Interview with Jack Nilles

Jack Nilles was born in 1932 in Evanston, Illinois. He says of his early life: “Evanston is the immediate northern suburb of Chicago with a population of around 75,000.  It’s the home of Northwestern University. Basically, it’s sort of a Norman Rockwell town; everybody was happy and fruitful and so on.  So, I had a pretty good life as a kid there.  My parents, neither of whom had gone to college, were middle income people who insisted on my brother, sister and myself, going to college.  And my life there was reasonably unexceptional.”

His father, uncle and paternal grandfather ran the Nilles Coal, Oil and Building Materials company. He says of his father: “He was an entrepreneur.  He was also elected an alderman of the city in about 1941 or thereabouts.” The business went bankrupt when Jack was in college.  He adds: “I didn’t find out about it until the end of my senior year. He [my dad] was overwhelmed by the technology of ready-mix concrete which did away with his business of selling bags of cement to people.”

Jack’s maternal grandfather emigrated to the US from Sweden. He was an electrician and ran an electrical business in Chicago.

Jack attended the Haven Elementary School from kindergarten to eighth grade. It was a short walk from his home. He says: “It had a very broad spectrum of teaching, music, art, science, chemistry, biology, the whole works. I had a great time going to school there.”

As well as his interest in technology which grew throughout his education, Jack developed and maintained a variety of extracurricular interests including art, drawing and music. Jack says: “The school triggered my interest in all sorts of things.  I liked singing and drawing and finally, later on in high school, I got my first camera and that hooked me on photography.  My high school, Evanston Township High School (ETHS), had also a very broad curriculum.  One of the interesting things is it put on a series of dramatic productions; we had school plays in lunch hours, we ran an annual series of musicals, mostly Gilbert and Sullivan.  We had a good auditorium and I got involved in acting and in lighting for the school productions. Later in life, I discovered I was considered a wheel in the high school, which was a big surprise to me, because I was just interested in doing my thing.”

After completing school, Jack went to Lawrence College, now University, in Appleton, Wisconsin, where he majored in physics. He says of his choice: “When I was in high school, I wanted to go to Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, California, but my parents insisted that I go to a regular university and would not fund me to go to Brooks Institute. I did well in the sciences in high school.  I spent several summers when I was in high school as an unpaid intern at the Field Museum of Natural History.  I became interested in biology and got involved in all the backroom operations of the Field Museum.  So, I was into some form of science. Biology wasn’t exciting enough at the time when I went to college, so I picked physics, because it seemed to have more interesting things, specially after the atomic bomb had been exploded.”

Jack also gained a Masters in electronic engineering which was prompted by his stint in the Air Force. He explains: “When I graduated from Lawrence, I was in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, run by the Air Force at Lawrence. I graduated as a second lieutenant in the Air Force. About three months after my graduation I was inducted into active duty into the Air Force. My basic training was in San Bernardino, California. Having grown up in a flat midwestern town in the centre of America, I was just knocked over by the mountains and the fantastic scenery in southern California and I just said I’ve got to get back here some way or other after this.

“But since my degree was in physics, the Air Force gave me a job of supervising several electronic intelligence research [and development] projects at the Aerial Reconnaissance Laboratory at the Wright Air Development Centre in Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. Instead of having the usual kind of military operation, I was back into doing research, the same things that I’d been doing in college, only switching from nuclear physics related research to electronic engineering.

“I went in the Air Force hoping to become a nuclear engineer of some sort, and that idea basically went away the first day I got to Wright-Patterson. They put me in charge of electronic intelligence projects (ELINT): [equipment for] detecting radars and other forms of radiation for the Air Force. Some of the equipment I worked on was in the U2 which was shot down in the Soviet Union. One of the projects I was working on was called Weapons System 117L, which was basically the Air Force’s first space programme pre-Sputnik. I was involved in designing electronic intelligence equipment that would fit into a spacecraft.”

Jack’s involvement with the project was cut short when his two years of active duty came to an end. However, he did get his wish to return to California when he was hired as a senior electrical engineer for Raytheon Manufacturing Company in their Santa Barbara laboratories, one of the companies which Jack had been overseeing while in the Air Force.

It was on a visit to Raytheon’s labs, as the Air Force officer responsible to check the work they were doing, that Jack met his future wife. He says: “She was a concert flutist and had her own chamber music trio.” The couple were married for fifty-nine years before she passed away. After marrying, Jack moved to Los Angeles where his wife’s trio played, and he started working in the aerospace industry as well as helping his wife produce some long-running concert series.

He says: “Ultimately through the mid-1950 to most of the 1960s I worked on a number of highly classified space programmes, switching careers again back to photography. I was the manager of a department doing advanced design for several photographic spy satellites. During this period, I spent a lot of time commuting between Los Angeles and the Pentagon.”

Jack moved to the University of Southern California in1972 after becoming interested in how telecommunications could replace needless business travel. The idea had started after a wasted overnight trip to the Pentagon in mid-1960 for a meeting which was cancelled. Jack realised that, had he been a general, he could have saved time and energy if he had been permitted to use the video conference technology which the generals used to contact the Pentagon via an encrypted and secure line. He says: “So this idea that I could have given the briefing without all this travel nonsense, but didn’t, festered.”

It was in 1971 that Jack had his Eureka! moment while working on a project to apply aerospace technology to the real world. As part of that effort he travelled to Santa Barbara to speak to an urban planner. The planner asked him if they could do something about traffic. He says: “The proverbial light went off in my head – traffic!  That’s it.  Travel!  Get rid of all this travel. I got really excited about this.”

However, The Aerospace Corporation, where he was secretary of the corporate planning committee, were not interested in Jack’s proposed research project to look at substituting telecommunications for transportation in order to reduce commuting.

After complaining to an ex-colleague, who had run a laboratory at The Aerospace Corporation and who had moved to USC to start their interactive television programme for graduate engineering students, that Jack decided to approach USC with his research idea. At a meeting with the executive vice-president, Jack told him about his project and the need for multiple disciplines to be involved. He adds: “I said: ‘it’s clear to me that universities are really not great at organising broadly applied research, and I’m good at organising multiple and diverse companies, so why don’t I come there and I’ll be your director of interdisciplinary programme development.’ Basically, I invented this job.  They said okay and, in 1972, I left Aerospace, moved to USC’s School of Engineering at first and then finally to the university main building.

“My job was to put together programmes involving multiple schools of the university. One of which was my main topic, which I finally got a grant from the National Science Foundation to study, called ‘Development of Policy on the Telecommunications-Transportation Trade-Off.’”

Realising that many people didn’t immediately understand the title of the research, Jack decided to use the words “telecommuting” to appeal to employees and “teleworking” to appeal to employers when he described it.

Jack attracted faculty from various disciplines including, engineering, computing, business and the Annenberg School of Communication which had dealings with the psychology of people working with each other. He was also intent upon setting the research project in a ‘real world’ situation and attracted a national insurance company to work with them. He says: “I wanted to get to the basics; if it’s going to work nationwide, it’s got to work for a business company. We got the insurance company to sign up with us because their problem had nothing to do with what we were trying to do; their problem was excessive turnover.  They had a large clerical staff, mostly of recent high school graduates and the like. They’d come and work for the company in their downtown headquarters, and about one-third of them would leave every year. This was a significant expense to the company, because of recruiting costs and the need to pay them more to work downtown. Most of the prospective employees lived ten or fifteen miles away and had to find some form of transportation to get to the downtown location, using their own cars or something else.  The public transportation system wasn’t that terrific in Los Angeles then, and it still is not terrific today.  Between eighty and ninety-something per cent of people in Los Angeles (and most large cities) still commute to work in a car by themselves.”

The project allowed the insurance company employees to work at a centre located near where they lived so they could get to work without using their cars.

Jack continues: “The company tried it. We worked it for nine months and took very careful measurements of what was happening, what worked, what didn’t work.  At the end, the project was a success. The turnover rate went from one-third to zero; productivity rose by 15%; office space costs were reduced. We estimated that they would save four to five million dollars a year in either savings or direct benefits in terms of improved productivity if they kept doing this.”

Despite the opportunity to make these saving, the insurance company decided against continuing with remote centre working over fear that the unions would step in and unionise the workplaces in the suburbs of Los Angeles.

After the project, and speaking to a strategic planner of the American Federation of Labor, Congress of Industrial Organisations at a conference, Jack realised that companies did not like the idea because they thought it was too easy for unions to organise employees scattered around the region; unions did not like it because they thought it was too hard to organise employees in scattered locations.  He adds: “This was basically the theme that went through my life for the next ten or fifteen years as I tried to get companies interested in this, to try it long enough to see that it worked for them, that there’s bottom line benefits and so forth and so on.”

Asked about the technology in use during the insurance project in 1973, Jack explains that employees worked in the company’s satellite centre. The centre had a minicomputer which collected the work done on the employees’ “dumb” computer terminals every day. It would upload all the data to the mainframe at night via a T1 (broadband) line.

Jack says: “Even in 1973/74 there were lots of jobs that could be set up this way. The technology was simple: you need a reasonably broadband telephone line to a nearby centre that people could go to where they could still use computers without needing a car. In the simplest case, all you need is a telephone to talk to somebody somewhere else and a pencil and pad of paper, in order to get a good part of information work at that time accomplished.

“As time went on, bandwidth got larger and larger, but we still had to have people in centres connected by a broadband line to the mainframe. When the personal computer showed up in the early eighties, everything was potentially solved, the office was now embodied in the PC; all the stuff people worked with ordinarily was in the PC; you didn’t need to have a constant connection to the mainframe, you could store the  data on the PC. You could concentrate the results of what you’re doing into a relatively small package and send that over a phone line, instead of being tied to a phone line all day. So, the economics worked out that way.”

Asked about the paper flow of that time with everything reliant on paper insurance applications etc, Jack says: “We solved that with couriers between centres.”

During this time, Jack was also interested other aspects of business. He adds: “I was interested in how do you get people to do this, what are the impacts on energy; my main consideration for telecommuting was to get cars off the road because cars use an enormous amount of energy, especially with one person driving alone an average of fifteen, sixteen miles each way every day; that’s a lot of energy used.  It was a big concern because coincidentally we had the great oil crisis in 1973 in which we discovered that gasoline was not available; it wasn’t a question of is it too expensive, you just couldn’t get any.

“So that got people’s attention finally, and I tried to make people aware of this, but it still was very difficult to convince the CEO of a big corporation that he or she (at that time it was mostly he) didn’t need all these people in the office every day so he could keep an eye on them.  That was the big impediment from then on until COVID.”

On the question of employers trusting that that their teams do work remotely without supervision, Jack says: “When we did our larger projects with the companies and ultimately with government organisations, we spent a good part of time training both the telecommuters, their supervisors and their colleagues as to how to co-exist peacefully.  … Productivity of home-based workers invariably is significantly higher than that of their in-office colleagues. I’d say it went up from five or ten per cent to double.  One of the main reasons for this is the lack of interruptions when you’re working at home.  You get to concentrate for more than twelve minutes to get some of your work done. … Most offices are dysfunctional because people want to talk to other people at completely inopportune times.  So, working at home or in some other cloistered situation gets you away from that.  Your productivity goes up, your stress level goes down, your feelings of creativity increase.  We’ve very carefully measured all this for hundreds and hundreds of people.”

Talking about the counter argument of the ‘water cooler’ moment creating greater creativity and sparking ideas, Jack says: “I claim it does not exist. If you’re talking to your colleagues who work at the same place, all you’re going to get is ‘group think’.  If you want fresh ideas, you have to go somewhere else.  The fresh ideas come from outside, not from the bunch you work with. I have no faith in this walking down the hall and meeting someone saying ‘hey, how about this great new idea’. I have never in my entire life had it happen to me, and I’ve had many years of experience in my life, I’ve had a chance for these occasions frequently.”

Reflecting on the evolution of teleworking from the 1970s to the current day where many people now regularly work from home following the experience of the pandemic, Jack says: “There are two parts of this: technology has improved at a pace such that there’s no possible explanation for most jobs that technology won’t support them if they’re doing this from a distance.  Even in the seventies, I could say we always had sufficient technology to allow at least thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people, or millions of people to work remotely.  Now, basically anybody can do it, unless they have a job that’s specifically location dependent.

“The first innovation was the personal computer.  The next was connecting the personal computer to a network of some size from the company to the world. Those greatly made it easier, but the chronic problem was between the ears of the management.  I have never had any difficulty getting people to become volunteers to be telecommuters.  The problem is getting their management to buy into this.”

Jack says that when we look at why we have management levels [in hierarchical organizations], it’s usually because someone is very good at something else, such as being an accountant or chemist etc. But in order for companies to pay them more, they make them managers and give them responsibility for a team. He adds: “That’s the way it’s been historically.  ‘Management’ meant watching their subordinates at work to make sure they’re doing it properly. I’m saying no to that.  What you need is a system in which you: ensure that the people know how to do their jobs; that they have the technology enabled to allow them to do it; that you and they have agreed on what it is they’re supposed to do; what the results of that work are supposed to be; and when it’s supposed to happen. Then go away, let them do it, wherever they are. That is a very difficult thing to learn.  Particularly if you’ve been brought up in the usual hierarchical organisation, that’s tough.  What it takes is not small, short term pilot projects, but something like a pandemic when all of a sudden there was no alternative to letting people work from home [for a matter of a year or more].”

By the start of 2020, pre-pandemic, Jack estimates, that there were probably ten to fifteen million telecommuters in the United States and today he estimates that around forty million people are doing at least some work at home.

He says: “We did a national survey in 2000 of telecommuters and about eight per cent of them were fulltime, which was a surprise to me, my forecasts put the fulltime workers at about four per cent, and it was double, so that was better.  And the rest varied, the average was about two and a half days a week, people would be either in the office or working from home. And that is the way I think it will happen now because when the pandemic started all of a sudden everybody who had an office job had to do it from home. Now the traditionally educated bosses are saying you have to come back to the office.   They are getting outnumbered by the people saying no, if you force me to come to the office, I’m going to work for somebody else who’ll let me work from home.  If you’re losing talented people you have to start paying attention. Even some of the big names like Apple and Microsoft are starting to say well, maybe you don’t all have to be here every day.”

The irony being for Jack is that during the time of his research, the hardest companies to get to take on board the idea of telecommuting have been high tech companies.

 However, Jack believes that history shows that after a disaster such as a pandemic, an earthquake etc, when people have had to work from home, there has been a trickle back effect. He adds: “I’ve been through a couple of those and you get immediate telecommuting right after the disaster and then when the roads get fixed and you can get back to work again, months later, then people start trickling back, but not all of them. …

“We do need offices, I can’t say the office is obsolete, we need places to congregate, to talk to each other in situations of uncertainty.  You have to get organised somehow, you need to quickly shift ideas back and forth and figure out what do we do with this threat we’re faced with, how do we get around it, what are ways to adapt to it, to organise ourselves to meet it, who has to do what and to whom for all that’s happened.  For that you need typically a meeting place somewhere.”

This is a pattern that he believes we will see in the continue.

 He adds: “Hybrid is what we were doing from the beginning.  Most of the people, other than at our satellite offices, were working from home maybe a day or two or three a week, so hybrid was the mode.  It still will be the mode.”

In 1973, Jack envisaged the potential for remote working and technology to operate in some of the key aspects of public life, including healthcare, education, government services, retail etc. For example, in healthcare, Jack envisaged the idea of a remote consultation to discuss such things as x-rays etc.  He explains: “When I was working at The Aerospace Corporation, we had a project of computers examining X-rays from coalminers to estimate the degree of black lung disease that they had.  This was in 1969/1970, thereabouts.  We were able to detect black lung disease easier or more accurately than the pros in the business could do it in 1970. Telemedicine was just starting to be practised and we had remote diagnosis.”

The concept was primitive with a patient with a nurse in one setting with a patient and a doctor in a different setting able to discuss and prescribe remotely.  Jack adds: “Everything that could be done was possible, even in a primitive form even then; now, it’s just so much easier and less expensive than it used to be.”

He points to remote education as another example, highlighting his nephew who gained his Master’s degree in engineering at USC over the interactive instructional TV system that Jack helped develop in 1972 as director of interdisciplinary program development.  So, we had lots of people, engineers, getting their Masters degree.

In 1983, Jack and his wife, Laila, set up JALA, the name incorporated elements of their first names. [JAck and LAila, get it?] JALA’s primary interests are in the development of programs that involve telework as a central change agent for satisfying major strategic goals. The company’s telework services and expertise cover all aspects of telework and telecommuting, from project design; participant selection and training; project evaluation and impact assessment; and policy formulation. The company has developed a variety of special tools and documentation aids to address any telework situation or opportunity.

Of his proudest achievement, Jack says: “Coming up with telecommuting, a new way to look at it, how to use the technology was the best one and in fact, I keep trying to escape telecommuting and work on other stuff related to global warming, but I keep getting back into that one way or another.”

Offering advice to anyone thinking about a career in technology, Jack says: “There are always interesting things to be done and, particularly in the current world, there are going to be lots more interesting things that need people to work on them. We need innovation, we need some great ideas, and the more people we can get working on alternative ways of doing things, rather than the same old thing, the better off we are.”

Interviewed by Tom Abram

Transcript by Susan Nicholls

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley