The Wage That Wasn't Money

Ken Holberger says it plainly, grinning, in the book's opening pages: "I don't work for money." He's talking about unpaid overtime at Data General in 1978, and he says it the way a man says something he's proud of, not something that should worry anyone. Kidder records it without comment. Forty-five years later the line reads like a policy document. Every startup that ever offered ping-pong tables instead of a raise, every "we're a family" all-hands, every "unlimited PTO" plan that nobody uses because using it looks disloyal — all of it descends, almost word for word, from the Eclipse Group's basement in Westborough, Massachusetts. Kidder didn't coin the ideology. He just happened to be standing in the room when it got its vocabulary: "signing up," the ritual by which an engineer agreed, tacitly, to forsake "family, hobbies, and friends" for the project, and "pinball," the promise that the reward for finishing one exhausting machine was the privilege of building the next one, exhausted all over again.

What the book anticipated is the entire management technology of intr