Case 5 SIMMONS LABORATORIES
adapted by William Starbuck from a case written by Alex Bavelas.
Brandon Newbridge was sitting alone in the conference room of the laboratory. The rest of the group had gone.
One of the support staff members had stopped and talked for a while about her husband’s coming enrolment in
graduate school. Brandon, now alone in the laboratory, slid a little further down in his chair, looking with
satisfaction at the results of the first test run of the new photon unit.
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He liked to stay after the others had gone. His appointment as project head was still new enough to give him a deep
sense of pleasure. His eyes were on the graphs before him, but in his mind, he could hear Dr. William Goh, the
project head, saying again, “There’s one thing about this place you can bank on. The sky is the limit for anyone who
can produce!” Newbridge felt again the tingle of happiness and embarrassment. Well, dammit, he said to himself,
he had produced. He wasn’t kidding anybody. He had come to the Simmons Laboratories two years ago. During a
routine testing of some rejected Clanson components, he had stumbled on the idea of the photon correlator, and
the rest just happened. Goh had been enthusiastic: A separate project had been set up for further research and
development of the device, and he had been given the job of running it. The whole sequence of events still seemed
a little miraculous to Newbridge.
He shrugged out of the reverie and was bent determinedly over the sheets when he heard someone come into the
room behind him. He looked up expectantly; Goh often stayed late himself and now and then dropped in for a
chat. This always made the day’s end especially pleasant for Brandon. But it wasn’t Goh. The man who had come
in was a stranger. He was tall and thin. He wore steel-rimmed glasses and had a very wide leather belt with a large
brass buckle. Lucy, a member of Brandon’s team, remarked later that it was the kind of belt the Pilgrims must have
worn.
The stranger smiled and introduced himself. “I’m Lester Zapf. Are you Brandon Newbridge?” Brandon said yes,
and they shook hands. “Doctor Goh said I might find you in. We were talking about your work, and I’m very much
interested in what you are doing.” Brandon waved to a chair.
Zapf didn’t seem to belong in any of the standard categories of visitors: customer, visiting firefighter, shareholder.
Brandon pointed to the sheets on the table. “These are the preliminary results of a test we’re running. We have a
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new gadget by the tail and we’re trying to understand it. It’s not finished, but I can show you the section we’re
testing.”
He stood up, but Zapf was deep in the graphs. After a moment, he looked up with an odd grin. “These look like
plots of a Jennings surface. I’ve been playing around with some autocorrelation functions of surfaces—you know
that stuff.” Brandon, who had no idea what he was referring to, grinned back and nodded, and immediately felt
uncomfortable. “Let me show you the monster,” he said, and led the way to the workroom.
After Zapf left, Newbridge slowly put the graphs away, feeling vaguely annoyed. Then, as if he had made a decision,
he quickly locked up and took the long way out so that he would pass Goh’s office. But the office was locked.
Newbridge wondered whether Goh and Zapf had left together.
The next morning, Newbridge dropped into Goh’s office, mentioned that he had talked with Zapf, and asked who
he was.
“Sit down for a minute,” Goh said. “I want to talk to you about him. What do you think of him?” Newbridge
replied truthfully that he thought Zapf was very bright and probably very competent. Goh looked pleased.
“We’re taking him on,” he said. “He’s had a very good background in a number of laboratories, and he seems to
have ideas about the problems we’re tackling here.” Newbridge nodded in agreement, instantly wishing that Zapf
would not be placed with him.
“I don’t know yet where he will finally land,” Goh continued, “but he seems interested in what you are doing. I
thought he might spend a little time with you by way of getting started.” Newbridge nodded thoughtfully. “If his
interest in your work continues, you can add him to your group.”
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“Well, he seemed to have some good ideas even without knowing exactly what we are doing,” Newbridge answered.
“I hope he stays; we’d be glad to have him.”
Newbridge walked back to the lab with mixed feelings. He told himself that Zapf would be good for the group. He
was no dunce; he’d produce. Newbridge thought again of Goh’s promise when he had promoted him: “The sky is
the limit here for anyone who can produce!” The words seemed to carry the overtones of a threat now.
That day Zapf didn’t appear until mid-afternoon. He explained that he had had a long lunch with Goh, discussing
his place in the lab. “Yes,” said Newbridge, “I talked with Dr. Goh this morning about it, and we both thought you
might work with us for a while.”
Zapf smiled in the same knowing way that he had smiled when he mentioned the Jennings surfaces. “I’d like to,” he
said.
Newbridge introduced Zapf to the other members of the lab. Zapf and Link, the group’s mathematician, hit it off
well and spent the rest of the afternoon discussing a method for analyzing patterns that Link had been worrying
over the last month.
It was 6:30 when Newbridge finally left the lab that night. He had waited almost eagerly for the end of the day to
come—when they would all be gone and he could sit in the quiet rooms, relax, and think it over. “Think what over?”
he asked himself. He didn’t know. Shortly after 5 p.m., they had almost all gone except Zapf, and what followed
was almost a duel. Newbridge was annoyed that he was being cheated out of his quiet period and finally,
resentfully, determined that Zapf should leave first.
Zapf was sitting at the conference table reading, and Newbridge was sitting at his desk in the little glass-enclosed
cubby he used during the day when he needed to not be disturbed. Zapf had gotten the last year’s progress reports
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out and was studying them carefully. The time dragged. Newbridge doodled on a pad, the tension growing inside
him. What the hell did Zapf think he was going to find in the reports?
Newbridge finally gave up and they left the lab together. Zapf took several of the reports with him to study in the
evening. Newbridge asked him if he thought the reports gave a clear picture of the lab’s activities.
“They’re excellent,” Zapf answered with obvious sincerity. “They’re not only good reports; what they report is
damn good, too!” Newbridge was surprised at the relief he felt and grew almost jovial as he said good night.
Driving home, Newbridge felt more optimistic about Zapf’s presence in the lab. He had never fully understood the
analysis that Link was attempting. If there was anything wrong with Link’s approach, Zapf would probably spot it.
“And if I’m any judge,” he murmured, “he won’t be especially diplomatic about it.”
He described Zapf to his wife, who was amused by the broad leather belt and brass buckle.
“It’s the kind of belt that Pilgrims must have worn,” she laughed.
“I’m not worried about how he holds his pants up,” he laughed with her. “I’m afraid that he’s the kind that just has
to make like a genius twice each day. And that can be pretty rough on the group.”
Newbridge had been asleep for several hours when he was jerked awake by the telephone. He realized it had rung
several times. He swung off the bed, muttering about damn fools and telephones. It was Zapf. Without any excuses,
apparently oblivious of the time, he plunged into an excited recital of how Link’s patterning problem could be
solved.
Newbridge covered the mouthpiece to answer his wife’s stage-whispered “Who is it?”
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“It’s the genius,” replied Newbridge.
Zapf, completely ignoring the fact that it was 2 a.m., went on in a very excited way to explain a completely new
approach to certain of the photon lab problems that he had stumbled on while analyzing past experiments.
Newbridge managed to put some enthusiasm in his own voice and stood there, half-dazed and very uncomfortable,
listening to Zapf talk endlessly about what he had discovered. It was probably not only a new approach but also an
analysis that showed the inherent weakness of the previous experiment and how experimentation along that line
would certainly have been inconclusive. The following day, Newbridge spent the entire morning with Zapf and
Link, the mathematician, the customary morning meeting of Brandon’s group having been called off so that Zapf’s
work of the previous night could be gone over intensively. Zapf was very anxious that this be done, and Newbridge
was not too unhappy to call the meeting off for reasons of his own.
For the next several days, Zapf sat in the back office that had been turned over to him and did nothing but read the
progress reports of the work that had been done in the last six months. Newbridge caught himself feeling
apprehensive about the reaction that Zapf might have to some of his work. He was a little surprised at his own
feelings. He had always been proud—although he had put on a convincingly modest face—of the way in which new
ground in the study of photon-measuring devices had been broken in his group. Now he wasn’t sure, and it seemed
to him that Zapf might easily show that the line of research they had been following was unsound or even
unimaginative.
The next morning (as was the custom) the members of the lab, including the secretaries, sat around a conference
table. Brandon always prided himself on the fact that the work of the lab was guided and evaluated by the group as
a whole, and he was fond of repeating that it was not a waste of time to include secretaries in such meetings. Often,
what started out as a boring recital of fundamental assumptions to a naive listener, uncovered new ways of
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regarding these assumptions that would not have occurred to the researcher who had long ago accepted them as a
necessary basis for their work.
These group meetings also served Brandon in another sense. He admitted to himself that he would have felt far less
secure if he had had to direct the work out of his own mind, so to speak. With the group meeting as the principle of
leadership, it was always possible to justify the exploration of blind alleys because of the general educative effect on
the team. Zapf was there; Lucy and Martha were there; Link was sitting next to Zapf, their conversation
concerning Link’s mathematical study apparently continuing from yesterday. The other members, Bob Davenport,
Georgia Thurlow, and Arthur Oliver, were waiting quietly.
Newbridge, for reasons that he didn’t quite understand, proposed for discussion this morning a problem that all of
them had spent a great deal of time on previously with the conclusion that a solution was impossible, that there
was no feasible way of treating it in an experimental fashion. When Newbridge proposed the problem, Davenport
remarked that there was hardly any use going over it again, that he was satisfied that there was no way of
approaching the problem with the equipment and the physical capacities of the lab.
This statement had the effect of a shot of adrenaline on Zapf. He said he would like to know what the problem was
in detail and, walking to the blackboard, began setting down the “factors” as various members of the group began
discussing the problem and simultaneously listing the reasons why it had been abandoned.
Very early in the description of the problem it was evident that Zapf was going to disagree about the impossibility
of attacking it. The group realized this, and finally the descriptive materials and their recounting of the reasoning
that had led to its abandonment dwindled away. Zapf began his statement, which, as it proceeded, sounded as if it
might well have been prepared the previous night, although Newbridge knew this was impossible. He couldn’t help
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being impressed with the organized and logical way that Zapf was presenting ideas that must have occurred to him
only a few minutes before.
Zapf had some things to say, however, which left Newbridge with a mixture of annoyance, irritation, and at the
same time, a rather smug feeling of superiority over Zapf in at least one area. Zapf held the opinion that the way
that the problem had been analyzed was very typical of group thinking. With an air of sophistication that made it
difficult for a listener to dissent, he proceeded to comment on the American emphasis on team ideas, satirically
describing the ways in which they led to a “high level of mediocrity.”
During this time, Newbridge observed that Link stared studiously at the floor, and he was very conscious of
Georgia Thurlow and Bob Davenport’s glances toward him at several points of Zapf’s little speech. Inwardly,
Newbridge couldn’t help feeling that this was one point at least in which Zapf was off on the wrong foot. The whole
lab, following Goh’s lead, talked if not practised the theory of small research teams as the basic organization for
effective research. Zapf insisted that the problem could be approached and that he would like to study it for a while
himself.
Newbridge ended the morning session by remarking that the meetings would continue and that the very fact that a
supposedly insoluble experimental problem was now going to get another chance was an indication of the value of
such meetings. Zapf immediately remarked that he was not at all averse to meetings to inform the group about the
progress of its members. The point he wanted to make was that creative advances were seldom accomplished in
such meetings, that they were made by an individual “living with” a problem closely and continuously, in a rather
personal relationship to it.
Newbridge went on to say to Zapf that he was very glad that Zapf had raised these points and that he was sure the
group would profit by re-examining the basis on which they had been operating. Newbridge agreed that individual
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effort was probably the basis for making major advances. He considered the group meetings useful primarily
because they kept the group together and they helped the weaker members of the group keep up with the ones who
were able to advance more easily and quickly in the analysis of problems.
It was clear as days went by and meetings continued that Zapf came to enjoy them because of the pattern that the
meetings assumed. It became typical for Zapf to hold forth, and it was unquestionably clear that he was more
brilliant, better prepared on the various subjects that were germane to the problem being studied, and more capable
of going ahead than anyone there. Newbridge grew increasingly disturbed as he realized that his leadership of the
group had been, in fact, taken over.
Whenever the subject of Zapf was mentioned in occasional meetings with Goh, Newbridge would comment only
on the ability and obvious capacity for work that Zapf had. Somehow he never felt that he could mention his own
discomforts, not only because they revealed a weakness on his part but also because it was quite clear that Goh
himself was considerably impressed with Zapf’s work and with the contacts he had outside the photon laboratory.
Newbridge now began to feel that perhaps the intellectual advantages that Zapf had brought to the
group did not quite compensate for what he felt were evidences of a breakdown in the cooperative spirit he had
seen in the group before Zapf’s coming. More and more of the morning meetings were skipped. Zapf’s opinion
concerning the abilities of others of the group, except for Link, was obviously low. At times during morning
meetings or in smaller discussions he had been on the point of rudeness, refusing to pursue an argument when he
claimed it was based on another person’s ignorance of the facts involved. His impatience with others led him to
also make similar remarks to Goh. Newbridge inferred this from a conversation with Goh in which Goh asked
whether Davenport and Oliver were going to be continued on; and his failure to mention Link, the mathematician,
led Newbridge to feel that this was the result of private conversations between Zapf and Goh.
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It was not difficult for Newbridge to make a quite convincing case about whether the brilliance of Zapf was
sufficient recompense for initiating this unravelling of the group. He spoke privately with Davenport and Oliver,
and it was quite clear that both of them were uncomfortable because of Zapf. Newbridge didn’t press the
discussion beyond the point of hearing them say that they did feel awkward, and that it was sometimes difficult to
understand the arguments Zapf advanced, but often embarrassing to ask him to fill in the basis for his arguments.
Newbridge did not interview Link in this manner.
About six months after Zapf’s arrival in the photon lab, a meeting was scheduled in which the sponsors of the
research would get some idea of the work and its progress. It was customary at these meetings for project heads to
present the research being conducted in their groups. The members of each group were invited to other meetings
that were held later in the day and open to all, but the special meetings were usually made up only of project heads,
the head of the laboratory, and the sponsors.
As the time for the special meeting approached, it seemed to Newbridge that he must avoid the presentation at all
costs. He could not trust himself to present the ideas and work that Zapf had advanced because of his
apprehension about whether he could present them in sufficient detail and answer such questions about them as
might be asked. On the other hand, he did not feel he could ignore these newer lines of work and present only the
material that he had done or that had been started before Zapf’s arrival. He felt also that it would not be beyond
Zapf at all, in his blunt and undiplomatic way—if he were at the meeting, that is—to comment on Newbridge’s
presentation and reveal his inadequacy. It also seemed quite clear that it would not be easy to keep Zapf from
attending the meeting, even though he was not on the administrative level of those invited.
Newbridge found an opportunity to speak to Goh and raised the question. He told Goh that, with the meetings
coming up and with the interest in the work and Zapf’s contributions to it, Zapf would probably like to come to the
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meetings; but there was a question of how the others in the group would feel if only Zapf were invited. Goh passed
this over very lightly by saying that he didn’t think the group would fail to understand Zapf’s rather different
position and that Zapf certainly should be invited. Newbridge immediately agreed: Zapf should present the work
because much of it was work he had done, and this would be a nice way to recognize Zapf’s contributions and to
reward him, because he was eager to be recognized as a productive member of the lab. Goh agreed, and so the
matter was decided.
Zapf’s presentation was very successful and in some ways dominated the meeting. He attracted the interest and
attention of many of those who had come, and a long discussion followed his presentation. Later in the evening—
with the entire laboratory staff present—in the cocktail period before the dinner, a little circle of people formed
about Zapf. One of them was Goh himself, and a lively discussion took place concerning the application of Zapf’s
theory. All of this disturbed Newbridge, and his reaction and behaviour were characteristic. He joined the circle,
praised Zapf to Goh and to others, and remarked on the brilliance of the work.
Without consulting anyone, Newbridge began to consider what job opportunities existed elsewhere. After a few
weeks he decided to apply for a position at a new laboratory of considerable size that was being organized in a
nearby city. Citing Newbridge’s training and experience, the new lab invited him for a lengthy interview and, soon
after, offered him a project-leader job similar to his current position and with slightly higher salary.
Newbridge immediately accepted the offer and notified Goh by letter, which he mailed on a Friday night to Goh’s
home. The letter was quite brief, and Goh was stunned. The letter merely said that he had found a better position;
that he didn’t want to appear at the lab anymore for personal reasons; that he would be glad to come back at a later
time to assist if there was any mix-up in the past work; that he felt sure Zapf could supply any leadership that the
group required; and that his decision to leave so suddenly was based on personal problems—he hinted at problems
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of health in his family, specifically his mother and father. All of this was fictitious, of course. Goh took it at face
value but still felt that this was very strange behaviour and quite unaccountable, for he had always felt his
relationship with Newbridge had been warm and that Newbridge was satisfied and, in fact, quite happy and
productive.
Goh was considerably disturbed, because he had already decided to place Zapf in charge of another project that
was going to be set up very soon. He had been wondering how to explain this to Newbridge, in view of the obvious
help Newbridge was getting from Zapf and the high regard in which he held him. Goh had, indeed, considered the
possibility that Newbridge could add to his staff another person with the kind of background and training that had
been unique in Zapf and had proved so valuable.
Goh did not make any attempt to meet Newbridge. In a way, he felt aggrieved about the whole thing. Zapf, too, was
surprised at the suddenness of Newbridge’s departure. When Goh asked Zapf whether he preferred to stay with the
photon group instead of the new project for the Air Force, he chose the Air Force project and went on to that job
the following week. The photon lab was hard hit. The leadership of the lab was given to Link with the
understanding that this would be temporary until someone could come in to take over.
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