One of my formative career experiences was working for Dave Thomas at OTI (Object Technology International). Dave was, like all good CEOs, very demanding with very high standards, but unlike most of the Silicon Valley CEOs I’ve met since, a very caring and empathetic human. He imbued in all of us a strong culture of people-first team-work and as a result, we did amazing things. I have strived to build organizations in his image ever since with sometimes more, sometimes less success (in the end, the culture of a company is set by the CEO and it’s impossible to deviate too much). Recently I found this slide about corporate culture on the internet and thought to myself “yeah, right on!”, and only later realized that it had been written by an ex-OTIer about OTI. I’m not sure I can pick a favorite principle, but a few that stand out are the focus on shipping (“He who ships gets to speak”) and the focus on people (“People, not organizations, ship great software”).

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The great AI overthrow of the old-school way of writing software into the new way of managing fleets of agents just brings back so many memories of the Issac Asimov novella “Profession” – the key point of the story is that education is instantaneous via direct-to-brain knowledge transfer, but the education is limited to just one technology and so when the technology changes, those who were educated with the older technology become obsolete because nobody had learned how to learn something new.

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A friend pointed out this Lao Tzu quote today that perfectly describes my leadership philosophy:

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I wrote a blog back in the last millennium, but then I stopped for many years. I tried restarting it a number of times, but didn’t find my voice in amongst the cacophony on the internet so the efforts withered away. However now I’m working on a number of new ideas and I’m feeling the urge to have a public persona again and so here it is.

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