leadership reflections

IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING MAGAZINE

Robert Lucky

Leadership and Life in the Old Bell Labs

6 MAY 2004

n a bright sunnymorning in earlyOctober of 1961,I walked up to theentrance of Bell

Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, formy first day of work. Somewherewithin these storied walls were theheroes whose works I had studied ingraduate school. Here ClaudeShannon had conceived informationtheory, Steve Rice had written hislandmark paper on noise, and thetransistor had been invented. I feltproud to have the opportunity tojoin such a famous community ofengineers and scientists. Besides feel-ing proud, however, I felt scared andinadequate. Who was I, next tothese legends?

Many years later, I still feel thatway. Occasionally I have looked backwith admiration, nostalgia, and won-der at the names in a tattered 1965Bell Labs telephone directory. Itseemed that every single person in theresearch department in those days wasthen or was later to become famous.What a world it was! There was aworld-class expert right down the hallfor whatever you needed to know.

Playing Follow the LeaderLeadership in those days emanatedfrom technical or scientific expertiseand fame. We followed leaders notbecause they exerted managementcontrol, but because we sought themeasures of technological and scien-tific success and acclaim that theyhad achieved. In my career as amember of the technical staff at Bell

Labs, no one ever gave me an explic-it assignment. It was assumed thatyou were self-motivated and self-led,and if you didn’t succeed in this con-text, you found a different job.

My initial assignment was in thedata theory department of a labora-tory responsible for developingcommercial modems. I had no pre-monition that one day everyonewould have complex modems intheir homes implemented on singleintegrated circuit chips. I thoughtthat modems would always be big,clunky things used exclusively byindustry. I was working on theproblem of how to adapt modemsto automatically equalize the variouschannel characteristics that theywould encounter on dial-up.

One evening while driving home,I was stopped at a red light and sud-denly saw a simple way to imple-ment an adaptive equalizer thatwould be optimum under the crite-rion that I had in mind. I was soexcited about my idea that I stayedup all night, waiting for the sun torise so that I could go to work andtell people about it. Looking backon this, I realize that the mostrewarding moments of my careerhave not been promotions or awardsbut the exhilaration that comes froma genuine, novel technical idea.Unfortunately, I can count on thefingers of one hand the number oftimes that I have had such ideas.

Past Projects RevisitedBell Labs was such a vast place thatit took several years of continuous

osmosis for me to get a larger pic-ture of what was happening there.When thinking about leadership it isinteresting to consider some of themore important projects that weregoing on at that time. One of thebest known was the developmentthe of Picturephone, which wasthought to represent the future ofcommunications. This requiredreengineering the existing telephoneinfrastructure, and it was a monu-mental engineering development.

I sometimes reflect on this project.At that time this project was praisedfor its engineering excellence, butwhat are we to make retrospectively ofits dismal market failure? Certainlymuch of the blame can be attributed

The author of this article, BobLucky, is well known for his sig-

nificant leadership roles at Bell Labsand Bellcore. As he describes it,leadership in the old Bell Labs dur-ing the so-called “golden years”emanated from scientific expertise.It was a laboratory driven by inno-vation rather than profit motivation.However, after the antitrust trial, thegrowth of the Internet, and the riseof competition, technological lead-ers began to be replaced with lead-ers with more business knowledgeand skills. Yet the attributes helooks for in a leader today are simi-lar to the ones of the past, namely,respectability and trustworthiness.

—Arye Nehorai“Leadership Reflections” Editor

O

IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING MAGAZINEMAY 2004 7

to poor marketing, but I think it isalso true that such a project couldonly have endured within a culturesuch as that which existed at Bell Labsin those days—a benevolentmonopoly with a vision of how thefuture should be and motivated muchmore by engineering excellence thanby economics and market feedback.

The anticipated widespread adop-tion of the Picturephone was goingto require a lot of bandwidth in thetelephone plant. Fortunately, theresearchers at Bell Labs were workingon the answer to that bandwidthdemand—it was to be the millimeterwaveguide system. Even today whenI sometimes drive by the old BellLabs facility in Crawford Hill, NewJersey, I see the legacy of that pro-ject. The Crawford Hill building islong and linear, having beendesigned to house the straight, exper-imental pipe that carried the circularlypolarized millimeter wave signal thatwas to be the primary means of trans-port for information in the future.

The waveguide carrier system wasunceremoniously dropped almost theinstant the news came that Corninghad made an optical fiber with thebenchmark attenuation of only 20dB/km. Bell Labs, to its credit, con-verted immediately to optical phe-nomena. Still, I wonder about theinitial judgment behind the millime-ter waveguide project. Perhaps thiswas a case of underestimating thepotential of competing technologies.

I had a personal experience of thisunderestimation (which ClayChristiansen has called “the innova-tor’s dilemma”) a decade later whenI led a research team assembling aprototype of a digital switch. At thattime the core switching fabric wasanalog, implemented with relays thatcost only pennies to manufacture.How could a digital implementationwith transistors compete with thiswell-honed analog technology? Iremember giving a sales pitch forour research prototype to the execu-

tive who headed the development ofthe new central office switch. “Butlook how much more expensiveyour digital switch is,” he said tome. My presentation was a failure,but so was the newly developed ana-log switch when competitors cameout with digital implementations.

I think back on this as a personalfailure to understand—truly under-stand and believe—Moore’s Law. Ishould have told the executive thatwithin a few years transistor switch-es would cost less than a few centsapiece. Much, much less, as we nowknow! Yet, still, I think most of usfail to believe and appreciate theexponential progress promised byMoore’s Law. It just can’t continue,we tell ourselves. We’re still tellingourselves this.

The Giants of TechnologyNot all of the projects at Bell Labsthen were as doubtful as thePicturephone and millimeter wave-guide. I remember being inter-viewed in my initial visit to Bell Labsby a young department head, JohnMayo (later to become president ofBell Labs), who was heading thedevelopment of the first digital carri-er system, T-1. Over in the researcharea, John Pierce was championingthe development of satellite commu-nications. Pierce was extremely influ-ential in getting governmentcooperation for the experimentswith the Echo satellite. The first sig-nals to a communications satellitewere sent from that same CrawfordHill facility designed for millimeterwaveguide experimentation.

John Pierce was the preeminenttechnical leader of that day. He hadhelped Rudy Kompfner bring radartechnology from England during thewar. He wrote science fiction underthe pseudonym J.J. Coupling, andhe had the distinction of coining thename “transistor.” However, it wasdisconcerting to be talking with himin the halls when he would suddenly

tune out and walk away while I wasstill talking to him. You could almostsee the “click” in his head, as if tosay, “That’s enough of this conversa-tion.” I remember the last time I sawhim at Bell Labs. I asked him whatBell Labs would do without him. Hesaid to me, “It’s up to you now,Bob.” I remember thinking that thiswasn’t going to work. Technicalleaders like Pierce have disappearedfrom our midst.

In 1982, I was promoted to headthe communications research divi-sion. I inherited the office of ArnoPenzias, who left one memento in hisoffice for me—a silvered plaque onthe wall of an AT&T advertisementfeaturing Penzias that had appearedin national publications. “What doesa Nobel Prize in physics have to dowith your telephone?” was the head-line of the ad. It went on to explainthat the work in radio astronomy thathad led to his Nobel Prize for the bigbang involved work on low-noiseamplifiers that were also critical forlong-distance telephone transmission.I thought then that this rationaliza-tion was a stretch and now, sadly, Ithink that Nobel Prizes in physicsmay not have much to do with eco-nomic success in the telecommunica-tions business. And I think that is aterrible shame. Perhaps AT&T didn’tprofit, but society certainly did.

Fading of the Golden YearsThere were still some good yearsleft for research in 1982, but thedark clouds were gathering on thehorizon. The next year I foundmyself on the stand in federal courtin Washington, DC, before JudgeGreene at the AT&T antitrust trial,trying to explain the importance ofresearch at Bell Labs and our guid-ing religion of trying to create thebest telephone network for thecountry irrespective of economicgain to the company itself. But theBell System was about to be brokenup, and the fate of Bell Labs

IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING MAGAZINE8 MAY 2004

leadership reflections continued

research was of minor consequencein the context of the tectonic forcesthat had been brought to bear.

While I was nervously defendingBell Labs to Judge Greene,researchers in academia were bring-ing up nodes on the experimentalARPANET. In 1983 there werefewer than a thousand hosts. Someresearchers at Bell Labs wereinvolved in this or similar activities,but probably no one believed thatone day this fledgling networkwould threaten to devour the entireworld’s telecommunications infras-tructure. Between the technologicalforces unleashed by the Internet andthe competitive forces unleashed bythe AT&T antitrust trial, theresearch world that we knew inthose “golden years” of the 1970sand 1980s was about to crumble.

Leadership TodayWhen I run into old Bell Labs people,we always talk about those “goldenyears.” But how the world haschanged! The kind of managementand technical leadership that existedin the old Bell Labs has vanished fromthe corporate environment. Today’stechnical managers are much moreconcerned with business value thanthose past technical giants. Perhapsthis is the way it should be, and in anyevent it is useless to lament what haspassed. The attributes that I look forin a leader today are fundamentallythe same ones I always did. I look forsomeone that I can respect and trust.In the old days, respect and trust hadto do with technology; now I have amore global understanding of whatthose attributes involve. Still, I’m gladI had the environment that I did!

Robert Lucky headedthe communicationsresearch division atBell Labs until1992, when he be-came head of re-search at Bellcore(later renamed Tel-

cordia). He retired from that posi-tion in 2002 and currently spendshis time on various technical advi-sory committees and boards. Hehas been president of the IEEECommunications Society, executivevice president of the IEEE, and edi-tor of the Proceedings of the IEEE.He has been awarded the IEEEEdison Medal, the Marconi Prize,and four honorary doctorates.Many engineers know him from hisregular column, “Reflections,” inIEEE Spectrum.