Video Equipment Company Breaks With Tradition : High-Tech Firm at Home in the Country

The remote hills of California’s gold country are far from the sprawling urban jungle of Silicon Valley--and that’s just the way employees of the Grass Valley Group like it.

A high-tech company where almost everyone, including top executives, wears jeans and sneakers, the Grass Valley Group has been designing and manufacturing state-of-the art video production equipment for almost 25 years.

Nestled in the hills outside of town, Grass Valley Group is by far the biggest private employer in an area where jobs in lumber and light industry can be hard to come by. A sleepy former gold mining town with fewer than 9,000 residents, the streets are lined with quaint Victorian homes, some of which are opening as bed-and-breakfast-style inns. An annual bluegrass festival attracts hordes of tourists.

The views from Grass Valley Group’s international headquarters of wooded hillsides, cows grazing and wide blue sky capture the feel of this decidedly rural area, traversed by roads with names like Squirrel Creek, Fawn Path and Lime Kiln Road.

Flashy Video Effects

It is an unlikely spot for the design and manufacture of technology that helps bring you everything from “Monday Night Football” to the glitzy graphics on the nightly news.

“If a picture is worth a thousand words, we give you a picture every sixteenth of a second,” said Dan Wright, president of Grass Valley Group, a subsidiary of Tektronix Inc.

Grass Valley Group has built its reputation on editing units and production switchers, the behind-the-scenes equipment that controls things like which images go over the air during a live sportscast or when one image “wipes” or fades to another.

Grass Valley Group is also a pioneer in the flashy video effects market. It’s Grass Valley Group equipment that made the Olympics logo tumble across the screen during coverage of the Winter Games in Calgary. Other popular effects can warp an image or give it a three-dimensional look.

Thanks to one gizmo, television viewers can watch “split-screen” action. Another, called a Kaleidescope, can compress one of the split images so viewers can see an Olympic skier at the top of a mountain while watching another zip for the finish line. On the zanier side, one of Grass Valley Group’s standard products enabled David Letterman to broadcast his late-night show upside-down one night.

And it was Grass Valley Group wizardry that brought President Reagan’s 1984 landslide victory to video life as state after state was “painted” into the President’s corner.

“It wasn’t too long ago you’d see the person turning the numbers by hand,” Wright said. “Now it’s all done with computers. They’ll just pack information into you now. They couldn’t do that 10 years ago.”

Jobs Rotated

As their equipment has revolutionized what television looks like, the company has introduced some innovations of its own.

Located about 150 miles east of San Francisco, Grass Valley Group has its own airplane to fly customers in and out of the remote, wooded company headquarters--”a plus and minus when it comes to recruitment,” according to Executive Vice President Dave Mayfield.

Designed to appeal to “free-thinking” employees (one company executive ventured to call them “mavericks”), flex-time schedules are available for most of the nearly 1,000 workers in Grass Valley.

Assemblers work in self-managed “cells” rather than production lines, rotating jobs and setting their own production goals. As an added incentive, a profit-sharing program was introduced in 1976.

A fitness trail winds its way through the 330-acres of campus-like grounds and fleets of bright turquoise company bicycles are parked outside each of nine buildings to carry employees and visitors about the grounds.

Part of engineer Larry Click’s job involves teaching customers how to operate their new equipment, some of which looks so complicated that it has appeared as spaceship interiors in “Star Wars” and other Hollywood features.

“If a question comes up during a class and I don’t know the answer,” Click said, “I’ll just go over to Building 9 where they design the stuff and ask them.”

That sort of attention to detail appears to have been a founding philosophy of the Grass Valley Group, which was established in 1959. It’s all part of what marketing manager Bob Johnson calls the “culture” of the company.

Company lore has it that the founder, Dr. Donald G. C. Hare, was such an avid environmentalist that he took a two-week vacation when trees had to be felled to make way for a new building. He couldn’t bear to hear the sound of the saws.

And if the habits of the free-thinkers at Grass Valley Group sometimes border on the eccentric, so much the better.

Scaled Down Equipment

One department is so adamantly unorthodox that if an outside salesman makes a call wearing a necktie, he’ll more than likely lose it--to a pair of scissors, according to Johnson.

Although the company will not release earnings information, officers will say that they are in the midst of a 100-acre expansion of their facilities in nearby Nevada City. Much of Grass Valley Group’s competition comes from Japanese companies like Sony, JVC and Panasonic, but Ampex Corp. of Redwood City is a major competitor.

With their specialized equipment in television newsrooms and video production houses across the country, Grass Valley Group is now aiming “lower in the marketplace,” toward smaller video production companies.