By Andy Serwer with Dylan Croll | Yahoo Finance |
To people of a certain age in Silicon Valley, (i.e. elders), Satjiv Chahil, 72, is a familiar and recognized figure. That he is less known to younger techies is both unfortunate and telling.
Once you meet Chahil, you won’t forget him. He’s the charming, Indian-born American guy wearing a brightly colored turban — often with a matching blazer. Chahil loves documenting all the people he’s met (I think he invented the selfie, decades ago) and has a picture with everybody. One of my favorites is with Brazilian mega-novelist Paulo Coelho and German metal(ish) band Scorpions. (What?)
Much more than that though, the Zelig-like Chahil has been a mission-critical marketing executive at the biggest tech’s biggest companies — think Apple, IBM, HP and Xerox—at some of their most critical moments.
Even that is selling him short though. A “global intercultural and interdisciplinary innovator,” as he’s been described, is probably closer. He’s also exactly what’s missing from Silicon Valley right now. Unlike the modus operandi of today’s technocrats, Chahil’s life’s work has been to make technology essential to the creative, moral, and fun-loving continuum of human existence.
Apple in its heyday exemplified some of this thinking, and it’s no coincidence Chahil worked there for nine years. The company was a home to many out-of-the box, non-technical minds like Regis McKenna and Lee Clow, designers Hartmut Esslinger and Jony Ive — and, you could argue, Steve Jobs himself.
“My first experience in Silicon Valley was in the early 80s when I moved there from the east coast,” Chahil recalls. “The mindset was so different. It was welcoming to people from all over the world and all fields of interest. It was long-haired, music-loving scientists who wanted to make the world a better place. Now it’s people wanting to get rich quickly and manipulate the world.”
Please forgive the indulgence in good-old-days-ism, but it bears re-hearing because very little in American business or society is as important as Silicon Valley’s shifted priorities, aka, moral collapse. We’ll get into that some more, but first back to our protagonist.
Chahil, born to a well-off family in India, came to the U.S. for graduate school, receiving a degree in international management from the Thunderbird School at Arizona State in 1976. (Chahil just gave the fall convocation speech there this past Tuesday.) Then he began his career at IBM.
“Silicon Valley was about changing the world. IBM world was about controlling the world. When I joined IBM, it could stand up to governments. Getting a job at IBM for me came from heaven,” Chahil says. “I wrote to my grandma in India, ‘your prayers have been answered.'”
In some ways, the company felt familiar.
“IBM was a very disciplined organization,” Chahil continues. “It felt like being in my British military boarding school again. The good aspects were that we were given training on ethics. We were not allowed to even expense a drink on our expense account. We were told to answer our mail as it came. But the whole company was driven by information, productivity and reporting controls. The business purpose was so different from where I landed up.”
Which was Silicon Valley. Chahil moved to another iconic, though radically different tech destination, Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). Scientists there famously developed all manner of technology (graphic user interface, the mouse, desktop publishing), which Xerox never put to market but was later adopted, borrowed or stolen (some say) by the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Adobe and others.
“Xerox collected the most brilliant scientists and asked them to think of a paperless future,” he says. “Steve Jobs visited Xerox PARC [in 1979]. And he got what Xerox could not get. Macintosh and what Apple became, originated at Xerox PARC. Jobs hired away Larry Tesler, who was the creator of cut and paste [and also showed PARC’s tech to Jobs]. Larry became the chief scientist of Apple.
“One of my office neighbors was one of these long-haired genius scientists, Joe Becker. He figured out how to do foreign languages on computers and was the father of Unicode, which allows not just languages, but all those emojis on your computer. I suggested ‘why don’t we launch multilingual desktop computing?’”
But Xerox passed and “one after the other, all the people left Xerox.” Chahil joined the exodus.
Read the full story here.
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