
54 • Strategy + Teamwork = Great Products
average Silicon Valley wage rate. One of our competitors was Rolm, which
had swimming pools and exercise rooms for employees, free coee and
donuts, and other amenities. I decided to shun all this and competed on
wages alone, and selectively set a higher percentile for those skills than our
competitors did. Within 6months, we had the required 47 test engineers
in place and never had a bottleneck again in that area. e factory deliv-
ered on its promises and became protable again.
e lesson learned here was that wages are more powerful incentives
than benets and if you desperately need a special sk