7 - Teaming Up for the Long Haul

Summary

Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.

—Andrew Carnegie

The early 1980s was a whirlwind. California Governor Ronald Reagan, a former actor who’d made his name playing opposite chimpanzees in movies, was president of the United States. PAC-MAN, an arcade game sans pinballs, was a digital rage. Americans began screaming, for the first time, that they wanted their MTV. And Thriller, Michael Jackson's follow-up to his solo Off the Wall album, forced the music industry to invent a new best-selling category: Diamond Platinum.

Underneath it all, and unseen under the hood of all things electronic, microprocessors were reshaping the present—and the future. Sony had people dancing in the streets with its burgeoning array of mobile sound systems. IBM brought computers home with its first personal computer, or PC. And computer systems began interacting via phone lines over something that would eventually be called the Internet.

Meanwhile, Mark and his merry men (and women) were forging ahead in the old ironworks shop in Cambridge. It wasn't glamorous. And a profit had yet to be made. But with a product shipping and mostly performing as advertised, that elusive glimmer of hope for success was growing brighter. Word was spreading about a little company that had indeed built a better timekeeping mousetrap. As had been the bottom-line objective when Larry Baxter and Mark had evaluated everything up to and including yo-yos with built in transistor radios, Kronos had been founded within a relatively small industry—time clocks and the keeping of workers’ time—where the technology was, putting it bluntly and pun intended, behind the times, as the basic time clock then used hadn't dramatically evolved in over 100 years.

By melding the emerging power of the microprocessor with the need for a more reliable and efficient way to collect time worked, all within plain sight of the gigantic companies that dominated the landscape at the time, they had set the time clock in sync with the rest of a rapidly evolving way of doing business. They had taken a first step in ultimately changing the way labor was managed.