The Race For A New Game Machine:. David Shippy

My first close encounter with the Japanese engineers came at a lunchtime gathering that Tony Truong organized. Tony rounded up eight of us, and we headed off to his favorite Vietnamese noodle shop in North Austin. The place was a hole in the wall, but the food was excellent. I always deferred to Tony to order for me, and that day he chose a large bowl of rice noodles with spicy meatballs for me. I was never sure how to eat this tasty mixture of chicken broth, rice noodles, and meat. Should I use a spoon, a fork, or chopsticks? Or should I just pick up the bowl and slurp? I mostly chose the latter.

      As we ate, I tried to make casual conversation with one of my Japanese lunch mates, Takeshi Yamazaki, who Tony introduced as one of Sony’s chief engineers on the project. What Tony had not told me was that Yamazaki spoke very little English. I muddled through several attempts at conversation, but Yamazaki returned only blank stares. He said nothing.

      At first, I thought he was one rude fellow, but then I finally figured out the problem. I thought to myself, “This is going to be an interesting project if none of my partners can speak English!” I certainly couldn’t speak Japanese.

      At just about the same time, IBM halted all external hiring, proving true the predictions of that wise human resources representative. Corporate management informed us there was a surplus of design engineers in the company who we must re-deploy before considering any more external applications. I can be as true-Blue as the next IBMer, but I knew right away that this was not going to be any easier for us than hiring off the street. In fact, it would probably be harder. As in any large family, our remote cousins were not enthused about letting us take charge of the family fortune.

      First, we looked to Rochester, Minnesota, the hotbed of high-performance microprocessor design in the mid-1990s. Their AS/400 minicomputers had been popular business and accounting computers, but those machines relied on proprietary operating systems and software. They eventually lost market share to the more popular open source Unix computer systems. With this erosion in the customer base, IBM corporate offices pulled a sizeable chunk of funding from Rochester, forcing a downsizing. Despite the reductions, some top engineering talent remained in Rochester.

      My first task was to figure out how to integrate a large group of engineers into my Austin-based design team and keep them motivated and happy while working remotely from Rochester. After several brainstorming sessions, I decided we needed to partition the microprocessor core in such a way that we could give the Rochester team a self-contained, “meaty” portion of the design, sort of a mini-project. This would serve two purposes: first, it would minimize the interaction required with the rest of the core team in Austin and, second, it would build pride of ownership at the Rochester site. The alternative was to give them responsibility for bits and pieces of the design work scattered throughout the core, a choice that was far more likely to complicate communications and make the Rochester team feel like hired guns.

      I deployed a similar technique with a team from the Research Center in Yorktown, New York. The Yorktown folks were some of the best engineers in the company, who had made major contributions to the Power4 microprocessor design. I was counting on a similar performance from them for this new design. I gave them a self-contained piece of the design so that the Yorktown contingent could work on their own mini-project.

      Since external hiring for IBM was no longer an option, we worked out a one-time good deal with Toshiba where they agreed to hire a hotshot ex-IBMer, Jack Bell, who we desperately needed for our verification team. It sounded like a great idea to everyone, and we all got what we wanted. The reality was very messy, though. Bell was looked upon by IBMers as “one of us,” so he was privy to lots of secrets that we didn’t necessarily want to share with our Japanese partners. We conveniently forgot he was in the room when we discussed IBM-only topics. Thankfully, he didn’t report everything he heard to Toshiba, because in truth, at the beginning at least, his loyalty was still to IBM. Meanwhile, Toshiba engineers didn’t fully trust Bell and probably viewed him as a spy in their Toshiba-only meetings. What an awkward situation.

      As the team grew, the management structure grew, too. Eventually, there were six second-line managers and one project manager working under Jim Kahle and Chekib Akrout in the Design Center. Technology and engineering as a whole were still overwhelmingly male-dominated fields, so it was somewhat surprising when the Design Center ended up filling five of these top leadership positions with women. The STI project was not a proving ground for gender equality, nor was it a traditional engineering team where men ruled the roost. It was simply proof positive that IBM’s long-held policy of hiring, developing, and promoting women engineers was effective. It functioned exactly as intended by providing IBM with a strong, capable, and diverse workforce. The STI project’s diversity is a tribute to Chekib Akrout, who selected leaders based on capabilities, not gender or race. At STI, the two or three dozen female engineers on the team gained a real vision for their own advancement potential by looking at the good role models these women in leadership positions provided. This coalition of powerful women created a climate of cooperation in the workplace, making it a place where teamwork ruled.

      Second-line managers were responsible for the technical goals, schedules, and performance for their respective teams, as well as all the personnel issues. Their teams came in sizes ranging from 30 to 240 people. Linda Van Grinsven was the first woman recruited for one of the coveted second-line management positions. She and her husband, Gene, both engineers, had been with IBM for nearly twenty years, mostly at the Rochester, Minnesota site. They relocated to Austin for a two-year temporary assignment, and Linda led the group responsible for the design of the Synergistic core, which you’ll read more about later. This core, slated to be used multiple times on the chip, was the brainchild of Ken Kutaragi and Jim Kahle. The forty-five people on Linda’s team were almost all located in Austin, but many of them were Japanese employees of Sony or Toshiba. Consequently, she tackled the language barrier early on and was instrumental in forming many of the practices that helped the Design Center function effectively in a multicultural environment. With a couple of hothead technical leads under her, Linda had her hands full keeping the peace in her team.

      My co-author, Mickie Phipps, a relative newcomer to IBM, came in as a first-line manager in 1999 from Eaton Corporation. Prior to that, during her 20 years in active duty and reserve service with the United States Air Force, Mickie’s resume spanned such jobs as aircraft mechanic, intelligence officer, and research and development engineer for air-to-air missiles. She joined the STI Design Center in September 2001 as Chekib Akrout’s technical assistant. This was a period of uncertainty for her as our country recalled military reservists in great numbers to fight the war on terror. She had been expecting to retire from the Air Force that year, but the attack on the Twin Towers in New York City changed everything. Twice, Mickie received orders to report for active duty with the Air Force, and both times those orders were cancelled at the last minute. Her position with Akrout was meant to be a gap-filler while she waited for her date to report. Months later, the Air Force released Mickie from service and in the summer of 2002, Akrout promoted her to second-line manager for the PowerPC team. I knew her well from her work with Akrout and was very pleased that we were now partners. Our team, located at seven different IBM sites in time zones that stretched from Germany to California, eventually grew to 240 people. Technical complexity, size of the team, geography, and language and cultural differences presented rocky challenges that we worked through together

      Kathy Papermaster led the Convergence team for a short time in late 2001 and early 2002. Her team was responsible for functions that were more global in nature or were more focused at the chip level, like design tools which had to be common throughout the team, chip verification, and chip integration. Kathy definitely had her heart set on becoming an IBM executive and soon left the Design Center to take a position as an executive assistant to a vice president, Michel Mayer. To replace her, Chekib Akrout brought out the big guns and lured former IBMer Dac Pham away from a very high-level position at Intel. Dac was high-energy, enthusiastic, and optimistic.

      After more than fifteen years of service with IBM, Pam Spann had resigned (along with many others) following the infamous retirement plan debacle in 1999. In one fell swoop, IBM had adjusted their benefit plan to fit a younger, more mobile workforce, drastically altering the retirement plans for a significant number of long-term, dedicated employees. IBM’s new plan no longer offered benefits that provided retired workers with a monthly