Chapter 5

Three Years Earlier

Alone in his office, Jon Stone checked the time. It was 5:00 p.m. He expected a call soon, and waited patiently for his cell phone to ring. Tuning out the day’s work, he listened while he waited. The sounds of the hum of his desk lamp, the puffing up of papers on his desk caused by the small oscillating fan aimed at his face, and the cleaning people loading trash onto the service elevator were normal. He was proud of what the sounds represented: his place of business.

This was his company. Stone, Incorporated. He started it seven years ago. Two years later he created the Nelson Corporation, another source of pride.

Stone was tall, handsome, with the build of an athlete, but was primarily a techie. He had degrees in Information Technology and Computer Science. Thanks to his initiative and abilities, and to having a talented team of coworkers, his companies were on the cusp of developing something that was literally going to change the world.

Gary Danders called at 5:05. They agreed to meet at a nearby diner. They found an empty booth, ordered beers, and discussed what to do next. Danders was handsome, short, disheveled, with the build of a gyroscope. He was a techie at the Nelson Corp., and a friend of Jon Stone.

Jeremiah Long, ‘Long’ to his friends, was average looking, average height, nearly bald, with the build of an overweight dancer. Graduating from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1968, he was a talented programmer and the creator of the “worthless principle,” and was well known in the IT profession. He was, by some accounts, a techie and a friend of Stone’s.

The “worthless principle” that Long put forth in 1971 states that the value of thoughts is directly proportional to the time spent on thinking them. Over a period of two years he noticed that experienced programmers who spent the least amount of time thinking through the logic to their coding always had poor results. To Long, then, if too little time is spent thinking about a task while doing it, the results will be worthless. This realization seemed obvious; to determine the validity of it he needed to measure the ratio of time and thought to the results for any process involving thinking.

What initially seemed obvious was not. He realized that for thought processes that did not involve emotion, such as computer programming, the worthless principle was valid. However, whenever thinking involved emotions, the results of such could be either directly proportional or inversely proportional to the amount of time thinking them.

For example, whenever Long thought for too short a time about his wedding anniversary, he invariably forgot to buy his wife something nice to celebrate the occasion. Not only were his thoughts worthless in this case, they were matrimonially dumb. On the other hand, whenever he spent the proper amount of time thinking about buying all the ingredients he needed to make a delicious gourmet meal, he and his guests enjoyed one.

He had a slew of other examples of emotion based worthless principle thinking, as well as examples of what he might well have called worthy principle thinking, but he never chose to coin that terminology. His interest was in eliminating the half-assed thinking that resulted in the worthless principle criteria being met, and his personal experience showed that emotion-based thinking went both ways. In his logic-based world of IT all that mattered was productive use of time spent in thought.

To evaluate that he developed a program that measured the time spent writing lines of code, determined by the user’s computer clock, and the quality of the output as measured by the programmer’s sign-off as to the program’s success. Whenever a new program failed, Long reviewed the results, and if he found an instance of poor coding caused by insufficient time spent thinking about the task, he met with the programmer, went over his findings, and let the programmer prove that failure was not the result of lack of concentration.

If it was not proven, Long issued a blast to the entire programming staff that Programmer ‘X’ had been issued a burned-out light bulb icon with the letters ‘WP’ underneath, signifying an instance of the worthless principle being met.

In many ways, receiving a ‘WP’ was an effective tool in keeping the programmers focused. The programmers were logical group and they understood the importance of reaching their goals on time, and while perhaps more introverted as a group than other professionals, they were a cocky lot, so getting a ‘WP’ was an embarrassment of the highest order.

In the broadest sense, there was a similarity between the "worthless principle" and the Six Sigma continuous improvement methodology which was used initially by manufacturing companies to get as close to a zero-product-defect ideal, and Long’s ‘program it right the first time’ ideal. However, Six Sigma was a success; the “worthless principle” was a joke. Why? Programmers were able, for example, to make a one hour task last eight hours. The program worked, but it should have been completed in far less time. In this example, 87.5% of the time spent on this task was wasted. Long never considered that some programmers were dishonest.

In no time at all, word of the “worthless principle” got out, and many IT shops instituted their versions of it. Most of them understood that the worthless principle was indeed worthless, but if you were a recipient of a ‘WP’ in your shop you were razzed mercilessly, and thusly Long and his “principle” became well known. But Long was oblivious to what the industry thought of the ‘WP’ and was not satisfied with merely knowing that a programmer had fallen short. He wanted to be able to determine what the programmers were thinking of when their efforts failed. For that he would need to read their thoughts. Long had trouble reading his handwriting at times; reading a person’s thoughts was unthinkable.

Long began his own computing company in the spring of 1972 and called it, appropriately, WP.