This is another notable quote from “Fumbling the future: how Xerox invented, then ignored, the first personal computer”, by Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander (1988).
One of the villains of that story is a Xerox executive called Bob Sparacino. He had come to Xerox from General Motors, and specialized in “operations” rather than research. The book suggests that his focus on operations did lead to faster release cycles of copiers, but the copiers were of lower quality, and damaged the company’s reputation (p 218).
In 1978, Xerox was planning to give Sparacino control of the research budget, a move that the research teams thought would be disastrous. Eventually, George Pake, head of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, offered to take the job of vice-president of research, in order to maintain some autonomy for research in Xerox. From page 217 of the book:
“I had a stormy meeting with Sparacino,” remembers George Pake. He was telling me I was crazy to take the job, that it couldn’t last. The thinly veiled threat was that if I took the job of heading up research, he’d get me. He seemed to be impugning the dedication and hard work of people in research. When I said they worked very hard and long hours and not for money either but because they loved it, Sparacino said, ‘People shouldn’t work because they love it. They should work because it hurts’“.