A good boss is someone who protects you from the hierarchy, or empowers you with decision-making, or gets you anything you want, or just leaves you alone. The no-boss boss. That is not bad, but it is fragile and temporary.

This struck home to me as I was listening to a book about Bell Labs. The researchers at Bell Labs were allowed a huge degree of autonomy and they could choose what they wanted to work on. It did not have to have an immediately obvious practical use. It was basic research, discovering fundamental things about how chemistry and physics worked.

Claude Shannon

The poster child for autonomy was Claude Shannon who was given even wider latitude at Ma Bell.^∇ They had an intuition that he would do great things if left to his own devices. So the Labs went out of its way to let Shannon pick his work.

Eventually, he would write a text on Information Theory that would define the “bit” and other concepts about how information could be measured and thought about. It was groundbreaking and ripples of his achievement are still felt to this day.

Later, Shannon would work on automated chess machines and other electronic inventions. The work was important, too, to some degree, but he never again produced anything like Information Theory.

Imagine now for a moment that he had been directed to tackle the automated chess games and other electronic machines before he had written about Information Theory. Or he might have been firmly encouraged to stay the course with his inventions. Or perhaps he would have been gently encouraged to leave and take up an academic position.

Better than Bell Labs

Bell Labs was hands off and a good place for researchers, so long as researchers picked things that had some plausible impact on the Bell Phone business. Even Shockley with his semiconductor research was trying to make an amplifier to replace vacuum tubes.

What would be better than one Bell Labs would be a community of them. I see some value in focusing research, certainly for companies. But there would be more value to society if there were a community of labs and people could follow their curiosity from one to the other. RADs^∇ make sure that whatever contributions a researcher made in one lab would not be lost and would carry on in the next.

Lucky Us

Now think of how extremely lucky it was for us that Bell Labs allowed Shannon to decide to tackle Information Theory first. And therein lies the flaw of management as a temporary, and fragile, guarantor of autonomy: it was not systemic.

If Bell Labs had been committed to decentralization and transparency and to creating meaning and belonging, then Shannon would have had the autonomy he needed at a systemic level. He could have tackled subjects in whatever order he pleased, whether it’d be Information Theory first or last or in the middle. It would not be up to the largesse of his good boss and the hierarchy he was beholden to.

Radically Healthier

The Radical model ensures the gains of invention, discovery, and innovation for society, for all. Invention under a Fiat framework is very high risk. It goes against the norm and it leaves us in a situation where a manager plays roulette with his future within the hierarchy. Do we want society’s achievements to be won that way?

The Radical model provides a healthier path toward discovery and achievement, one without the threat of professional death constantly hanging overhead.

ENDNOTES

• Ma Bell was the nickname for The Bell System. It had a government-sactioned monopoly on all telecommunication. It was led by the Bell Telephone Company and later by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. They dominated the telephone services industry in North America from its creation in 1877 until its antitrust breakup in 1983.

• By Matt Perez, Jose Leal, Adrian Perez. Giving RADs 2021. <https://radicalcompanies.com/2022/07/17/giving-rads.html>