ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

158 ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AND LEADERSHIPsalespeople, they pointed out, the time horizon involved the completionof a sale, which could take minutes, hours, days, or weeks.In general, however, even their longer time horizons were muchshorter than those of the research people, for whom a one- or twoyearhorizon was normal. In other words, research people would notget closure, in the sense of knowing that they had a good product,until a much longer period of time had elapsed, partly because theyoperated more in terms of “development time,” as described above,and partly because in many industries it is not known whether thenew product or process will work when it is scaled up to greater volumeproduction. Particularly in the chemical industry, a researcherdoes not know whether he has been successful until his product haspassed the pilot plant and full production facility hurdles. At eachstep the larger scale can change the process and reveal things thatwill require new research and development.If we now consider the communication process between theresearcher and the salesperson/marketer, when the latter says thatshe wants a product “soon” and the researcher agrees that the productwill be ready “soon,” they may be talking about completely differentthings and not realize it. For example, at DEC I constantlyheard complaints from the sales department that engineering wasnot getting the products out on time. If I talked to engineering, Iwas told that the product was on schedule and doing just fine,which often meant “we are only six months late, which is nothingin a several-year development cycle.” Each function got angry atthe other. Neither recognized that the judgments being made aboutwhat it meant to be on time differed because different assumptionsabout time units were being used.DEC and Ciba-Geigy differed in their overall time horizons,probably because of their underlying technologies and markets. Theslow deliberateness of the research process at Ciba-Geigy spilledover into the management process. Things were done slowly, deliberately,and thoroughly. If a project was going to take several years,so be it. Time was expressed in spatial terms in a phrase commonlyheard around the company: “The first thousand miles don’t count.”