Mr. Kidder's Gift

Either write something worth reading, or do something worth writing about. Benjamin Franklin

What are your top five favorite books? I'm suggesting this as broadly as you like - most important to you, most entertaining, most informative. If I asked for the list, what would you say? This is what I'd say about one of mine.

It was 1981. I worked "shifts," which meant graves (9PM-7AM) with weekdays off. Since most of the people in my life worked regular people's hours, I had plenty of time on my hands, since it was pre-kids. I suppose I could have done almost anything. Mostly, I read.

The Soul of a New Machine arrived in hand an unlikely choice. I learned early that I was a victim, or was it early practitioner, of "Greer Math." Dad was an engineer, Mom the money-smart daughter of a banker. Me?

"Two plus two? I dunno ... Four-ish?"

So why I would pick up a book about designing and building a computer remains a mystery. Given the circumstances, it was probably a Book of the Month Club selection I failed to reject before the deadline.

As is sometimes the case, Fortuna ineptos favet - fortune favors the inept. The book is not entirely, even primarily, about computers.

It's about the people. It was about personal struggle, corporate wars, "ego, and the money to buy things for yourself and your family." Kidder, who (in the modern vernacular) was embedded with the engineers, was a gifted storyteller. He presents his subjects as distinct individuals, using the most ordinary observations about character traits that are not unique to engineers. In the nuts and bolts of writing, it creates a connection, a rapport, commonality between writer and reader. Writing worth reading.

One of the Data General employees, the machine's architect, is an abrasive, blunt, hard-boiled New Yorker who wears cowboy boots and evidently prefers...insists on ...getting his own way. To him, building the "box" is a giant fuck you to a company he believed had turned its back on both the project and the Massachusetts plant asked to "save the company." He built it, he said years later, to prove the company brass wrong.

Another, the main character (as it were) is a former folk singer, clock-maker and - Kidder met him on a windjammer cruise - literally a "good man in a storm." Tom West was more than just a computer engineer, he was a corporate infighter, a tough-minded manager who would make his company do the right thing when it seemed hard-wired to fail. He tenaciously held upper management at arm's length, allowing his grunt hardware designers and software code writers to bring the machine to life.

"Not everything worth doing is worth doing well," West wrote on his white board in the midst of the project. Was he giving his team permission to cut corners, or reminding a gaggle of early-twenties perfectionists that if something works, overengineering it is a waste of their talents, and time? Kidder lets you decide how to handle a subtle, but powerful life lesson.

The book ends ... I'm tempted to write badly, but here the lesson is broad and repetitive. They have built this wonderful machine that does nearly everything they wanted it to, and breathe new life into their company. And now? "I guess I have to find someone to design the plug," says West. Because the customers will need one.

Kidder passed recently, after a long and successful career writing about real people in the real world. Among the accolades he received was the Pulitzer for Soul. But, no doubt unknown to him, a young police officer opened his book on a day off and discovered an amazing world that had less to do with computers, and everything to  do with how his own future might unfold.

Writing something worth reading. That's what Mr. Kidder did.