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Tomorrow's man today
FT Mastering Management Review, March 1999
Part of Peter Cochrane's role as head of research at BT is to construct the business and technology environments of the future - and inhabit them. James Pickford talked to him about teleworking, electronic chaos and fruit flies.
Peter Cochrane is paid to look into the future. As head of BT Research since 1993, he directs 660 engineers and scientists (as well as biologists, designers and artists) at BT Laboratories at Martlesham Heath, in the UK's eastern county of Norfolk. They are expected not only to come up with bright ideas for BT's new products and technologies, but to build and use those products in their daily working life - with Cochrane leading by example.
For a man who began his telecommunications career in 1962 digging holes for telephone cables, 53-year-old Cochrane has come far. He joined BT Laboratories itself in 1973 after graduating from Trent Polytechnic (now Nottingham Trent University) with a degree in electrical engineering. He worked on a variety of analogue and digital switching and transmission studies and in 1994 was awarded the Martlesham Medal for his contribution to the development of fibre optics systems and networks. He is a visiting professor at University College London and Essex University, an Honorary Professor and Member of Court at the University of Kent, and a member of the Oxford University Advisory Council on Further Education.
Q. What is the purpose of the BT Research Centre?
A. BT Laboratories constitutes about 6,500 people worldwide. This site covers 200 acres at Martlesham Heath with about 4,500 people, about 600 of whom people conduct research. The research division has a very straightforward mandate - first to create the core competencies for the future of the company, the understanding and skill base necessary for the 21st century, and second to make sure that the company is not wrongfooted by change, so that some technology or social change doesn't come out of the sun and take us by surprise.
We have to plan now for what you're going to be doing and demanding as a customer a decade from now. Usually the only way that you can do this is to make predictions, but here we can build futures and live them. We subject ourselves to our own technology before it gets anywhere near the customer. I have a range of people living with technology that is anywhere from 1 to 10 years ahead. We experiment with technologies to see what impact it has on working life, on people and companies, home life, and the whole raft of human experience.
We also consider what happens when you have a business that is really going very, very quickly and everybody is running at top speed. When something goes wrong with the technology in these kinds of businesses everything backs up very, very quickly and the company's success is threatened. I'm interested in human brittleness, network brittleness and system brittleness that causes these situations.
Q: How do you measure applicability or productivity in a place like this? How do BT know they're getting value for money?
A: This is the $64,000 question for any research LABORATORY. First there are formal procedures: we are visited by consultants who do benchmark studies comparing us to other research laboratories around the world. On that basis this laboratory was ranked number one in Europe and number three in the world. The metrics are things like published papers, number of products launched, the time it takes to develop a product, the time is takes to write a given amount of code. But really what you're interested in is the amount invested and the amount generated in revenues. For instance, we spent about #250m developing optical fibre technology and that technology saved BT over #8.5bn.
If BT wishes to make a numbering change in the network, you can't believe the complexity of doing something as simple as automatically advising every customer that they've forgotten to put a zero in front of the number - and the automation systems we built to deal with this have saved BT millions. In speech technology - things like operator services, directory enquiries, fault reporting - all those developments were made here. And when we do our costings, we know that BT gets its research at about a third of the cost it would have to pay on the external market.
Q. What kind of structure do you need to run a research lab? How do you ensure that you are encouraging innovation?
A. You have to have a flat structure. There are just have two layers here: researchers or engineers, and their managers. In research everybody has to communicate with everybody else in a somewhat chaotic fashion. You have to be able to form teams and disband them very quickly. Typically one of my teams will have a linguistic expert, a cosmologist, a biochemist, a mathematician, a physicist, a chemical engineer, an electronic engineer and a computer scientist. You can't get all the skills you need in one brain any more!
Q. How do you personally operate here day-to-day?
A. I have made it my personal promise to respond to all electronic communication inside 12 hours, 24-hours-a-day, 365-days-a-year, irrespective of where I am and what I'm doing on the planet. I want to help invoke change in the organisation. I make half a phone call a day, but I write about 60 e-mails a day.
Q. If you have to respond in 12 hours, how do you address really problematic issues?
A. One of my replies is, "Thinking". You send me something complex and that's all you need in response. You know that I've got it, that I'm considering it and that I need some time. However, if you e-mail me and say you want to buy a box of two dozen pencils, all you'll get is "OK".
Q. One would imagine that teleworking technology is an important area for BT Research. Given your commitment to trying things out on your own staff, what proportion of the employees already telework?
A. About 20 per cent are teleworkers - the farthest flung in Singapore, in the UK in Wick, on the northern coast of Scotland. But it is not that one person is a teleworker and another is office-bound - everyone has the opportunity to telework, because we have servers that can be accessed from anywhere. On Sunday, for example, I will be driven down to Heathrow airport. I will be online in the car, then when I get to the airport I will be online in the business lounge. I'll be offline in the air but working non-stop across the Atlantic, then as soon as I hit New York I will be on-line, and for the rest of next week I will be a teleworker in New York and Washington DC. Later in the month I will be teleworking from Florida and from Boston. It's not unusual for me - I do it all the time.
And my work output has gone up tenfold in ten years because of technology - measured by how many deals I close, how many communiques I receive and process, how many projects I manage, how fast they get to market. I don't know how to measure exactly how much I work, but I know I do a lot more.
Q. What about for other people here?
A. When we set up this laboratory we offered to put all our employees' families online. The entire family can use BT's facility for the internet and email. We told workers to buy a new computer and take their old one home - leave your new one at work and set up a workstation at home.
Something magical then happened. People bought new computers but took them home and left their old one at work. Why? Because they come here to be disturbed; they go home for monastic periods of deep thought. I can't work here because there's always somebody coming into the office to do an interview, or the phone goes, or my secretary wants something, or I have meetings all day, and I go home exhausted having done no work. Instead I work at home and on aeroplanes. This place is set up principally for human interaction. We have coffee points, white boards where people can congregate and exchange ideas. That is the fundamental point of an office and it can coexist very effectively with a teleworking culture.
Q. Do you think that it's possible that teleworking will replace the need for face-to-face communication? What will happen to the water cooler effect?
A. The electronic advances that enable telecommuting don't obliterate the need to talk to people, but simply give you another channel. For me to say I will only work on this screen by e-mail is nonsense. For our sales force, their office is now their car, their desktop is their laptop computer, they work from hotel bedrooms or wherever they happen to be, but they do come together for conferences in hotels, in BT buildings. You need to touch the flesh now and again.
Q. Do you worry about whether telecommuters are actually working?
A. The neolithic manager would say if I'm having teleworkers I'm going to have a system that monitors their keystrokes, so I can see that they're doing something. This is absolutely wrong. It's very, very easy to see who is working and who isn't. And if you hire good people they are absolutely driven to succeed because if you put them into teams and they will want that team to succeed.
Q. Do you find, on the other hand, that the technology prevents you from escaping work?
A. The hours I work have remained fairly constant. But what has happened is that work no longer occurs at regimented times. On a Sunday afternoon, if my family decides to watch some movie that I think is pretty dreadful, I might drift off into my office and work. I have a 1.5MB radio link from the research centre to the roof of my home, so I can work quietly and have my family near at the same time. I try to organise my life so as to give everyone due proportions of my time, but it is very difficult.
It is not as if modern office practices are particularly healthy. Consider the working life of many employees: we go without sleep, do not eat regularly, cannot go to the bathroom when we should, have no access to fresh air. We sit all day staring at screens instead of getting exercise, crouched up in a position that compresses the gut and can cause problems to the digestive system. One of the aims of the grand experiment here is to establish what are good working practices.
Q. BT is a telecommunications company. What research are you doing to further its cause as such?
A: We have to solve the problem of a telecommunications system that is essentially chaotic. Let's say a particular conference is attended by 4,000 people. In the main hall, nobody makes a phone call because everyone is listening to the keynote speech. But at 10.30 they all have a coffee break. Four thousand people stream out, 300 of them pull out their mobile phones and within two minutes the system has crashed. It is the same around busy motorways; within a minute of an accident on the M25 we get a thousand people trying to make a phone call. So the cell just crashes. An ordered system that relies on expected levels of traffic can't cope. We find ourselves in a business where we put all the resources we could ever want in the wrong place. But when you try to manage chaos, you realise that Mother Nature does it rather well.
Q. So how do you capture the insights of Mother Nature and convert them into telecoms applications?
A. The last PhD student I recruited had a PhD in fruit flies - here he works on mobile radio. Why? If you look at the distribution of hairs on the back of a fruit fly they are organised by groups of 40 cells that compete to spring a hair. The curious thing is that if you were to stretch the fruit fly's carapace over the surface of the UK, there's a definite correlation between the distribution of those hairs and distribution of antennas for mobile radio. In other words, it turns out that the biological systems that determine the location of a hair can be used to determine how much traffic we need to divert into a particular mobile radio cell. We are making many advances at the crossover of raw engineering, technology and biologically evolved systems.
Q. You talk about people "living" the future here but your people are hardly a representative sample of the population at large - most are experts in their field.
A. This is not a closed laboratory of hi-tech boffins, this is an environment where we bring people in. Our youngest consultants are five-years-old and our oldest are over 90. We've had schools and universities online to the labs for the last ten years. We make the technology very user friendly - not just for the 20 per cent of people who are IT capable, but the other 80 per cent who will never make it. We have put the bus route on-line - you can look on your computer and see where all the buses are. We impose pressure on ourselves to make it successful. After all, it would be really stupid to launch a product that people can't use.
At the same time, the time is long gone when a technology-based company wandered into an industry and say, "I'll talk to the customers, they will tell me what they want and I will make it". We have 150,000 visitors here every year. They come here, we show them absolutely everything, and they explain to us how the things they have seen will transform their companies. We engineer solutions together. You get customers who simply don't understand what technologies are available to them. Our job is to put it right under their noses so they understand it and work out what is can do for them.
Q. In specialised fields poaching must be a great problem, not to mention the protection of your patents. How do you protect your ideas?
A. It's a problem for all technology-based companies - people will always move around. But I think what's actually going to happen is that companies will run out of R&D capability. Already they cannot get enough people - they are starting to look offshore for research. It's getting to the point where the human race can't afford to have ten teams researching one topic in competition. One team will do it - it's such a wide, broad and very diverse and very fast-moving market.
But the good news is that in an electronic, networked world, copyright is dead. It's not about everybody doing it and selling a hundred each, it's about one group doing it and selling a million. For instance, in the future PCs and laptops will be given away - by that I mean for £200-£300. They will be sold on the same principle as mobile phones. Mobile phones are paid for by call costs; PC and laptops will be paid for by software costs, network costs and access costs. Reason? The more terminals you can get out there the more software you can sell and the faster you amortise the R&D costs on software products.
Q. Do you see recruitment becoming a problem as your competitors in grow in size and sophistication?
A. At the moment we have no problem recruiting. We have people queuing up to come in here from all over the world - from Iceland, China, Japan, Australia, South America, North America and Europe. But if we don't maintain a very visible presence, if we're not at the forefront and we look boring, people won't want to come here.
One of my policies is to bring in over 100 schoolchildren from the local area on two weeks' work experience. We also bring in more than 300 students worldwide for the entire summer and 50 students come here from Singapore to complete their degree for six months at a time. We think we need friends all over the world. When we are helping to create the engineering, scientific and management minds for the 21st century, we shouldn't just be doing it for the UK.