Here's one of those fascinating tales that resurfaces from time to time online - an old story, but one which amazes you every time you read it. The one I'm looking at is The Graphing Calculator Story, and I urge you to bear with me despite the boring title.
It's the tale of a software engineer at Apple Computer - Ron Avitzur - who had been charged with creating some graphing calculator software, to ship with every Apple computer. After a year on the project he lost his job in 1993 because - he says - of internal politics at what was, at the time, a struggling company. The key thing is what Ron did next.
He kept showing up for work.
His swipe card worked, there were lots of empty offices, so he just kept going, unpaid, for months, creating a fully-fledged and entirely unauthorised skunkworks at the heart of the company.
Along the way, he roped in support from various specialist departments and, after huge amounts of work from across the company - and all without top management knowledge - he got the software shipped on every new Mac computer. The software is still going out today, although the relationship between Ron and Apple has, at last, been formalised.
It's a remarkable story, and one that's perhaps a useful lesson - and a rather cautionary tale - for business managers out there. Ron reports his life was, in many ways, made easier by his sacking from Apple - he was able to cross departmental boundaries, rely on informal lines of communication and bypass the bosses all in the name of, simply, getting things done, to a very high standard indeed.
If it had been planned by an MBA, it would surely be hailed as a great example of the new wave of organic, fluid organisational engineering. As it is, the story goes to prove the oft-ignored management maxim that, sometimes, the best thing a manager can do is simply get out the way of talented, enthusiastic staff.
