Lunch with Robert and Don

Well show me the way to the next whisky bar

What did you do for lunch at work last week? Did someone bring a tray of sandwiches to your meeting room to accompany the Powerpoints? Did you pop out and grab a sandwich meal deal to eat one-handed while catching up on emails? Did you down a protein shake, perhaps with some nootropics on the side? Or did you go to a restaurant with linen tablecloths and a leather-bound wine list, demolish some cocktails and three courses, and only stagger back to the office three or four hours later?

It’s a stupid question of course. Unless you’ve somehow arrived through a time portal from the 1960s, it’s overwhelmingly likely that for knowledge workers in the 2020s, the experience would be something like one of the first three. The world of enormous expense account lunches feels like it’s gone the way of having someone doing your typing for you.

That’s probably for the best, and I’m certainly not advocating a return to the three-martini lunch. But it’s interesting to think about why it changed, and wonder whether perhaps we lost something along the way.

I think the best way to understand the change is via Tom Wolfe’s classic 1983 Esquire profile of Robert Noyce. Wolfe embedded himself in the corporate culture of Intel, itself perhaps the most consequential company of the twentieth century. The very idea of Moore’s Law, that computing performance could and would increase exponentially over a long period of time, dates back to Intel itself.

As usual at this newsletter, exponential growth is the Real Deal, because it blows everything else out of the water. If we take something like Moore’s 18 month doubling time for computer performance, and project it out over 60 years, we’ve got time for 40 doublings. That means that a 2025 computer would be of the order of a trillion times more powerful than its 1965 counterpart. If you compare that progress with an industry like airlines or cars, it’s a stratospherically different rate of progress.

In the 1960s, you could fly transatlantic for about the same absolute dollar cost as you can now. Of course inflation means that is something like 15 times cheaper in real terms now, but there’s a huge difference between a 15-fold and a trillion-fold improvement so it’s worth trying to understand how Noyce and Intel did it.

That’s where Wolfe’s piece comes in. By spending time understanding Noyce and the corporate culture he created in his own image, Wolfe finds that the key was demolishing old-fashioned corporate hierarchies and creating a workplace culture where good ideas mattered and not the pay grade of the person who proposed them. This philosophy lay at the heart of the advance of Intel, setting the blueprint for the modern Silicon Valley culture of Google, Apple, Facebook and the rest.

And at the heart of this lies lunch. Towards the end of the piece, Wolfe contrasts the experience of East Coast executives experiencing a “daily feast of the nobility, a sumptuous celebration of their eminence” with a West Coast world where:

At Intel lunch had a different look to it. You could tell when it was noon at Intel, because at noon men in white aprons arrived at the front entrance gasping from the weight of the trays they were carrying. The trays were loaded down with deli sandwiches and waxed cups full of drinks with clear plastic tops, with globules of Sprite or Diet Shasta sliding around the tops on the inside. That was your lunch. You ate some sandwiches made of roast beef or chicken sliced into translucent rectangles by a machine in a processing plant and then reassembled on the bread in layers that gave off dank whiffs of hormones and chemicals, and you washed it down with Sprite or Diet Shasta, and you sat amid the particle-board partitions and metal desktops, and you kept your mind on your committee meeting. That was what Noyce did, and that was what everybody else did.

While Wolfe reports it in the wide-eyed tone of the cultural anthropologist that he was, it’s not hard to recognise that as a universal kind of experience now. Just as Silicon Valley has created much of the world of knowledge work itself, the world of emails, Word documents and spreadsheets, the original Intel work culture of the 1960s has become more universal, whether in hedge funds, academia or law firms.

Overall, like I say, that’s probably a good thing. If we compare the world of Noyce with the alternative, it’s certainly a lot more wholesome. Of course something like Mad Men is a fictionalised portrayal not a documentary. We can question whether Ian Fleming’s description of James Bond planning lunch at Lutèce followed by an evening of Martinis (in 007 in New York) was a post-war fantasy for austerity-starved Britons rather than a realistic portrayal of the life of a British civil servant. In the same way, maybe the real Don Draper didn’t live quite like that.

But even if we take Draper’s exploits as a fictional archetype, it’s still worth wondering whether we should return to it. It’s hard to argue that he’s an admirable figure. As Draper’s drinking and infidelity leaves a trail of wreckage (both metaphorical and physical) through the 1950s and 1960s, it doesn’t seem any more admirable than the grim sexism depicted in the show. I wouldn’t advocate taking up a Don Draper lifestyle, any more than I’d regard Tony Soprano as a role model because he got the job done and provided for his family.

So if it’s a choice between living in the Intel world or the Sterling Cooper one, of lunching and living like Robert Noyce or like Don Draper, then I’ll be Team Nerd every time. But what if that’s not the choice?

As usual in my centrist viewpoint, I have to point out that we don’t have to be 100% Noyce or 100% Draper. Even if we’d prefer a meritocratic kind of Silicon Valley culture, there can be some value to cutting loose and thinking outside the box every so often.

My favourite of Wolfe’s books is The Right Stuff, about the early days of the space programme, and it’s interesting to notice that some of the same tensions are present there. One of Wolfe’s main themes is the tension about whether an astronaut was cargo or a flying ace (“A monkey's going to make the first flight”). Shepard and Grissom’s first suborbital Mercury flights weren’t so far from Katy Perry’s experience of sitting in a projectile. In contrast, at the same time, Joe Walker had flown above the Karman line in a X-15 plane under his own control.

So the question was really why did astronauts need to be fighter pilots, if so much was being controlled by computer? Were NASA looking for someone in the Noyce mould, or for a Draper? In fact, they were looking for both. Wolfe describes a tension between the more wholesome John Glenn and the fact that many of the astronaut trainees would “get in their cars and go barreling into Cocoa Beach for the endless, seamless party … the temptations for the Fighter Jock Away from Home were enormous”.

And of course, the drinking and driving and cheating culture isn’t something to be emulated. But it’s striking that it was Neil Armstrong’s pilot instincts, honed in the same X-15 programme as Walker and developed by pushing the limits of the lunar lander in test flights, that let him land on the Moon with 25 seconds of fuel left. If he’d been too rigid, if he’d played it safe, he wouldn’t have got to make that giant step for mankind.

I’m not saying that we should all go out and get drunk at lunch every day. If your job is as a heart surgeon or an air traffic controller, you probably shouldn’t do it in the pub or on a bench in the park. But if your work has an element of creativity, of having good ideas, of writing interesting things, there’s maybe no harm in trying it. It certainly feels that there’s a danger that falling into rigid patterns of eating at our desks can lead us into rigid patterns of thinking and doing.

Over the last 15 years or so, I’ve mentored over a hundred PhD students, acting as their personal tutor and advisor. At the end of the process of research, they have to produce a thesis of 100-200 pages setting out their ideas, which is not easy. Naturally some of them get daunted by the task and end up in some state of writers block. I’ve always advocated some of the same tactics: try writing in a coffee shop or outside, try writing things down on paper for a change, if a LaTeX document is too daunting then write yourself an email.

And in my own career, I can think back to occasions when this worked. The first time I really understood how to write an academic paper was sitting in a coffee shop in New Haven Connecticut discussing our introduction sentence-by-sentence and writing it out longhand. The first time I really got my head around the French Bakry-Emery calculus was doing some sums on a notepad in a restaurant in Toulouse with a carafe of red wine while waiting for the cassoulet to arrive.

At the end of the day, I’m always going to be more Noyce than Draper. But it’s sometimes worth fighting my own instincts to do the same thing all the time, to try to tell the difference between being in a groove and a rut, and to remember the other Silicon Valley imperative to Think Different.