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and Blackburn came into the room. Sanders's first impression was that the lawyer was smiling too broadly, behaving too cheerfully. It was a bad sign.

    Philip Blackburn, the chief legal counsel for DigiCom, was a slender man of forty six wearing a dark green Hugo Boss suit. Like Sanders, Blackburn had been with DigiCom for over a decade, which meant that he was one of the "old guys," one of those who had
    "gotten in at the beginning." When Sanders first met him, Blackburn was a brash, bearded young civil rights lawyer from Berkeley . But Blackburn had long since abandoned protest for profits, which he pursued with singleminded intensity-while carefully emphasizing the new corporate issues of diversity and equal opportunity.
    Blackburn 's embrace of the latest fashions in clothing and correctness made "PC Phil" a figure of fun in some quarters of the company. As one executive put it, "Phil's finger is chapped from wetting it and holding it to the wind." He was the first with Birkenstocks, the first with bell-bottoms, the first with sideburns off, and the first with diversity.

    Many of the jokes focused on his mannerisms. Fussy, preoccupied with appearances, Blackburn was always running his hands over himself, touching his hair, his face, his suit, seeming to caress himself, to smooth out the wrinkles in his suit. This, combined with his unfortunate tendency to rub, touch, and pick his nose, was the source of much humor. But it was humor with an edge: Blackburn was mistrusted as a moralistic hatchet man.

    Blackburn could be charismatic in his speeches, and in private could convey a convincing impression of intellectual honesty for short periods. But within the company he was seen for what he was: a gun for hire, a man with no convictions of his own, and hence the perfect person to be Garvin's executioner.

    In earlier years, Sanders and Blackburn had been close friends; not only had they grown up with the company, but their lives were intertwined personally as well: when Blackburn went through his bitter divorce in 1982, he lived for a while in Sanders's bachelor apartment in

    Sunnyvale . A few years later, Blackburn had been best man at Sanders's own wedding to a young Seattle attorney, Susan Handler.

    But when Blackburn remarried in 1989, Sanders was not invited to the wedding, for by then, their relationship had become strained. Some in the company saw it as inevitable: Blackburn was a part of the inner power circle in Cupertino , to which Sanders, based in Seattle , no longer belonged. In addition, the two men had had sharp disputes about setting up the production lines in Ireland and Malaysia . Sanders felt that Blackburn ignored the inevitable realities of production in foreign countries.

    Typical was Blackburn's demand that half the workers on the new line in Kuala Lumpur should be women, and that they should be intermingled with the men; the Malay managers wanted the women segregated, allowed to work only on certain parts of the line, away from the men. Phil strenuously objected. Sanders kept telling him, "It's a Muslim country, Phil."

    "I don't give a damn," Phil said. "DigiCom stands for equality."

    "Phil, it's their country. They're Muslim."

    "So what? It's our factory."

    Their disagreements went on and on. The Malaysian government didn't want local Chinese hired as supervisors, although they were the best-qualified; it was the policy of the Malaysian government to train Malays for supervisory jobs. Sanders disagreed with this blatantly discriminatory policy, because he wanted the best supervisors he could get for the plant. But Phil, an outspoken opponent of discrimination in America , immediately acquiesced to the Malay government's discriminatory policy, saying that DigiCom should embrace a true multicultural perspective. At the last minute, Sanders had had to fly to Kuala Lumpur and meet with the Sultans of Selangor and Pahang, to agree to their demands. Phil then announced that Sanders had "toadied up to