The Eagle team had a rite West named, though he didn't invent the practice: "signing up." By signing up you agreed to do whatever the project needed — to forsake, if necessary, family, hobbies, and friends. It was rarely a formal declaration; among the old hands a muttered "Yeah, I'll do that" could constitute it, and often it was tacit. The point of the rite was consent. "Labor was no longer coerced. Labor volunteered." When you signed up you had in effect said, "I want to do this job and I'll give it my heart and soul." VP Carl Carman, who knew the term, explained why it mattered even to management's conscience: "That's why you have to go through the sign-up. To be sure you're not conning anybody" — and that the person wasn't conning themselves into a commitment they didn't feel. The move converts extraction into volunteering. The same brutal hours, demanded, breed resentment; volunteered, they breed ownership and pride. The organization gets discretionary effort no schedule could compel — and a moral cover, because the person chose it. That is also the trap. "Signing up" launders a company's capture of unpaid overtime into an act of the worker's own will, and someone who has signed up too many times "might not have" family, hobbies, or friends left. The rite is real leverage; it is also how good people burn themselves down and call it devotion. --- *Source: [[The Soul of a New Machine]] (Tracy Kidder, Little, Brown 1981) — Ch 3 — Building a Team*