The Story Of Dorothy Vaughan, Or How Not To Be John Henry'ed

I wrote an article on John Henry and his encounter with the steam powered hammer. John Henry chose to compete with the steam powered hammer and won that day, despite dying in the process, and, in retrospect, helping usher the industrial revolution into tunneling. What would you have done, had you been in John Henry’s position? Would you look at the new tool, which will take over your job, as a threat, or as an opportunity? The threat is obvious, but what would be the opportunity? Well, the opportunity would be taking the lead user role of the new tool. Someone still has to direct the steam powered hammer to the right crevice to hammer into. Someone has to actually move that machine into place, and someone has to use it until it dug deep enough for the explosive to be stuck into the hole. John Henry could have been that person.

Most of us would never see such disruptive events as opportunities. Most of us would have reacted just as John Henry did: fight back by proving our worth over some new upstart. Typically, the younger crowd would be more accepting of new technology, since they’re not so heavily invested into the old technology to want to fight back.

In the recent film about African American women mathematicians and engineers at the start of NASA, Hidden Figures, a different and true scenario played out. Dorothy Vaughan, played by Octavia Spencer, headed a group of African American women mathematicians who did all the computing using slide rules and mechanical adding machines. Then one day, management brought in the steam powered hammer, the IBM 7090 DPS. Unlike the steam powered hammer, there was no way that Dorothy and her team of mathematicians could out compute the IBM 7090. Perhaps when the power of the alternative is so obvious, the supplanted ones would yield willingly.

Dorothy Vaughan decided, rather than compete with the IBM 7090, that she’ll learn how to use it, and be the best IBM 7090 user in the whole damn office. At least in the movie, and most likely in real life, she and her team became the most proficient software programmers in the whole of NASA at that time. History, being written by white males, might argue otherwise, but we know. At that time, the macho computer profession was in hardware. Build those things and figure out how they’ll be used later. Programming didn’t even exist as a profession back then. Then, software was the job of the women who tended the machines. To the men back then, coding was nothing more than a glorified receptionist job, translating the wisdom of top male engineers into the short hand of FORTRAN or whatever other language that was being used. It was literally no different, in the minds of men, than taking dictation from a male executive in short hand and then transcribing that into typewritten text.

More important than the decisions of these two people, John Henry and Dorothy Vaughan, is the ramification of their decisions. I think it’s quite clear that the two stories demonstrate that adopting new technologies whenever possible is the winning strategy. Adopting new technologies has an evolutionary heritage that shows the process to be the winning strategy. Fighting against the new technology may have short term wins, but in the long term, it is a losing proposition.

What are the new technologies that will be coming your way? Who will be impacted by these new technologies? Will you be the John Henry and fight them, possibly to win a day or two, or will you be the Dorothy Vaughan and champion that new technology, thereby crowning yourself the key user of that technology going forward (until a newer technology comes along). In the world of business, there are literally thousands of new technologies being created. Some will not pass the smell test: they’re just not that innovative to be worth trying out. But many are genuinely beneficial. How does your company seek out these innovations? Send me your stories, and I’ll tell you some startups I know that may just be these technological saviors.