Silicon Valley Road

Silicon Valley Road by Tom Maher is a wonderful book on the experience of the author. He has briefly described his life at Silicon Valley from a supervisor to Vice President of several companies. He has beautifully portrayed the importance of his childhood learning at an Iowa farm, which helped him to manage several problems created by union workers in companies. In his book, he underlines the need for teams inside the organisations for efficient management. Even his talent in laying bricks helped him to resolve the problems among employees.

He states that, “An embarrassment they (workers) would play on us while we walked by would be on the ladder trick. One person would be on the ladder by himself and would very politely ask for our help to hold the ladder for his safety. As soon as we would touch the ladder, he would jump down and write up a “grievance” and give it to us for doing union work.” He handled such instances by kicking the ladder and say “It’s stable enough, so get to work.” This is how he beautifully handled the union fun through his experiences from his work at union when he was a school boy.        

                               

While he was working in Caltex, he came across a different person named Perry Wallia. His employer told him that Perry was going to be fired but Tom should take him and may be find a job for him. So, Tom placed him as Quality Assurance manager. He was ok for four months and later all the employees complained about him. Then, he removed Perry and Perry just sat in his office. Once wafer fabrication director called for a process engineer’s help to solve a trouble in game board chip. Since, Perry was without any job Tom had asked him to do that. He solved that problem very easily. Only after this incident Tom understood that Perry was good at engineering rather than Quality assurance. So he made his job full time for solving complex and old problems. Later on he kept solving all the problems and made an impact on the organisation. This is where Tom felt that companies should not quickly lay off the underperforming employees, because each and every person will have different talents. An organisation must understand the employee talents and place them in a proper area where they can excel and make use of them.

Adding to this, he stated that poor performance is not the workers’ fault, because people are same all over the world. Only organisations should direct, train and monitor the employees towards the goal of the organisation.

Tom Maher says, “Most of the calculator companies deposited their payment in our bank or sometimes in another bank. One customer made a deposit outside the bank with a cashiers check and was able to cancel the check after the parts were delivered and before we could get the money.” He over came such problems by stating that “Customer must bring cash upfront before we would deliver any parts.” In such situations, he worked strategically by getting the insights from the customers wrong doings.   

Tom Maher took pains to remodify the damaged and unused products, because huge cost is levied on it. And also, he focused on the immediate inspection and correction of returned products by customers. One of his principles is that customer satisfaction comes from the employee satisfaction.

Apart from that, his life at several companies conveyed to him the importance of proper merger between related companies. The real time – online reporting system was the one which Silicon Valley companies lacked during his life time. Only at mid-2000, he was able to develop such system which has greatly improved the efficiency of the organisation.    

                                        

One thing which made me feel bad from his book is that he feels “India is a place which is full of garbage and manufacturers are not giving importance to the cleanliness. The ICs produced needs a clean machine set up, so that the accuracy of the instrument will be high.” This is one which he dislikes in India.  Maher also learned how management must be involved in the daily factory issues by knowing what problems are present and how they are being solved!