51:00 [Music]