Once upon a time the world’s richest man lived on cheap rations and was terribly in debt. All he had were ideas and a very smart woman in his bed.
“Nobody is going to listen to you, Ken”, May said. “And nobody will read your book, either. If I can’t read it, nobody can.”
This was pillowtalk, after an exceptionally fine recreational session in his tiny basement suite. His single bedroom was not good for much else, but sleep and fun were enough. Mellow from his exertions, Ken accepted the woman’s comments without the mild bitterness he might otherwise have felt. What she’d said was true, of course.
“What you need is money. A fiery passion for social change is not enough. Add money and stir, suddenly you will have a real chance of making a difference.”
“Yes. Money. Hey, maybe I could pay people to listen to me.”
“I don’t know if you’d be able to afford that. Not unless you had a lot of money.”
“Well then, I should just make sure I have a lot of money, to buy the ears of the masses. Where does money come from, by the way?”
“It comes from people who have it, in exchange for something they want.”
“Any man would want you, my dear. Why haven’t you left me for someone rich?”
“Oh, I might. A better plan would be to make you rich. I like having you around.”
This idle talk one night was followed by more serious one two days later.
“Business software, Ken.”
“Huh?”
“You can write software. Businesses buy software. They might buy yours, if you wrote something good.”
“Ouch. No fun in that.”
“Think of it as a means to an end. Write it, sell it, then pay people to listen to you spout your world changing stuff.”
“OK, I’ll think about it. I know nothing about business, though.”
“Neither do I. Find someone who does. Take an add out in the Peak.”
The Peak was the student paper at Simon Fraser University, near Vancouver, where Ken and May were undergraduates. It took a while to come up with a wording, but eventually May wrote and submitted an ad that read, “Programmer interested in writing and selling business software seeks business student partner.”
Ken did not get along with men, and was reluctant to work with any. May jealously voted down any female applicant. Finally a married couple applied. Deeply in love, Dora and Joe Tenley were both business students who had been interested in the business applications of computers from the beginning.
It took a lot of effort for Ken to drag out of the Tenley’s just what they wanted the programs to do. May knew little about software requirements analysis, but had a lot of common sense, so she was able to help a lot.
It was not fun writing these boring programs, but working with the others began to appeal to Ken. Eventually the Tenley’s were able to switch from analysis mode to sales mode, selling the software Ken had written.
By their simple agreement, each of the four would get a quarter of the money that came in, though Ken had written the software. That seemed fair to all of them and the partnership seemed like it would last. May was the first to leave, and that was heartbreaking. Ken truly loved her, but he was spending more and more time on his work, less and less on her. Eventually she took her affections elsewhere.
Ken and the others were bound by promises and some written words to keep giving May a share of the income from what had already been written. They would certainly do so, but as new software emerged, those amounts would become insignificant.
The small company expanded quickly by hiring a few new programmers, especially those with a business orientation, but its further expansion was threatened by a growing rift between Ken and the married couple.
“We believe in just hiring the best people and leaving them to run with it”, Joe Tenley said to Ken, summarizing their differences. “You want to meddle too much.”
“It is not meddling. I just don’t accept the idea that people can be evaluated in isolation. It is a question of optimizing the workplace. And we are all part of it, so we need to be fitted in as well.”
“Yes, sure, all that is apparently in your book, but I could never make sense of it, and neither could Dora.”
“But are you willing to cooperate, for now?”
“Ah, no. Not really. I think we might have to go our separate ways, Ken.”
That put an end to it. Ken left, assured of a regular income from software already sold. He took with him one programmer and one management person, both women. All were students, actually. The whole company had been based on students.
Ken entertained the idea of sleeping with his new employees, but did not feel right doing so. He got his entertainment elsewhere. The young women were not there so much because he wanted to work with women, but because he didn’t want to work with men.
Ken’s new girlfriend was named Millie. Emily, actually, but she preferred the silly version of her name. As before with May, much of the direction Ken got was in pillowtalk, when he was mellow and receptive to the ideas of others.
“I can’t understand a word you’ve written, Ken, but I believe you have something there. You say you have, and I trust you. So why don’t you trust yourself more? Use your own theories.”
“I suppose I could. It won’t be easy though. Or cheap. I have only so much money coming in, and I haven’t begun using it to pay my student loans yet.”
“Well don’t. There is no need to start paying them back as long as you remain a registered student, so use what income you have to set things up the way you want to.”
“Worth a try.”
Ken’s part time management person was a young third-generation Chinese-Canadian woman named Vera Ling.
“Vera, I want to hire some part time staff to make decisions and produce estimates for me. Say an hour a week. What would we have to do to get a lot of applicants willing to take a lengthy test in order to get the job?”
“A lot of applicants? How many?”
“Thousands. Not just from the university, but from all over. Not necessarily students, anybody.”
“Well, it would have to be a lot. Not many people are going to attracted by the idea of getting an extra twenty dollars a week for an hour’s work.”
“Let me think. What I want will be valuable. Suppose we paid them one hundred dollars a week, just for that one hour. That would be five hundred dollars a week or about $25,000 a year. Worth it. Easily worth it.”
Ken and Vera wrote up an ad, which went out to all university and college student newspapers as well as the local city papers. “Earn an extra $100 dollars a week. All that you need do is spend one hour a week answering a few simple questions. Applicants must take a one hour written test of general knowledge.”
Vera grimaced at the cost, but hired a hall, where Ken watched while a stream of arriving people took his carefully written general knowledge test. Over seven thousand people took the test, which was a multiple choice test. It used forms in which people blackened circles beside the list of possible answers. Ken had rented a device to automatically read these forms and enter the results into a computer.
Three days later, Ken had the information he wanted. He contacted the five selected people. To each of three he said, “I will be sending you short lists of yes-no questions. I just want you to guess at the right answers and submit them to me.” To the remaining two Ken said, “I will be sending you lists of questions for which the answer wanted is a numerical value, how much or how many or when. I just want you to guess at the right answers and submit them to me.”
With this set up, Ken talked to Vera Ling and his programmer, Henrietta Harris. “Well, it’s now up to the three of us to come up with questions. All of our people were selected to minimize their error-covariance, which means their tendency to make similar mistakes. We should be able to get pretty good decisions from votes of our decision making team of three. We should be able to get good numerical estimates from our two person estimating team. I call them teams, though they won’t work together or even know of each others existence.”
“I think I understand about tendencies to make mistakes, Ken, and how we could good decisions using the votes of the three decision makers. But what about the estimators?”
“Oh, another form of error-covariance. Where one tends to estimate low, the other tends to estimate high. The average or mean of their answers will almost always be pretty good, better than either one of them could guess.”
“So what are the questions”, Henrietta asked.
“Whatever we want to know. It is up to us, now. The three of us have to come up with things to ask.” In fact Ken also got good questions from his current girlfriend, the girl who had gotten him to apply his own methods, Millie Smith.
It took a while to become good at this. Vera wanted to know about investing money, Henrietta about whether a program of some kind would be useful. Programs that Henrietta suggested and were judged as useful by the decisions makers generated further questions from Vera, about how much they might sell for and how many copies might be sold. Ken’s questions were more general. Vera didn’t quite understand why he asked most of them.
Ken’s five person team of advisers was effective because they had been chosen well, but the supply of good questions to ask them was not ideal. Ken sought out an ideas person with Vera’s help, putting some questions to his strange committee about what kind of person to hire.
A week later, Ken and Vera hired a young woman (of course), Rina Anderson. She was an endless font of interesting ideas and could turn them into questions with great skill.
Now Ken had a good ideas person, a good team of decision makers and estimators, together with Vera Ling and Henrietta Harris to implement the decisions. It was now a machine which little input from Ken to run smoothly. He did provide ideas, but left decisions and implementation mostly others.
Now understanding how Ken’s theories applied, Vera got Henrietta to write software aimed at efficient use of them. Among the first things done was to expand the company, hiring more programmers, other managers, and eventually other teams of decision- makers and estimators.
As the company expanded, Ken finished his formal education, which he had continued part time. He got a bachelors degree in computer science with minors in psychology, sociology and linguistics. Then he did a interdisciplinary masters in computer science, systems theory, psychology and sociology.
“We have enough money to buy a house now, Ken”, Millie said, the day he got his masters degree.
“Millie. We should talk.”
“Uh-oh. That sounds bad. Don’t tell me. I love you Ken. Don’t say it.”
“You never did read my second book, did you, Millie?”
”Well, no, it wasn’t any easier to get into than the first one was.”
“It’s mostly about people being compatible, Millie. I think people have to be really compatible to stay together. Ordinary love is not enough.”
“But Ken, what are you saying. Don’t tell me you want to break up with me.”
“No, but I think we should both look for someone else. I don’t mean split up right away, just assume we are not permanent. Keep our eyes open for other possibilities.”
Ken meant this to be gentle, but did not yet have the social skills he developed later. Millie felt heartbroken.
“I can’t live that way, Ken. I can’t live with the idea that you might be looking for someone else. And I can’t look for someone else while being with you. I’d hoped we could stay together, get a house, you know, uh, well, maybe, you know …”
“I’m sorry, Millie. I do love you, but I think we both need someone more compatible.”
Ken offered to buy Millie a place of her own, a condo of some sort, and to arrange that she could work for his company as an employee, reporting to Vera.
Having not only a broken heart but few choices, Millie agreed. She moved out of Ken’s apartment into the condo he bought for her, and worked for Vera. Eventually she got another job. Eventually she got another boyfriend. Eventually she got a whole new life, with a husband and family.
After Millie there were other women who wanted Ken to marry them. Again and again he had to explain his views on true compatibility. Once these were explained, a breakup was inevitable.
Meanwhile Ken’s commercial organization became enormous, increasing at an exponential rate. His scheme for making money was not a secret. Indeed, he published it in his third book. Somehow nobody understood what he was saying. Maybe he wrote poorly, maybe his ideas were to unconventional, maybe nobody understood that they were really working, making him rich.
Becoming rich changed Ken Green’s social life a lot. As soon as it became apparent that he had money, he was sought out by more and more women. To avoid breaking more hearts he now routinely explained his views on true compatibility upfront, insisting that any relationship they had was unlikely to last.
Though Ken explained this before getting involved with anyone, it did not take long before each woman developed domestic desires and wanted permanence. He had a nice house by this time. Over and over he got close to someone, explaining that their relationship would not last but inviting them to share his life and live in his house for a while. Over and over they found the warm nest seductive and wanted to stay, to marry and raise children in it. Over and over Ken had to gently explain about his desire for someone truly compatible, which eventually led to a breakup. Some were almost friendly separations, but some were not.
A billionaire by 35, Ken Green was still looking for the right woman as he approached 40. When between girlfriends he found sexual relief with a woman friend who did not need his money or want a family with him. She had a nice house of her own and children to keep her busy.
Edith Brown was an unusual woman. After she found out that her husband was cheating on her, she found a male friend of her own. That seemed only fair. Not wanting to divorce and still desiring each other, sometimes, both Edith and her husband had two sexual relationships at the same time, with each other and with their tolerant lovers.
Upon meeting and falling in love with Ken, she did not immediately seek a sexual relationship with him, but made it clear that he could have her whenever he needed her. So Edith had two men and occasionally three, when Ken was included. The men were jealous of each other, but stayed out of each other’s way, putting up with the situation.
It was probably Edith’s polyandry, a woman being with more than one man, which put the idea of polygamy into Ken’s head. He did not seek it out, but one day he found himself with two girls who both wanted him and a polygamous situation did develop.
Sarah Rivers and her friend Joan Simmons were very young, but a sexual relationship with them was legal under Canadian law. They pressed him for one. The insisted that they were not seeking marriage, but did want his children. They both wanted to stay with him and raise a family together.
Even Ken was not sure how they talked him into it, but they got what they wanted. Perhaps it was because Ken had begun to want children rather badly. What these girls offered was just too much to refuse. Thus was born the Green Family, which expanded rapidly as other women sought to join it.
Soon Ken changed the name of his corporate empire to the Green Family Corporation. It would continue to fund the growth of his family as it continued to grow itself.
Ken never intended to have a harem, it just worked out that way. He always claimed that it was not for his pleasure but for the production of children, and most people pretended to believe him.
Though he loved his children dearly, they were also intended for a purpose. He wanted to raise them to understand his ideas completely, and made sure they were taught about them from an early age. Each child was also taught something else from an early age, whatever the mother wanted. Thus many of Ken’s children became artists, musicians or scientists.
Probably the greatest success story in the Green family is the story of Beth Green, Ken’s first child. Raised to understand mathematics, computer science, psychology and sociology, Ken’s own special interests, she developed remarkable abilities at a young age. By age ten she was writing very useful software, some of which was sold before she was twelve.
That was the year Beth began to write an application of her father’s kind of social technology, which she called just The System. It would change the world.