The call was one of those unexpected calls that come totally out of the blue. It took a bit of time to mentally connect voice and memory, but when the circuit was complete, hearing her voice was a very welcome addition to what had been a very stressful day balancing work and the raising of twin boys. On the phone was a former Tandem Computers colleague whom I’d worked with in Marketing in the mid-1980s, but I hadn’t seen or spoken to in a very long time. She had access to some Tandem memorabilia and had heard from a common friend that I’d been working for some time on a book about Tandem. She wondered if I wanted to take a look at it before it went into storage. She thought that there might be some good historical reference material that I might not have seen. As she was explaining this to me, my mind’s eye drifted to that scene in the closing minutes of the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark. All I could see was row upon row of boxes, piled floor to the ceiling, in this huge cavernous warehouse spreading into the distance as far as the eye could see. Those few boxes that captured some essence of Tandem forever lost. Needless to say, though this book had been on the back burner for some time, I jumped at the chance to take a look at this cache. We set up a time to visit a few days later.
Heading over the Santa Cruz Mountains from Capitola to San Jose that day, I reflected on my journey to California from Canada that had started out as somewhat of a lark back in the fall of 1983. My former husband, whom I’d met at high school in Toronto, had been consumed with wanderlust at the time and convinced me to abandon what seemed to be a very promising career with Bell Canada’s Computer Communications Group (CCG) in Ottawa, Ontario. I’d been working with a business development team whose objective was to bring to market what were known at the time as value-add services—email, voice recognition systems, database access and other services that were all new to the Canadian market. Unbeknownst to me, in Silicon Valley at the time, a midrange computer systems boom was under way. Personal computers didn’t yet exist, so computers were based in data centers and connected to users via what we used to call “green screens” or “dumb terminals.” Through colleagues at CCG, I had managed to obtain a job as a program manager at Tandem Computers, an upstart carving out a new market called online transaction processing. Though information technology had not been of interest to me in the business school at Queen’s University where I’d done my undergraduate work, it wasn’t long before I got caught up in the magic and excitement of the high-tech business.
Since Tandem had arranged a work visa for me, the transition to living in the United States and adapting to the culture of California was relatively painless. For the first few years I’d complain about missing certain consumer products such as Red Rose tea, McLean’s toothpaste, decent maple syrup and Pop Secret popcorn, but my family in Toronto would ease those concerns by sending me care packages from time to time. Other than having to get used to not starting each conversation with a comment on the weather (as it was always sunny in California) cultural differences tended to be few. The funniest were bizarre conversations I’d get into about the differences between consumer packaging practices in Canada vs. the United States. For example: In the United States, milk comes in gallon jugs and butter comes in quarter-pound blocks, whereas in Ontario, Canada milk comes in plastic packages of three one-liter bags and butter in one-pound blocks. Or I’d talk about the lack of great “nippy” (as in old) cheddar and other imported specialty cheeses or farmers markets like Ottawa’s Byward Market or the Lawrence Market in Toronto, where the weekly buying of fresh local farm produce had been integral to my life. Over the years, the differences became less acute (or perhaps I just became desensitized), though I am happy to note that farmers markets now abound everywhere and specialty cheeses can be bought in most supermarkets.
Meeting my former colleague was like taking a walk back in time. She had what seemed like a mountain of material and gave me free access. Over the next week, I spent long days going through her material, photocopying everything in sight. We shared a lot of laughs, a few tears and a lot of storytelling. In the end I came away with several legal-size boxes of “stuff.” These I hauled home and shoved under my desk along with the other boxes of research notes, annual reports, magazines, Tandem internal publications and copies of various Tandem_Alumni Yahoo! Groups social media postings that I’d collected over the years. I then promptly forgot about it all.
My twin boys were 8 years old at the time, and I had little time for more extracurricular writing. I’d begun a research effort many years earlier, prodded by Ed Martin, a former Tandem Human Resources Manager whom I had met when he was working on the Focus Series of Tandem Philosophy training courses in the late 1980s. Our idea had been to survey former Tandem employees on the long-term impacts of the Tandem Philosophy. The line of inquiry was to ascertain, which of Tandem’s people management values and practices had the most meaning to them over time and whether any were being adopted by their current employers. Though we collected some interesting data, the results weren’t compelling enough to turn into a book or even a magazine article. I was never sure if this was due to lack of content, motivation or if I just didn’t care any more. In addition, a year earlier I’d gotten engaged in writing what became my non-fiction Algonquin Series (now eight books). These were oral histories about various aspects of a community in Algonquin Park, Ontario, where I still had a cabin in the wilderness that I would retreat to every summer.
So there the boxes lay, under my desk until the spring of 2009, when Hewlett Packard (HP) decided to close the Fremont Manufacturing Supply Chain facility. For reasons I can’t explain, the floodgates opened when I saw a note posted on the Tandem_Alumni Yahoo! Groups site advising of the facility’s demise and a tongue-in-cheek précis of the supposed subsequent wake. As a sort of memorial, readers were encouraged to share their memories and a moment of silence. The response was overwhelming. Day after day for more than a week, person after person, some names that I recognized, lots that I didn’t, weighed in with their thoughts and feelings across every possible spectrum, from sorrow to joy, from wonder to remorse. It was like nothing I’d ever seen—at least not in recent years. There had been a similar outpouring of storytelling in 2002 when a reunion was held at Bay Meadows Race Track in California and again in 2004—though I can’t recall what triggered the 2004 postings. Though late to the party, I was motivated to add to the thread my 1986 story of working with Jimmy Treybig, Tandem’s president, to create the company’s first solutions marketing presentation called “Tandem in the Marketplace”, which I will share in a later chapter.
Now motivated, I dragged out the boxes, plus a few others full of documents I’d collected over the years, from under my desk and shipped them to Canada where, I was going on a summer sabbatical to my cabin in the woods of Algonquin Park. (For those unfamiliar, sabbatical refers to a common practice in academia and imported to Silicon Valley in those heady days of enabling an employee after some number of years of service to have paid leave). In Tandem’s case, after four years of service one was entitled to six weeks paid leave. For some this meant traveling, for others it was an opportunity to rest at home and reconnect with the family. Still others used the time to give back in some way to their communities in a volunteer capacity. The goal was to do whatever one needed to do to refuel one’s jets.
In the wilderness I spent days sorting through the various boxes, which included annual reports, old copies (from 1978-88) of Tandem’s main internal communications mechanisms, the NonStop News periodical and the more philosophical journal Center magazine, and a host of technical publications, user manuals, sales guides, etc. The stack of press clippings alone was two feet high. There was even a copy of Jimmy’s three-foot by two-foot philosophy cum business operating model masterpiece that he’d written in 1980. This document was the result of a bet as to whether or not it was possible for Jimmy to put the entire operating philosophy for Tandem on one piece of paper. (See Chapter 12 for pictures and a summary). Tucked in the bottom of one box was a copy of cartoon maps on how to get to Tandem from the San Francisco airport, as well as the original benefits brochure and customer support procedures manuals. The task was daunting, but there were enough rainy days during my sabbatical to slowly but surely make my way through the piles, taking copious notes and copying quotes verbatim into my laptop. A few weeks later I was done and once again the project stalled. Over the next two years, I would pick it up from time to time and work on different sections