respect through his brains and dedication, not through the normal
trappings of executivedom. He was bearded. He wore a sweater and heavy
boots and wire-rimmed glasses. He plainly was the construction
industry’s version of the proverbial shirt-sleeves manager. He must
loathe paperwork, prefer the field to the executive suite, even if he
was a vice-president of a publicly owned real estate company with twelve
hundred stockholders. He was in his mid-thirties. That wasn’t so much
younger than Ed Boland, who himself, interviewed on a Saturday, had worn
casual clothes. And yet the two somehow came across as being on opposite
sides of the generation gap that all the pundits were babbling about
during Vietnam. I could imagine Boland watching _M*A*S*H_; I could
imagine Bowie, in the right setting, being a mild version of Hawkeye. He
wouldn’t necessarily do things the traditional way, but in the end no
one would care, because whatever it was, he’d succeed. Ed Boland was a
man with a fondness for constants—a characteristic that in his
profession had served him well. Charlie Bowie, I sensed, enjoyed
surprises and change.
Bowie’s company, like Boland’s, had to be good to have survived so long
in a boom-and-bust industry. Everyone needs transportation, everyone
needs housing; everyone does _not_ need recreational motorcycles or
_new_ homes. Across the country, home sales had plummeted at the start
of the 1980s. Washington Homes’ sales had been almost $30 million in
1980 but just half that two years later.
Yet Bowie’s company had survived the ups and downs since 1965. The
management philosophy struck me as the same as Clinton Cycles—the lean,
mean school. It was early 1983 when we first talked. Another housing
boom seemed ready to explode, and Bowie was working a sixty-five-hour
week, “because we’ve gotten very busy, very quickly, and we haven’t
built up our staff rapidly. It’s hard to find qualified people, and we
don’t know whether the recovery’s here to stay.” Small wonder that he
welcomed his computer as a sort of financial radar—an early warning
system that would buzz before the bombs fell.
Washington Homes was a general contractor. In other words, it was just
as much in the management and budget business as the building business.
Bowie and his company didn’t hire laborers, didn’t buy every nail and
brick. Rather, they farmed out the construction to subcontractors, some
of whom, if not policed, could wreak havoc on Washington Homes by, say,
finishing work late.
You can’t do plumbing and the electrical wiring, normally, if the walls
aren’t up yet. You’ve got to keep your invisible assembly line moving.
The sixty phases on Bowie’s “House budget summary” started with items
like “Engineering” and “Water Sewer Charge,” continued through “Brick
Veneer” and “Siding” and went on to such details as “Fences” and “Trash
Removal.” If Bowie was late in submitting bids or getting what he paid
for, it wasn’t a bureaucratic abstraction. It meant a late house, an
unhappy customer, perhaps, and above all, more interest to pay the bank
on Washington Homes’ construction loans.
Bowie, moreover, had to keep track of his customer’s own financing
arrangements. The company’s houses sold for anywhere from $55,000 to
$135,000, but most customers were first timers who had never before
wended their ways through the mortgage maze. Bowie could reduce his
company’s carrying charges if he didn’t rush homes to completion before
the customers were ready for them.
“We don’t make any money until we deliver the house,” he said, “so we
need to keep track of the time between when people contract and make
application with a lender and how long it takes for them to win loan
approval.
“When our company had ninety or a hundred houses and was backlogged, it
was fairly easy to do manually. But now we have almost five hundred
houses in our backlog.”
Shopping around for a system to handle all those grubby details, Bowie
found that computer stores didn’t treat their first-time buyers as well
as he wanted to treat his. “I looked at computers for a year,” he said,
“and the biggest thing I found was the condescending attitude of the
people in the sales centers to someone who knows nothing about it.
“I’d walk into a store and give them a written list of my requirements,
and the first thing they’d tell me was ‘Your requirements are wrong.’
And that was the case until I got to Clinton Computers.”
Bowie showed Sue Grothoff, the sales rep, his sixty-phase budget sheet—a
basic common-sense rule of software and hardware shopping. If you’re
working with documents, at least nonconfidential ones, then _show_ them!
Do so to a store. Do so to a consultant if you have one. Explain as
clearly as you can just what kind of paperwork you’re computerizing.
Here, incidentally, you can’t compare Bowie and Boland in an
apple-to-apple way. Accounting programs can be much trickier than data
bases and spreadsheets, especially for companies with unusual
circumstances like Boland’s—that is, all those subsidiaries in a
small-to-medium business. It’s clear, though, that whatever happened,
Grothoff and Bowie communicated much better than she and Boland.
“At this point,” said Bowie, “I was only interested in loan processing
and budgets, and the main thing I was interested in was budgets.”
He thought he needed above all an electronic spreadsheet. Here, however,
for once, a computer sales rep knew his needs better than he did.
Grothoff persuaded him that most of all he needed a =data-base=
program—one that would help him track loans on hundreds of houses. It
would store information and rearrange it in patterns he needed. He might
not want full copies of all loan-processing reports, for example.
Instead, he might want just the names of the home buyers, say, or just
the foundation costs of each house. Or he might want the program to tote
up all the foundation costs or perform other arithmetic, including
complicated multiplication and division or calculation of ratios and
percentages. And with a program like dBASE II that’s possible. Like many
of its rivals, it will do some complex calculations, not just shuffle
facts around. There are many books on dBASE II—yet another advantage and
indication of its popularity. (Two good choices are _dBASE II User’s
Guide_ by Adam B. Green and _Everyman’s Database Primer featuring dBASE
II_ by Robert Byers.)
Here are some ways in which dBASE II might organize your records if
you’re an executive like Bowie:
1. The CREATE command lets you begin a =file=.
2. A file in a data base is the electronic version of a file drawer or
cabinet. It’s just the space on the disks holding =records=—say, the
house-budget summaries for your homes.
3. A =field= is a category of fact like the amount of money spent on
each air-conditioning system for each house.
4. =Structure= is simply the way a record is set up. There are three big
considerations—the =field names=, the =field width=, and the =field
type=. The field name is simply a field’s title. The field width is
the number of spaces required for the information in each field. The
field type can be one of these categories:
a. A =numeric field=—just numbers
b. A =character field= or =alphanumeric field=—numbers, letters,
question marks, miscellaneous symbols like “@,” or spaces between
letters or numbers
c. A =logical field=—one with just two choices, like “Y” for “Yes”
and “N” for “No”
5. The EDIT command changes the contents of a data field. You can type
in modifications after putting your cursor in the right place.
6. A command to APPEND can add new records to your electronic filing
cabinet.
7. =Sorting= lets you reshuffle records alphabetically, by date or other
ways, just as you would index cards.
8. The LIST command tells dBASE II to flash across the screen the
records that you specify.
9. .AND. helps you narrow down the information you’re looking for or
changing. Consider this hypothetical example: LIST FOR SALE:PERSN =
‘BABBITT’ .AND. LOAN:AMT = ‘$70,000’ would guide you to all houses
that a sales rep named Babbitt sold to a customer borrowing exactly
$70,000.
10. .OR. is another way to describe the desired facts. LIST FOR
SALE:PERSN = ‘BABBITT’ .OR. LOAN:AMT = ‘$70,000’ would indicate you
wanted to see records involving either Babbitt or a loan of $70,000.
11. LIST FOR .NOT. SALE:PERSN = ‘BABBITT’ could help weed from view, or
the files, all records involving Babbitt.
12. =Command files= are programs that tell the machine how to manipulate
the data so you needn’t repeat complicated procedures one by one. You
might work out these files to simplify your secretary’s work—or he or
she might do the same for you.
Bowie and Grimes mastered dBASE II basics in eight hours of classes at
Clinton Computer. “dBASE II was real easy,” he said. “The manual is in
plain English. Even without all our records in the computer now, it
saves me and Julie probably five or six hours a week. We were doing it
manually before, and we’re on the verge of saving other people in the
company lots of time with the loan processing by using dBASE II. I think
we’d have to say with five hundred houses in our backlog there is the
potential for this to save us $50,000 a year in carrying charges that
may have accrued under the old system of keeping loan-processing
records.
“We are going to buy another machine,” Bowie said, “for the Northern
Division.”
The potential $50,000 annual savings from the two machines, by the way,
would include just reductions in carrying charges—not in executive time
or tasks besides loan processing. Consider the economies that would
result simply from less paperwork.
“When we first set up the computer,” Bowie said, “we set it up exactly
like we were doing things manually. As a division manager, I’m in charge
of marketing and production. And earlier we had (1) marketing reports,
(2) production reports, and (3) reports combining highlights of each for
me to determine whether to start houses and things like that. But now
all three categories appear on one loan-processing form.”
dBASE II (or the new dBASE III) may not work for you. But for Bowie it
was a dream program through which he could store and retrieve records
quickly and conveniently for any one of many purposes. He might set up
his records mainly for loan processing. But the “SALE:PERSN” field,
combined with the “SALE:PRICE” one, could tell him which outside sales
reps were selling the most expensive homes. In other words, the
loan-processing data base was one good way to keep track of the salesmen
catering most successfully to the $135,000 buyers. For who cared what
Bowie called his data base—“Loan Processing” or “Sales”? The point is,
he could follow the salesmen’s performance, too, through
cross-references between fields. dBASE II was a treasure trove of
information about trends, sales, or otherwise.
“The problem,” said Bowie, “is that dBASE II would work fine with my
budget summaries for my houses, except they require sixty fields and
dBASE II is limited to thirty-two. So Sue suggested the Multiplan
spreadsheet program. Multiplan is easy to use, even easier than dBASE
II. Julie got started with Multiplan with just fifteen minutes of
instruction.”
Multiplan works on the same idea as the better-known VisiCalc program,
which, like WordStar, has sold hundreds and hundreds of thousands of
copies.
The true origins of these spreadsheets go back to 1978. A Harvard MBA
student disliked the tedium of using a calculator to tote up columns and
rows of interrelated numbers; it was boring even with a pocket
calculator. A change in just one number could throw off dozens of other
entries, so imagine the brain-numbing effect of making an error and then
having to recalculate an entire spreadsheet. Why not write a computer
program to alter all the other variables if one changed?
And so was born the electronic spreadsheet; it and word processing are
the single most popular uses of microcomputers—the real justifications
for their existence. A VisiCalc-type spreadsheet can add, subtract,
multiply, average, do partial sums, find minimums, maximums, simplify
your life in a number of ways.
A description of VisiCalc in _CPA Micro Report_ ticks off an awesome
number of applications: “sales forecasts, profit and loss statements,
rate-of-return calculations, project scheduling, tax calculation,
pricing strategies, financial planning, loan amortization, league
standings and report generation.” An electronic spreadsheet can help do
your checkbook; or it can assist in the preparation of a small country’s
budget—which, in fact, has happened.
Some even say that spreadsheets are contributing to the paperwork
deluging American business. VisiCalc coauthor Dan Bricklin disagrees. “A
lot of calculations,” he said of the pre-VisiCalc days, “were being done
on the backs of envelopes or corners of envelopes or the corners of
newspapers. VisiCalc isn’t causing people to produce more numbers and
reports. Those numbers were always there, but they weren’t always being
identified.”[28]
Footnote 28:
The Bricklin quote comes from Steve Ditlea’s excellent article in
_Popular Computing_, September 1982, page 48, which helped me
appreciate VisiCalc’s many uses.
“Multiplan is incredible,” Bowie said of his VisiCalc-style software. “I
have generated budgets to see if they’ll do all I want them to, to
consider all the what ifs.
“And it’s a big help in scheduling production. We have a factory
producing cabinets for our homes, and our scheduling system is critical,
since at most it can produce cabinets for only fifteen units a week.”
The cabinet plant manager, caught between the demands of Washington
Homes’ northern and southern divisions, had scheduled production
according to his own whims.
“It was costing us a lot of money in missed settlements,” said Bowie,
“and cabinets were not delivered, or they were the wrong color and
size.” He was talking in late February, telling how, the other day, he
had loaded in thirty-five more cabinet orders and instantly learned “we
were out to April 15 on cabinet deliveries. That’s the soonest we could
get them based on the plant’s production capabilities. I’m meeting with
the manager this morning to see if in the future he can up his output.
I’ve found that everybody’s got to live with lead times. Everybody’s got
to give us the right lead time on orders, which means we are now
ordering cabinets for delivery at the end of April and May, where we
generally in the past would not have ordered May delivery until April.
If I miss five house deliveries in a month because of cabinets not being
there on time, then that’s ,000 to $5,000 in carrying charges over the
next three to five months.”
Similarly, Multiplan was probably saving Bowie several thousand dollars
more over the same period by “identifying houses not started because
building permits have not been issued. And it will help identify the
reasons why they haven’t been.
“To get a building permit, all sorts of things must fall into place. And
now we can look at any particular job at any particular time, and if we
see it isn’t started, find out why the permit hasn’t been issued.
“We can determine if we’re waiting for site plans or a plumbing permit
or electrical permit or whatever it happened to be and instantly target
and solve that problem.
“Before, the record keeping was ‘Go get a permit. Have you got it yet?’
There were no details, no backup. We relied on our field people to get
the permits, and they would get the permits in a way that was timely for
them and their production schemes but not in a way that was timely for
us in bottom-line deliveries. So we are now able to target all the
permit process and make it happen at our rate.” Not only was Bowie using
Multiplan as a spreadsheet to plug in all the what ifs; he was also
using it as a data base, even if it wasn’t as nimble in manipulating
nonnumeric data as dBASE II could be.
Whatever chore Bowie was using Multiplan for, he loved the “Help”
screens. He could turn them on to guide himself through the commands he
wasn’t familiar with; besides, all of Multiplan’s basic commands were
normally at the bottom of the screen, anyway.
Multiplan, by the time you’re reading this, may not be the best
spreadsheet on the market, at least not for you. But at one point _CPA
Micro Report_ was pronouncing it the “new Empress of Spreadsheets” for
accountants using a wide range of computers. Multiplan even worked with
VisiCalc files so that users of the older program could easily convert.
“Multiplan,” said _Micro Report_, “... can sort a line-by-line record of
events by account number or name—a frequent requirement in CPA
applications.” Keepers of expense accounts, presumably, could cherish
such a capability. Also, Multiplan, as the newsletter pointed out, lets
you name your variables; you could refer more easily to the =cells= or
the exact locations in the columns and rows. Instead of saying cells
“A26” or “R38P,” you could refer to “Sales” and “Total Costs.”
With programs like Multiplan, software designers are more successfully
catering to the needs of businesspeople who want computers to adjust to
them rather than the other way around. That’s how it should be. Bowie is
a construction executive, not a computer expert, and Boland’s an
accountant rather than a hacker.
Bowie, however, plainly seemed more willing to live with the
complexities of existing software. Many in his place would have used a
consultant—and wisely, I think, for Washington Homes was a
multimillion-dollar operation—yet Bowie had the background and patience
to computerize just with guidance from a store. He might not have been a
computer expert. But he loved the new. He loved complexity if he could
logically unravel it. He didn’t mind mistakes. He felt in control
because he had backups on disk and on paper. The manuals didn’t scare
him. Instead of soaking up every word there, Bowie, like Seymour
Rubinstein, had a gift for knowing which page to flip to if he had
trouble. Bowie was a born micro user. However serious about his job, he
might as well have been a child relaxing after school with a few rounds
of Pac-Man. He loved seeing instant cause-and-effect relationships. He
took as much delight in learning where his division could be six months
hence as a child might take in winning an arcade game. He considered his
computer “the greatest therapy in the world,” an opportunity to “sit
down and feel really good” in “a fairly high tension business.”
Edward Boland, too, however, in a different, more structured way, was
curious about numbers and life, and in the end, I suspect, the two men’s
learning styles didn’t entirely explain their opinions of their
programs. Bolands’ general-ledger software just wasn’t right for his
needs. It straitjacketed him. Bowie’s programs, on the other hand,
helped him do just about anything he wanted.
“Anything,” incidentally, included advancing his career. When I next
caught up with him, in May 1984, he was president of another
construction firm and owned one-third of that company and was taking
home a paycheck thirty-five percent bigger. Bowie said his computer
skills “had a great deal to do with it. I had management tools that not
very many other people had.”
Alan Scharf: Integrated Program, Including Graphics
Alan Scharf, a forty-three-year-old New York executive, also has a nice
touch with software—a good-enough one, in fact, to have helped win him a
job at a blue-chip firm at triple his old salary.
“It’s done wonders for my earning power,” he said from his offices at
Merrill Lynch Leasing, Inc., where he was a $75,000-a-year assistant
vice-president. “I got this job because I walked in and told them I
could do a better job on an Apple.
“I didn’t own one at home at the time. But you can be sure that I bought
one promptly and boned up on it for the next three weeks, and of course
I’d done a lot of research on the Apple before then to make sure I could
deliver on my promise.
“My previous company had refused to let me get one to improve operations
there and do estate taxes. I had to do them by hand on a calculator. It
took hours per client. And I got mad. Most people my age are afraid of
computers, but I’d worked with word processors. And what are word
processors but another kind of computer?”
So Scharf left his job as an estate tax planner with a staid old
brokerage firm and set up shop at Merrill Lynch’s division dealing with
real estate and equipment leasing.
It was a VisiCalc devotee’s dream job, one calling for quick,
repetitive, accurate math in deals as big as $150 million. Merrill Lynch
Leasing made bids to companies hungry for better cash flow. The leasing
company (and rivals) offered to buy their headquarters buildings or
other real estate, freeing the money for bigger factories or research
and development. It was a series of leaseback arrangements. Merrill
Lynch organized syndicates for the ultimate buyers—people or companies
eager for tax shelters. And that meant more than a little numbers
crunching.
Imagine the variables. The deals had to be sexy enough to the selling
companies for Merrill Lynch to win the bids. At the same time, the tax
shelters couldn’t leak. The deals must provide the buyers with the
write-offs that the prospectuses from the leasing company promised.
Ideally, too, they would yield maximum tax advantages on minimum
investments. And for investments of different sizes and at different tax
rates, just what would the various benefits be?
When Scharf reported for work, he found that the real estate department
of the leasing company was on the verge of spending $200,000 a year
tapping into an outside firm’s computer to come up with the right
numbers. The big machine would have been able to do simple
debt-amortization calculations. Scharf could have told a company, for
instance, how long it would take to pay off a mortgage on a building for
which Merrill Lynch proposed a leaseback. But that was only a small part
of what the job needed. And what about the costs?
So Scharf instead used an Apple system costing less than $7,000, a
one-time investment. The Apple couldn’t do all the calculations needed,
but it could actually outperform the time-sharing system in some ways.
Consider simultaneous equations. The software on big machines—at least
by way of the terminals at Merrill Lynch Leasing—just didn’t include
them. But the Apple could simulate this capability. With the VisiCalc
spreadsheet it could juggle around dozens of interrelated statistics,
using nightmarishly elaborate algebra with Catch-22-like mathematical
spirals. In other words, you wanted to know the value of _x_, and it
depended on the value of _y_ and _z_, and you couldn’t solve for _y_
until you solved _z_, and you couldn’t solve for _z_ until you knew _x_.
That’s how it worked, except, quite possibly, Scharf and his staff would
be wrestling with, say, _a_ through _k_ instead of just _x_ through _z_.
Struggling with these Catch-22s, the Apple was a slowpoke by computer
standards. It still took half an hour. That might seem like the Indy 500
to someone accustomed to hand calculations. But Scharf must have felt
the same way I did about inferior word-processing software. However
faster than without a computer, it still limited your possibilities. You
didn’t have as much time to experiment with all your choices. And the
more time Scharf had, the more closely he could consider all the
variables and the more attractive could be Merrill Lynch’s leaseback
bids. The Apple did its job. “We used it to compete successfully for
work with a number of well-known clients,” Scharf said. “Anheuser
Busch—we did their office building in St. Louis. We worked with
Beneficial Corporation. We’ve done a number of K mart stores.”
Scharf, never smug, still tinkered with the Apple and its software. An
observant computer dealer noticed he would keep asking for larger RAM
boards to allow him to do bigger, fancier spreadsheets.
And so it was that the dealer nominated Scharf a tester for Lotus 1-2-3
in late summer 1982. 1-2-3 was the new =integrated software= from Lotus
Development Corporation, a Massachusetts firm started by a former rock
disk jockey rich with $500,000 in royalties from programs sold to the
makers of VisiCalc.
1-2-3 combined a spreadsheet, graphics, and data base. You could, for
instance, pump figures from the spreadsheet program directly into the
data base with a few simple keystrokes. You didn’t have to go through
unwieldy computer rigamarole to transfer facts from one kind of
electronic file to another. More important, however, Lotus, at least for
Scharf’s use, was a more powerful numbers cruncher than the VisiCalc he
ran on his Apple. Lotus was for the 16-bit IBM PC. Sixteen-bit machines
were speed demons for numbers crunchers, especially with powerful
programs like 1-2-3. An Apple-VisiCalc duo handled worksheets with 254
rows and about 65 columns. But an IBM and 1-2-3 duo could take on 2,048
rows and 256 columns.