Uber’s new ceo is a champion of everything uber once rejected: caution, discipline, and tact. Can he reform the most audacious, rule-flouting company in silicon valley?
IN THE LATE 1950S, A WEAPONS MAKER CALLED the Martin Company received a contract to build the first Pershing missile. It was to be the most sophisticated mobile weapons system on earth: 5 tons of metal and precision technology designed to deliver a nuclear warhead from up to 460 miles away. Should it ever be used, there would be no margin for error. It had to be perfect. And the US Army wanted it delivered quickly.
The task of ensuring this timely perfection fell to Philip Crosby, a quality-control manager at Martin. To break with his industry’s wartime habit of tolerating small mistakes in feverish production, Crosby came up with a philosophy he would later call Zero Defects. The idea was, basically, to instill in workers the will to prevent problems during design and manufacture rather than go back and fix them later. Crosby’s philosophy went on to become a management buzzword, especially in the aerospace and auto industries, where a faulty gasket or a weak bearing could mean a fiery catastrophe. During the Apollo program, NASA even gave out little Zero Defects trophies—each one a cute pewter spaceman standing on the moon with the letters “ZD” emblazoned on his chest.
This story is from the May 2018 edition of WIRED.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the May 2018 edition of WIRED.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
RUSSIAN, GO HOME
WHEN MY COUNTRY WENT TO WAR, I FACED A CHOICE: Flee to a world where the truth might kill me - or seek peace in censored oblivion.
The Fateful Eight
THE STORY BEHIND THE MOST CONSEQUENTIAL TECHNOLOGICAL PAPER IN RECENT HISTORY.
Can the Internet's Greatest Authenticity Machine Survive Wall Street?
When thousands of subreddits went dark in protest last summer, it exposed the tension at the core of Reddit - on the eve of the company's IPO. Now that synthetic media is flooding the internet, does the web's most reliably human forum represent a gold mine for investors, or an old-fashioned dumpster fire?
The Unnerving Presence of Javier Bardem
He's known for playing fanatics and murderous psychopaths. In real life, he loves his wife (and Brad Pitt) and cries during E.T.
HAPPY HAUNTING
IN A CHARMING game called This Discord Has Ghosts in It, up to 15 participants at a time gather in a Discord server that has been reimagined as a haunted house. (Of course.) Inside lies a maze of (chat) rooms where each player takes the role of either an eponymous spirit or a paranormal investigator.
THE MYTH OF METAL
How I became a Python programmer - and learned to love our abstract world.
SO YOU WANT TO REWIRE BRAINS
There's a lot to like about brain-computer interfaces, those sci-fi-sounding devices that jack into your skull and turn neural signals into software commands. Experimental BCIS help paralyzed people communicate, use the internet, and move prosthetic limbs.
FOR GIANT LIZARDS, PLEASE HOLD
The sounds of Slack have a secret history.
WOMEN AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD
They go to Antarctica with dreams of studying the unknown. What they discover there is the stuff of nightmares.
THE NERD-KING VIBES OF JENSEN HUANG
The Nvidia CEO turned a graphics-card company into a trillion-dollar AI behemoth. Now he wants to transform the rest of the world-health care, robotics, autonomous driving, the works.