Customer Reviews

Bell Labs: Life in the Crown Jewel

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SHORT REVIEW

What happened to Bell Labs? This book answers that question. Gehani shows how the Labs survives but struggles. He thinks Bell Labs can continue but only by quickly changing culture and direction.

Throughout his book Gehani provides fresh and important information. We get a rare look into Bell Labs' life, the tremendous freedom to pursue independent, high quality research. Even more so than academia, where tenure provides a backstop, publish or perish was a constant watch phrase. Do your research, whatever that may be, but make sure the scientific community recognizes it and accepts it. Published papers, not profit, was the expectation. As the emphasis changes to helping Lucent's business units the Labs cannot retain its old character, indeed, the old Labs is probably gone forever. Glory can come back to Bell Labs but it will probably be in a different way, helping Lucent first, then society at large. Reinventing itself may prove the Labs most difficult project, still, it may surprise us, as its discoveries and inventions have surprised us for more than seventy five years. Let's hope.

DETAILS

Bell Labs: Life in the Crown Jewel, chronicles Narain Gehani's twenty three years at Bell Laboratories. It is a welcome and needed addition to telephone history. Gehani started work in 1978, when the Labs was fully subsidized and owned by AT&T. He left in 2001, after the Lab switched parent companies, split apart many times, and researchers reduced two-thirds.

AT&T's telephone monopoly generously funded Bell Labs from its 1925 creation until the Bell System's 1984 divestiture. Each customer's bill sent something to the Labs; slightly higher rates subsidizing research and development. This excellent arrangement lasted nearly sixty years, Bell Labs contributing mightily to building the world's best telephone system. After1984 AT&T no longer had guaranteed revenue; Bell Labs withered as its parent wandered and floundered financially. Lucent's recent control has not helped.

Chapter 1, I Have A Job For Life!, summarizes Gehani's Labs' career, Laboratory accomplishments, its history, and the desire researchers felt to work there. Chapter 2, The Crown Jewel, describes the Labs' confusing ownership, spin-offs, and name changes. Gehani details relations and history between the Labs and Lucent, Bellcore, Telecordia, NCR, Avaya, and Agere. After explaining the Labs external structure, he lays out its internal structure in Chapter 3, Life at Murray Hill. We learn how researchers, managers, and development people get along. Chapter 4, Looking For Dung But Finding Gold reveals how often pure research leads to important discoveries.

Gehani's writing turns from Old Labs to New, as Lucent ownership and funding demanded change from pure to applied research. In Chapter 5, Do We Work For The Same Company?, corporate culture differences between Lab researchers and Lucent business people block cooperating. Chapter 6, What Are You Doing For Us?, finds researchers struggling to pioneer science while producing relevant work for Lucent. Chapter 7, Bell Labs Goes West, details the well intended but doomed expansion into Silicon Valley. Chapter 8, Maps On Us, describes a successful web development project between Labs researchers and Lucent business units. It points to a collaborative direction the Labs may have to take. Chapter 9, Most Fantastic Place! recaps Bell Labs bygone university like atmosphere and the changes needed to transform the Labs into something quite different: a market oriented research institution.

Bell Labs: Life in the Crown Jewel by Narain Gehani, Silicon Press, 2003, 258 pages, hardcover, ISBN 0-929306-27-9. Consecutively numbered, descriptive endnotes. Good index. No photographs. Minor, first edition layout problems. Easily read type with plenty of white space. Recommended .

I can't remember reading a more poorly written book since grade school. I read the whole book solely so I could write this review honestly. Mr. Gehani appears to have slapped together every single moment he can remember about his time at BL, inserted 9 chapter headings at random, and called it a book. His sentence structure is consistent with a 7th grade reading level (7th grade by US standards, so basically, a normal 8 year old). I found myself frequently saying, "What the hell is the point of this?" after each chapter.

There have been many brilliant scientists at BL; Mr. Gehani does not shed any light on the fascinating scientific culture that produced so many Nobelists. He does however, shed light on each and every mundane managerial decision he had to make. Again, I found myself frequently saying, "What the hell is the point of this?" after each chapter.

It's truly sad that this book exists. So many other writers could have done a better job and added something to libraries around America. I wouldn't even use this book for a grade school book report. It truly is that worthless.

My review of this book has since been critized. As PhD student in computational physics and chemistry, my failure to "get" this book is not for lack of understanding of the research that went on at Bell Labs, but perhaps a lack of understanding of why anyone would write this poorly about mundane events.

Crown Jewels describes the evolution of Bell Labs from the gravy-train days under the Ma Bell monopoly to its struggling to stay alive under the faltering Lucent. Aside from back and forth chronology that confused me at times, I found the book to be well-written. However, I don't know that the material is worthy of a book. The entire volume is really summed up in one sentence: Life at Bell Labs was like academia until after the divestiture, and then no one at either Bell Labs, AT&T, the RBOCs, or Lucent really knew how to harness its energy. As somewhat of an industry insider, I was hoping for more details of its products and innovations, but such information was hit-and-miss -- the author talked about "MapsOnUs" in detail, but quickly blew over other products like VoIP and Softswitch.

At one point, listening to this book while running on an eliptical, I wanted to throw the remote control at the television.

In a way, comparing Bell Lab: Life in the Crown Jewel with other stories of innovation engines (such as Where Wizards Stay Up Late and Dealers of Lightning) leads to the same comparison of The Man Who Stayed Behind and I Chose China. Both of these latter two books concern American Jews who went to China in the early post-War years, aligned themselves with the Communist Party, and witnessed Maoism first-hand over a period of decades. However, while The Man Who Stayed Behind is carefully organized, I Choose China is a collection of reminiscences that go nowhere in particular. Bell Labs: Life in the Crown Jewel is a collection of reminiscences that go nowhere in particular. The tenacity with which Narain repeats that there is a conflict between basic and applied research is impressive, but ultimately pointless.

Bell Labs: Life in the Crown Jewel appears to want to be a popular business book. I say this because technical and research skills are regularly mocked, but little is learned from a research perspective, either. For instance, in one anectdoe, Gehani disputes whether a colleague actually saved a Business Unit a large amount of money through some new technique. The colleague, the colleague's manager, and the Business Unit all assert that he did. Gehani's "test" -- to see whether the Business Unit would grant a bonus of a large amount of money, because that employee might again be so productive the next year, ends the anecdote as an example of Gehani's cleverness. The technical details of what this innovation might have been are not discussed. But neither is any business thinking exhibited. Questions of headcount, corporate fiefdoms, and the such aren't even raised. Instead, in this anecdote and others, the reader is intended to exist with a sense of Gehani's unique cleverness.

The book is a nauseating example of how corporate lawfare retards actual innovation. For instance, in a sickening passage, Narain discusses how he "invented" and patented co-browsing, and urged Bell Labs' general counsel to sue others who use this "invention." These ridiculous patents exist only because corporate corporations attempt to use the law to club possible competitors. None of these "inventions" are any more impressive than, say, "A Method to Repair Shoe Laces with Scotch Tape in the Event they Break Instead of Buying New Shoelaces." However, large companies that hire lawyers are able to cause enough problems litigating these pattens (that they get by flooding the underfunded USPTO with applications) that they are able to carve out de facto monopolies contrary to the intent of U.S. law. A search on the Patent Office's website indicate that Gehani's first patent was granted in 1995, considerably after he joined Bell Labs. My obvious conclusion is that Bell Labs, ever closer to its decapitation by Lucent, began generating patents in order to force competitors to "license" obvious methods, or else face hundreds of thousands in legal bills. This is not discuss.

The tragedy of Bell Labs: Life in the Crown Jewel is that it might have been one of the best case-studies of an innovation engine written. Perhaps Narain Gehani will still write that book. He is no longer with Bell Labs, and currently serves as the Chairman of the Computer Science Department at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. His publication list is impressive, and Google Book Search brings up numerous other works written or co-written by Dr. Gehani. I hope that I will have a chance to read a more complete first-person perspective, perhaps titled Bell Labs: Decline and Fall, sometime soon. Narain could structure such as book as follows.

Introduction: What Went Wrong
Chapter One: My Early Life
Chapter Two: From a Professor to a Researcher
Chapter Three: (Mis)Adventures with the Unix Team
Chapter Four: Concurrent C/C++
Chapter Five: The Object Database Environment
Chapter Six: Years of Transition
Chapter Seven: The Columbus GPS System
Chapter Eight: Maps On Us
Chapter Nine: Cell Center Capers
Chapter Ten: Commuting from Jersey to the Valley (by Jet)
Chapter Eleven: From a Researcher to a Professor:
Epilogue: What Went Right

Such a book would be a wonderful read, a great "technical autobiography" of a man, and a first-person history of Bell Labs. It would explain obviously important parts of Narain's career which are discussed but never described, such as his database and C/C++ systems. Additionally, it would provide a coherent chronology and frames of reference, that do not exist in the current book.

Narain Gehani's exceptional book is a "quick, enjoyable read" on a very complicated global transformation in the research and business worlds today. His insights into the lives of researchers, how they think and work, and how they interact with business units and managers, can transform the way we approach these major business enterprises in the 21st Century. The book can appeal to a diverse audience, including those interested in the telecommunications industry (including software development), in monopolies, divestitures and trivestitures (business and industry), university and business research industries, and the worlds of employees, customers and managers. For someone like myself who has written about research, technical assistance and innovation in the field of disability(Racino, 1999, 2000), it was heartening to have a base to challenge the research industry in that field. Thanks to Narain who just appeared in my life after our years at Cornell University where he obtained his Ph.D. way back in 1975.

There are good and bad sides to this account of the legendary Bell Labs.
On the good side, this book is definitely a _must_ to the BL "diaspora", people who spent some 5-10 years of their life there, but did not choose it for lifetime. This is true especially for those who experienced the real pioneer era, i.e. when research was still under AT&T funding without business pressure, and at the birth of optical communications, a field that BL carried to the full end, in spite of many other useful or useless but high research achievements. Good times indeed from 1945 to until the 1990s for talented and die-hard investigators. As one Holmdel veteran wrote it once "..it was hard believing that you could be paid to have so much fun".

The book is very interesting when showing the transformation from this legendary research system model into the new-and-ugly market-oriented one. Regrettably enough, the author puts emphasis on the more politically-correct later stage, instead of telling us what was good and personal in the earlier one. Yet, he provides a vivid account of his (seemingly mild ?) tribulations to get the scientific nerds and egoes under him through such a cultural painstaking transformation, especially when he strove to develop a viable and interesting product which unfortunately failed to interest the blind Top. In the concluding sections, he courageously mentions the infamous fraud that marred this respected institution (but it could be a "vaudoo" trick as well to avoid really adressing the core of the issue: scientific dishonesty as a mushroom on a decaying environment). In spite of many repeats and heavy commonplaces "scientific- vs. market-oriented research problem, or the reverse, and again never really solved", it is written in a soft and agreeable style, with that touch of personal and sincere account that makes you want to read the book to the end (could CS engineers of the world unite and follow such a writing example).

On the less good side, there is way too much lip service to the author's past line/patriarchal hierarchy: basically GOD, as incidentally represented by VP research, then N+2 and N+1 or self, yielding annoying or meaningless expressions such as "the post-(my boss)BL", and so on. For any experienced-writer viewpoint, the final edition looks embarassingly perfect and rosy, in spite of some episodic 'disagreements' and other ego-tantrum lullabies. But the reader may forgive the author's sincere epitaph for the "great" bosses that made up his career, and understandably, that book is a dedication to them. (now are these heroes really dead, or enjoying happy lives in California start-ups instead ? We may surely save our tears in the latter case). We would have liked to know more about the causes that precipitated the doom of Telecoms, as viewed by the seemingly unique institution in charge. The competition and ROW must have been following in daily angst the Murray Hill saga, with its waltz of questionable promotions and friendly departures. Overall, it looks like the author stayed inside a fall-out shelter during all the events that got the market and stocks down to where it still lags. The painstaking story of the N-vestiture of the BL hologram, which gives a conceptual ground to the book, is alas no substitute to a real personal 20-years account. Maybe when the author was a post-doc researcher doing science and papers in his laboratory keyboard, hoping to get to the boss position, could we have learned something about the Crown Jewel times. Unfortunately, this is where the intimate story is skipped, and thus the official one (taht the reader is offered) starts with the "day after" the demise of the Crown, and the Jewels in the process of running away.

At the beginning of his book, the author is very honest (say at least careful) to mention his lack of knowledge of non-CS activities at BL. But nevertheless he seems to praise Raman amplifiers (invented in Germany, France and Japan in the 80s, notwithstanding the discovery of SRS in fibers at Holmdel in the 70s) while remaining blind to the discovery/development of the erbium fiber amplifier at the BL Holmdel facilities. Such an event triggered the entire WDM revolution and generated billions of revenues for the new market-oriented BL BUs, their subsidiaries and an opportunistic submarine branch in particular.

The author was probably not interested in the history of BL to such an extent, past his office/coffee-machine loft at Murray Hill. A bit more curiosity and less self-centeredness would have been a plus for such an otherwise very commendable personal account.

This lack of curiosity about other fields, due to internal competition, rivalry or complete indifference between BL sites, was typical of the older BL regime. This book thus indirectly provides an unwanted homage to these lesser-known and shadowy aspects of the Labs. But glamour of the past is also important for little boys and girls.

One star yet for "buy" in a 1/0 decision space.

Having worked some with Gehani, it is important to clarify some of the errors in some of the other reviews. Narain indeed knew a lot of the "big names" at Bell Labs, as did many of us. However, it was not the culture, nor the tendancy to really put those folks on pedestals. Also, I expect Narain to write about things he was most involved with, such as MapsOnUs or the many other significant contributions he made. While the book may be hard to understand by those without "Bell-shaped heads," it is interesting to read by those of us who were there.

A must read for those working in organisations where a fine balance needs to be made between the sweaters and the suits. The book describes in detail how even one of the greatest, legendary companies can stumble badly when management fails to keep the crucial balance.

This is a must read for all those in organizations that have been around for a long time. Today, partly due to technology, organizations more at a far greater pace than ever before - Bell Labs the technology innovator itself could not keep pace. It was a fascinating look inside Bell Labs at the time it was going through a historic cultural shift. Gehani is a gifted writer, it was hard to put down the book.