Interlude - Index of

Managing Engineers | 113
They say with dogs that you cannot punish them three
days later for crapping on the floor. You have to drag them
over and rub their noses in it right away. Bill applied the same
principle, except he rubbed our noses in success.
Bill also used the milestones to bring teams together. Sometimes
a big project has separate groups working on separate
components, and they don’t connect them up until the very
end. Bill would set a goal that required the parts to work to -
gether. That often exposed problems that would have been
much harder to fix later on. At NetApp, I encouraged managers
to set creative early milestones and keep a bottle of champagne
on hand.
••
Sometimes alcohol is the reward for teamwork, and sometimes
it is the inspiration.
“What would you like to drink?” the flight attendant
asked.
I was on a business trip with a coworker named Laura
Pickering, and we must have been thirsty because we answered
together. “Cranberry and—” said Laura. “Dr Pepper,” I interrupted.
“—vodka,” Laura finished. Laura wanted a Sea Breeze
(cranberry and vodka), and I wanted Dr Pepper, but since we
interrupted each other, the flight attendant got confused.
“You want cranberry, Dr Pepper, and vodka?!”
Seizing the moment, Laura said, “Huh? Uh, sure, I’ll take
one.”
“Make that two,” I added.
We had accidentally invented a new drink that we christened
Doctor Death. We named it after we’d each had two