ROLM in Silicon Valley

The context in which ROLM was born and grew presented a significant and multifaceted exhaustion of structures. In the telecommunications sector, AT&T’s monopoly was ending in the United States with the opening of systems and the market. In the context of industrial paradigms, electromechanical was beginning to give way to new electronic technologies. In a large area of rich agriculture, empty warehouses could be seen. In the context of business management styles, less hierarchical, more flexible, and engaging forms were appearing. ROLM found itself in the midst of this complex of restructuring with pioneering roles. And it was collective action, internal to the company and in the network. The “formula” faith against science and science against faith was applied and was successful, proving to be specific to collective action. This was demonstrated by the failure of ROLM’s incorporation into the eminently hierarchical IBM. And the experience was not inimitable, however, as demonstrated by its application with impressive analogies in the Echelon case. The two cases of application of the formula, ROLM and Echelon, allow for further observations. The engineers, endowed with rich human capital, played an important role. But they could not have achieved the exceptional results that were achieved without the “relational capital”, relatively poor in human capital: of the TMs (Telecom Managers) in the case of ROLM, and of the small local providers in the case of Echelon. This shows how reductive and misleading it is to consider only human capital as decisive and also how heavy the ideological load surrounding this concept is. At the same time, the crucial role of the “last wheels of the wagon” emerged. In the “model” of collective action, it was seen that leadership had, among other tasks, the relevant one of guaranteeing the “free valorisation of all individual contributions to design”, even of apparently eccentric and unimportant members of the active group. In the two examples, this is precisely what stands out: the decisive contribution coming from components of the collective action (the TMs and the small providers), is surprising and unexpected, if it is true that in both cases care, exploration and time were needed to discover it, overcoming widely shared visions that underestimated it. Collective action has also been “meso-situated”, that is, action that, by including, broadens the intermediate zone of the process between micro and macro. It could take place and succeed only because it was exercised in and for the broad network organization of the value realization process. Only in this way could collective action have a decisive role both toward the micro level of the company and toward the macro level of the sector.