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From: MitchAlsup on 17 Jul 2010 19:01
When I was at Motorola in the 1980's, they had a particular management
structure that relied on the underling doing the "right thing". With
the minions doing their jobs, management was free to bicker about
(basically) everything, and never give a yes or no answer to any
requests percolating up throught the masses. And we never saw these
managers, or their management decisions to disuade us from our jobs.

Early in the 1980s this worked fine and resulted in the development of
the 6809 and the 68000 through 68020, because management was not there
to prevent forward progress, and the engineers just did what they
wanted. One time, the microcode ROM in the 68020 was encoded such that
in 9-point ASCII text the words "Moto Man Lives" was smack in the
middle for all to see. This particular mask set was caught and never
saw production, but the bit patterns did.

Then towards the end of the 1980s, management noticed that they were
not leading the pack, and then started to hold meetings--with
(shudder) the minions. At one point it got so bad that meeting were
taking place 8 hours every working day, and engineering came to a
standstill. Still no actual decisions were made, and the rest is
history. The casual observer will notice that Moto is no longer in the
processor game, nor in semiconductors, itself. Management won, and
Moto lost.

Mitch
From: nmm1 on 18 Jul 2010 04:41
In article <54756430-661a-46b0-a655-fd6abbaafbb8(a)i28g2000yqa.googlegroups.com>,
MitchAlsup <MitchAlsup(a)aol.com> wrote:
>When I was at Motorola in the 1980's, ...

Your description explains a lot. I liked the CPUs a lot, though they
did suffer rather from galloping featuritis, but I was surprised at
the complete (political) mess Motorola made when they started to
lose HP, Sun etc. to the RISC designs. Especially given that their
end-users generally preferred the older 68K CPUs to the first RISC
CPUs, on several grounds.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.
From: nedbrek on 18 Jul 2010 08:18
Hello all,

"MitchAlsup" <MitchAlsup(a)aol.com> wrote in message
news:54756430-661a-46b0-a655-fd6abbaafbb8(a)i28g2000yqa.googlegroups.com...
> When I was at Motorola in the 1980's, they had a particular management
> structure that relied on the underling doing the "right thing". With
> the minions doing their jobs, management was free to bicker about
> (basically) everything, and never give a yes or no answer to any
> requests percolating up throught the masses. And we never saw these
> managers, or their management decisions to disuade us from our jobs.

I've always felt that the role of a manager is to shield his workers from
upper management, and to fight for pay raises. I'm not certain that is
actually the best system, but it seemed to work pretty well.

Have managers make decisions seems like a bad policy :)

Ned


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