About
Writing is inextricable linked to intelligence, and this illusion of pixels on bright surfaces allows us, as if by sleigh of magic, to share our writing (and writings). Is that online illusion shared intelligence or just another mediated hypnotic opium derivative? I honestly don’t know. I am not optimistic about the response or even the existence of such answer. After all, most of us seem to be rushing to plaster yet another layer of pixelated inanity on yet another ‘page’ on yet another corner of this ether; nothing closer to the total negation of intelligence, to the void of humanity…
But one thing is certain, however: in these times of peril for all that we used to call human, where ‘we speak freely, but not about freedom and what is being done to it’ (liberty taken with Gelman’s text), and where apocallyptic shadows wiggle in the confused/ing boundaries of our posthuman bodies, the possibility of a collective intelligence, media-magically shared and essentially collaborative, may be our species’ last hope; we have managed to corrupt our visions into nightmares, our leaders into murderous executioners, and our future into a near past of consumed shopping malls and meaningless accumulation of wealth. Our only hope left may be what comes from the whole, not what comes from individuals or masses; if chaotic molecules can raise the basket that hangs from that balloon, perhaps we can all find the way out.
If so, let’s keep trying. Let’s keep tears flowing into the rain, let’s keep releasing pidgeons, let’s keep memories alive, let’s love writing and write loves. Finally, let’s keep trying to share our presumed intelligence. Not much time left, but who knows… Do you have anything better to do?
The long road to ‘OnShI’
I zeroed into product management and strategic planning by trial and error. Having majored on Physics and Mathematics and demonstrated clear aptitude for academic endeavors, in a linear-future world I would now be tenured in some sleepy university in Argentina. But (a) the grass is always greener somewhere else, and (b) during the Dark Ages of the 70’s in Argentina the military didn’t like to have thinking people around, and so, in the non-linear real world I was doing computer operations before I graduated, then software development until I left my country to come to the USA, just to find myself bored beyond belief with coding.
What do you after taking a major leap of faith just to look at your landing pad and really dislike what you see? You count your assets (deep logical training, good coding skills, excellent persuasion skills, and a unique perspective on products – fruit of both a strange origin and a hybrid socialistic-academic training); you add to it what you would really want to do (in my case, business), and you determine the shortest path between them. For me, it meant working on Product Management (that grey zone between the realities of the business and those of producing stuff that people like or need); being very technical, I managed technical products that served people such as me (it’s much harder to do PM when you have to serve customers that exist only abstractly). The result was product management for software development tools (the ones I wish I had had when I was a developer) and IT management (the supporting infrastructure I wished I had when I managed IT), specializing on the most technical parts of those categories (change and configuration control, performance management, and such).
I ended up being OK as Product Manager. So much so, in fact, that I started to look for what was really broken with the category of products I had become an expert on; these were quite mature tools, with layers and layers of resolved complexity, with huge markets (then, 20 years ago, and still today), high prices, good profit margins, and so. But they also were control-oriented, and hated by the users (not the buyers, precisely because they were bought for control); further, they did not solve the problem they were supposed to solve, they just masked complexity. That is still the case with most development tools (luckily alleviated by agile methodologies and tools) and all IT Operations Management products. How bad? Well, according to a recent (2007) survey by Forrester Research on users of Operations Management products, customers give vendors a grade that averages C-. Yes, these are not free or open source tools, these are products for which enterprises pay way north of $100K just to start dabbling with them… and then give the vendor a C-… just before buying more of them.
In any case, there were two obvious, glaring problems with the products whose life cycle I managed:
- They masked complexity, but did not address it; further yet, they created the illusion of managed complexity (the classical nuclear control panel from the Simpsons, full of funny lights and gauges, with Homer operating it while spilling beer and eating sandwiches). I have grown wary of presumptions of controlling large complex systems and processes and grown a proportionally large respect for the capabilities of systems that develop organic control patterns (almost deterministic at micro-scopes, self-governing and redundant at the macro level);
- They attempted to control people and their work, but did not empower them at all; on the contrary (precisely as a corollary of the previous point), in their attempt to control organic entities, full of diversity and rich contradictions, they could only do so by reducing them to their minimal, robotic trivial patterns (controlling combustible substances by removing the air from all rooms, and in the process turning them uninhabitable).
The two patterns above, deterministic treatment of semi-chaotic systems and reduction of the individual to the idiotic minimal, seem to point to yet another change of course in my life; after all, if you detect such patterns in the products you manage day in and day out, how can you realize yourself as a Product Manager? Well, a normal person usually can’t, but sometimes they get lucky. I found Starbase (a company determined to make a dent in the change control market, a market that by then had already been declared closed and done by the pundits), and immediately joined the company, attracted like a moth to the shining light of ‘technical collaboration‘, that is, the notion that control could be partially replaced with empowerment, and also that empowerment would in turn reduce the need for control and at the same time improve the quality of the results.
Starbase and StarTeam were crucial turning points for me. Professionally, I had never had so much fun and learned so much, so fast. It was an awesome team, a great product, a fantastic vision, everything a PM can ask for. Personally, it changed my way of looking at problems and software applications and platforms: approaching a new problem, I started looking immediately for collaboration patterns, for ways in which the team could break nots that were too thick for the individual.
How that change happened is quite hard to describe, but if you sail, I can tell you that it felt similar to the moment in which I stopped looking at the wind telltales and ‘feeling’ the sails in front of me and noticing the wind on my hair, ears and face. It’s not a replacement, but rather something you grow into, a better way of doing something else that contains the old way: the control perspective is always contained in the collaborative one (usually as a trivial reduction), but the other way around it doesn’t work: you can’t ‘dig’ collaboration once you started worrying about control. I read this paragraph and I find it too mystic, but I can’t do much better of a job. Perhaps it is a mystic process. ;p
Once I made the switch, I couldn’t go back (so much so that in other occasions, forced to take the ‘old way’, usually while serving customers that were too set in their own ways, I started to fail and/or get out of the deal immediately).
As time went by, I grew more and more convinced that it will be only highly innovative collaborations that will produce solutions for the very complex times we live in. The same way that modern Physics was built in a highly collaborative manner, by highly cooperative people (the proverbial ’shoulders of giants’), world solutions will be built using team collaboration and social networking (or what will come out from them). The same cannot be said of the next Windows or Mac OS, or the next application, or the next enterprise systems management engine. Solutions will come from collaboration and social effects. And I want to participate in the process; this site is my first attempt to do so.
So, let’s start writing and sharing
I will start writing about things I know well, in the hope that they become useable, and attract other people with the same interests. At that point, we will probably re-calibrate the site and objectives, but for now there is no ‘we’ yet. Here are things I promise to cover:
* Team collaboration, and specially in enterprise environments
* Social networking, also with an enterprise slant
* Collaborative competitive intelligence (yes, I am still working on the book, who knows, discussions or postings in this site may attenuate my intense procrastination instincts)
* Desktop and personal computer applications and experiences that are relevant to collaboration.
