“Bring along some fried chicken,” he said.
Hunt’s home sat on a hill in horse country just outside Washington. He called it Dahlonega, after a town in the Georgia mountains where he had once lived and where miners had extracted gold before the Civil War. In his basement, in plain, fluorescent-lit rooms, were the offices of his land-development company. Hunt showed me how he had rigged up a roll of Teletype paper with a clothes hanger so he wouldn’t have to buy a tractor feed for one of his daisy-wheel printers. A tall, heavy-set man nearing fifty, he wore casual clothes and looked like old pictures of his father in middle age. In the beginning, however, I could only guess who he might be. Even if he had been Hugh Doe, I still would have been interested in his style of training the people who operated his Apple, his several Kaypros, and a pair of Osbornes. His techniques were wrong for many corporate situations. They would have been a disaster for Jim Mahony, the old newspaperman, who was so heavy-handed that he ruined at least two typewriters. But they were just right for Hunt and his people—and perhaps for many other small businessmen who like to be surrounded by employees comfortable with high tech.
Hunt didn’t give his staffers extra-long, step-by-step guidance. Instead, he:
1. Hired people who were fast learners at the keyboard.
2. Helped them with some learning aids like color-coded keys showing kinds of WordStar commands.
3. Motivated them by explaining how their new computer skills would make them happier—and richer, since he paid them more, once their productivity increased.
Esther King, his middle-aged office manager, a bright, down-to-earth high school graduate, actually may have been as responsible for his training methods as he was. She tried to hire only people who’d benefit from some quick lessons followed by intensive self-instruction. “Sometimes I’ll have them sit down at the computer,” she said of her employment interviews, “and I just turn it on and tell them to type. A lot of people, they’re afraid they’re going to hurt it. And you’re not going to hurt it. You can’t hurt it. So you mess up, and you get the wrong thing, and it says you made a ‘fatal error.’ So you just start over, and that’s the only way you’re going to learn—is sit down and not be afraid of it.”
Jeanette Counsellor, at the time an employee of Hunt’s, didn’t just type on computers. She also knew how to juggle around thousands of dollars on electronic spreadsheets. And King herself boasted the ability to use computers to help project building costs, a useful skill since Hunt at the time was finishing construction of a water-theme park in North Carolina. What’s more, on the Apple, King helped Hunt do company tax work.
By telephone—I talked to Hunt and his people several times—I asked point-blank why he’d been so successful in getting staffers running on computers.
“I told them,” he said, “how it would be useful for the rest of their careers to be able to say, ‘I’ve worked with a computer and I’ve word processed.’” His people didn’t mess with BASIC, just skills directly useful in their work. “I showed them,” said Hunt, “how computers could save them a lot of time and trouble in the amount of rewrites I do. I put it to them as a challenge.”