HP and Motorola decided to have a boat race, on the
Thames, following the famous Oxford vs Cambridge course.
Both teams practiced hard, and came the big day, they were as
ready as they could be.
HP won by a mile.
Afterwards, the Motorola team were very downhearted, and a decision
was made that the reason for the crushing defeat had to be
found, so a working party was set up to investigate and
report.
Well, they had everybody on the working party, Sales, Systems
Engineering, Marketing, Customer Education, Field Service,
the whole lot, and after 3 months they came up with the
answer, and the working party co-ordinator gave his summary
presentation.
"The problem was", he said, "that HP had 8 people rowing
and 1 steering, whereas we had 1 person rowing and 8
steering."
The working party was then asked to go away and come up with
a plan to prevent a recurrence the following year, for Motorola's
pride had been damaged, and another defeat was not wanted.
2 months later, the working party had worked out a plan, and
the coordinator gave his (customarily brief) summary--
"The guy rowing has got to work harder"
