Drafting the proposal was only part
of the battle,
however, and a small
part at that. Quite justifiably, Ellenby had
doubts
about how long it would
take
his report to wend its way up the
Xerox chain
of command.
As
it happened, the issue got taken out of his
hands by a
legendary corporate figure named Shelby
H.
Carter.
Then Xerox's
national sales manager,
Shelby Carter
was the type of person who could not but bridle at Xerox's
torpid
decision-making.
A
Texan
ex-Marine
fighter pilot who pursued his
quarry
with the implacable force
of
a
tornado and fashioned himself one
of the
greatest salesmen of all
time (few customers dared disagree),
Carter
was a throwback to the old
Xerox
of relentless sales targets and blood-in-the-shoes pounding of
pavement. Every bit as instinctive an inspirer of men as
Bob
Taylor, he
preferred to work his magic among bigger crowds.
"He
used to conduct what were known as
Jet
Squad
Meetings,"
recalled David Kearns. "Carter would hop into the corporate jet and fly
to two or three cities a day and stir up the troops.
In New York City
they
might gather at Shea Stadium. Carter would stand on the pitcher's
mound and deliver his spiel, and the salesmen in attendance would be
spellbound. Then they would go out and sell copiers with an almost
crazed intensity." On sales reps who met his exacting standards Carter
would bestow the treasured memento of a Bowie knife mounted on a
plaque. For many of them it meant more than a cash bonus.
By the late 1970s, however, Carters influence within the corporation
was distinctly on the wane. With the possible exception of David Kearns,
he could no longer command a rapt audience in the executive suite. The
genetic code of the place had changed. "The hip-shooting Shelby Carters
weren't listened to as much at meetings anymore," Kearns observed.
"Carter would say, 'I have a hunch about this,' and everyone would
respond, 'No way. We don't act on hunches.'"
One of Carter's hunches concerned the Alto. Convinced that a properly
motivated sales force could sell the machine, big-time, he had placed a
trusted lieutenant named Frank Sauer inside ASD to keep him up to date
on the marketing program and to involve Xerox's Santa Clara sales office
in
the planning. One day Sauer slipped him a copy of Ellenby's proposal.
Carter, who had been deeply involved in the Futures Day planning and
appreciated Ellenby's talents as a result, "took a look and got pretty
excited," Ellenby recalled. "He was a great believer in making things happen. So one day he happened to be sitting next to David Kearns at a New
York Mets game and said, 'Hey, John's team is really up to something
exciting. Don't forget these are the guys who did Boca Raton for you.'
And Kearns said, 'Get me a copy right away.'"
The proposal thus skipped over several levels of management on its
way to the top. This was a dangerous move. As much as senior executives
liked to talk about tearing down the bureaucratic walls to get Xerox moving again, they remained very fussy about protocol. When word filtered
down that the proposal had somehow reached Kearns, Ellenby was
assumed to have deliberately leaked it to the chief executive—understandably, since his can-do style at Boca Raton had earned him the reputation of "a hot shot who got the job done regardless of other people's
organizational feelings," as he put it himself. An "extremely pissed off'
Elkind even threatened to fire him, Ellenby recalled.
Ellenby denied having had anything to do with sending the report
upstream. But now that it was done, he remained unrepentant. He was
fed up with Xerox and considered the proposal his last crack at achiev
ing his goals
within the organization.
If it did
not fly, he
was ready to go
off and
start his own company. He also
felt
that the proposal would
never have
made it to top management
any other
way.
"Elkind
would not have passed it to
his boss,
who would not
have
passed it to his boss," he said. "Xerox did
not
work that
way."
He was
right. Elkind said later he
did not
think Ellenby’s program
could ever succeed within Xerox, even
absent
"the disruption of bounc
ing it
several steps up the management
chain"—
especially
with
the
Star
still holding pride of place as the corporation’
s
designated spearhead in
office
systems.
Carters impertinence had
earned
the
Alto
no friends.
As
Elkind
predicted, the proposal met with
nothing
but resistance and hostility all the way along the management
line.
Still, it might have succeeded had
Kearns
thrown some real weight
behind
it.
This
he was unwilling to do.
Having
reached down to grab the
proposal as
though to demonstrate he
could be
as entrepreneurial and
spontaneous as the next man, he turned
it over
to a deputy
for a
routine
appraisal.
The
deputy, Robert Wenrik, tested
it against
the judgments
of the
usual
suspects, including
SDD
and
Bob Potter.
Both
found
plenty
to
carp at,
including the perennial issue
of cost. In
the end
Wenrik
shot
down
Ellenby’s work with a bureaucratically vacuous rejection letter.
"We
have concluded that Xerox will
not adopt
the proposal you have
prescribed,"
it
read; "however, we
appreciate
the thought
you
have
given
to the many issues covered in
your
proposal
. .
."
"I
kept a copy," Ellenby said one day
many
years later, withdrawing it
from
his
files.
"Its
pretty interesting what
he
did
say
here, like '
Some
of
the
challenges which you clearly identified
are
being pursued through the
normal management channels
,
and should
be
resolved over
the
next
few
weeks . .
'Which was not the case, because they never were.
And
'Your
proposal
assisted us in dealing with the
problem
more expeditiously than
we normally might have . . .
'
I
don't think that's true,
I
think actually the
proposal delayed things, it was like throwing a wrench into the works.
"Then he goes on to say,
'I'm confident that you will continue your
support to the challenges we face in Jerry Elkind's probe activity
Knowing
full well that Jerry wanted to fire me."
In January 1980, about one year after receiving Wenrik’s letter, Ellenby
quit Xerox. Partially with the money he had earned in his corporate
profit-sharing plan by staying the extra year, he founded a company called
Grid Systems, which manufactured the world’s first laptop computers.
The product line derived not from any work he had done at Xerox, whose
lawyers had cautioned him sternly against recruiting any of his team
members to his new company, but from flat-panel display and microprocessor technology he had learned from Ferranti. The dream of transferring PARC's technology to the outside would have to wait. Ellenby,
like so many others, had found it impossible to accomplish this as an
employee of a company that treated his brand of aggressive advocacy
purely as a threat.
"Dave Kearns took it upon himself to come out to PARC and spend a
bit of time discussing my capability proposal after he saw it," Ellenby
recalled. "He said, 'What will you do if I decide not to do this?'
"
I said, 'I'll make sure my folks are well set and happy within their corporation because they like this corporation. But I'm going to have to leave, David, because I've burned too many bridges.'