6 - When the Time Was Right

Summary

Success is not final; failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

—Winston Churchill

The year 1979 brought calamity and change.

The burgeoning nuclear industry took a hit when a failed cooling mechanism at Three Mile Island caused a partial meltdown in Reactor #2. Young couples in China were told that as part of their government’s population planning policy that they would only be allowed one child. And sixty-six Americans were taken hostage in Iran.

It wasn't all bad news. Amid a backdrop of The Sugerhill Gang’s “Rapper's Delight” and Rod Stewart's “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” Americans flocked to movie theaters to see Martin Sheen surface in “Apocalypse Now” and Mel Gibson quietly take on a collection of crazy post-apocalyptic hooligans in “Mad Max.” And going downhill became a good thing with the introduction of the snowboard.

It snowed in the Sahara Desert for a grand total of 30 minutes. A tsunami killed 23 people in France. And Great Britain elected Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister.

Along the way, two University of Connecticut basketball fans, unable to attend all their favorite team's games, licensed space on a new concept called cable television, giving rise to an organization called ESPN. Canadian board game Trivial Pursuit rewarded those with a command of inconsequential knowledge. And music got mobile as Sony introduced the first Walkman.

Meanwhile, at Kronos World Headquarters, things were not necessarily going well, but they were going. Finally emerging from their respective basements and garages, the dozen or so employees of the fledgling organization found themselves toiling for the first time under a singular roof. True, conditions were less than ideal. But the fact that they could interact, and test, and postulate the possibilities of actually creating a breakthrough product, put wind in their sails.

“Finally getting everyone under one roof really got us on track,” recalled Mark. “Thanks to Donald Levy we had connections and a partnership within the industry. And thanks to Larry Baxter, we were on our way to having an actual product.”

Mark knew the demand was there for a better, electronically based way to capture time data. His constant trips to both establish a prospect pipeline and seek input for the design phase proved that out time and again.