Between Two Cultures
Today is my father's birthday. He would have turned 95 today.
Pop was an inventor. For much of his early adult life he was also a blue collar worker. He used to tell the story of an improvement he made to the manufacturing system at a box factory where he worked. The change eliminated a bunch of jobs, including his own.
That irony illustrates hard facts about the old industrial system that still prevails in much of he world, including the default mental models in our own heads. That system sees workers as human machine parts: cogs and gears, pistons and pulleys, input trays and output belts. In this system, you contribute two values. One is the work you perform. The other is the "position" you occupy in an organizational schema that resembles a pyramid. Even today it's hard not to think of a business as a "human resources" machine that's one person wide at the top and many people wide at the bottom.
Even seventy-five years ago, there were exceptions. For example, those performing unusual or dangerous jobs tended to function outside the established order. Such was the case with one of Pop's most interesting jobs: "bootstrapping" cable for the George Washington Bridge.
<http://www.inventionfactory.com/history/RHAbridg/gwbuild/>
The bridge project was the largest of its time, and took four years to complete, from 1927 to 1931. Pop was nineteen when it started and twenty-two when it finished, eight months ahead of schedule. Twelve men died on the job. Not a large number, when you consider the work involved.
<http://www.nycroads.com/crossings/george-washington/>
Pop's specialty was working the compactors that squeezed hundreds of rope-sized cables into fat main cables. Four of these cables, two on each side, were draped across 600-foot-high towers from anchorages in New Jersey and New York. The guy in this archival picture, straddling a girder on the top of a compactor suspended hundreds of feet above the Hudson River, looks like it might be the old man:
<http://www.fortleeonline.com/gwb/gwbgallery6.html>
I was born about 20 years after that picture was taken, at the front end of the baby boom, not long after the end of World War II. Like many returning soldiers, Pop's dream was just to get a nice white collar job and raise a family. Luckily, his older sister got him a job as an agent with the Prudential Insurance company. She was the highest-ranking woman in the company at that time: She ran an office.
The corporate millieu of that era was perfectly described in 1995 by John Perry Barlow in "Death From Above":
Over the last 30 years, the American CEO Corps has included an astonishingly large percentage of men who piloted bombers during World War II. For some reason not so difficult to guess, dropping explosives on people from commanding heights served as a great place to develop a world view compatible with the management of a large post-war corporation.
It was an experience particularly suited to the style of broadcast media. Aerial bombardment is clearly a one-to-many, half-duplex medium, offering the bomber a commanding position over his "market" and terrific economies of scale.
Now, most of these jut-jawed former flyboys are out to pasture on various golf courses, but just as they left their legacy in the still thriving Cold War machinery of the National Security State, so their cultural perspective remains deeply, perhaps permanently, embedded in the corporate institutions they led for so long, whether in media or manufacturing. America remains a place where companies produce and consumers consume in an economic relationship which is still as asymmetrical as that of bomber to bombee.
Last week at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCon) in Portland, I thought often about the corporate world of my father's generation. It's still there, big time. And it's also ending, big time. Meanwhile it manifests in the fear IT people feel when asked to talk about how open source and free software are bringing it down hard.
<http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2003/>
The conference set a new record for attendance. To my surprise, many of the attendees were IT folks from large and medium-sized corporations. Two stood out. Both were from major financial institutions.
The first was Robert M. Lefkowitz, is a highly energized six-foot-something extrovert with a shaved head, a dapper outfit, a loud voice and a red foam rubber nose that he carries in his pocket and snaps onto his face whenever the opportunity arises. Everybody calls him "Rommel." At first I thought it was because he must bear some resemblance to the Field Marshal Erwin Rommel -- the famous "Desert Fox" defeated by Patton's forces in World War II. But no. "Rommel" is just the pronunciation of rØml, which has been Lefkowitz' computing handle for several decades. His card features a clown with a red nose over "just a bozo." He was billed as "... formerly the director of Open Source Strategy for a large financial services firm". That firm, for which he actually still works, is Merrill Lynch.
RØml gave two talks: Protecting the Innovation Premium -- Open Source Business Models, and The Missing Open Source Projects.
<http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2003/view/e_sess/3940>
<http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2003/view/e_sess/3897>
He held audiences rapt in both sessions, and not just because he's a master showman. I'll visit his subjects in a future SuitWatch, or in a Linux Journal Web feature (not sure which right now... stay tuned).
<http://www.linuxjournal.com>
Meanwhile I'll report that there were three main take-away from both sessions:
The other standout IT guy was W. Phillip Moore, who is no less odd than rØml. Phil has a fit, muscular and body, tattoos, and a face stitched with more piercings than a football. His short hair is dyed blond, and he is both blunt and smart in the extreme. His job is running the UNIX engineering team at Morgan Stanley.
Phil starred two years earlier in a speech at the OSCon in San Diego. His speech then was titled An Open Source Success Story on Wall Street.
<http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2001/view/e_sess/1529>
This time he kept a lower profile, starring as an audience member of two sessions I attended, including one I addressed, titled "DIY-IT: How Open Source is turning IT into a Do-It-Yourself Marketplace".
<http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2003/view/e_sess/4570>
In that session I highlighted the vast differences between the open source success stories and those told by mainstream media and by IT people themselves. In mainstream stories, I said, vendors take the lead. In IT worker stories, on the other hand, customers take the lead. In many cases they don't even perform as customers, using open source goods and methods to solve problems and "build solutions" on their own, or with help from vendors who perform a subordinate roll.
Phil nodded his head all through my talk, and added plenty of agreement in the form of testimony during the Q&A. But, like rØml, he was very careful not to violate company policies that restrict IT folks from talking openly about open source -- or whatever category of subjects open source might fall into.
It's clear which way we're heading in our journey between cultures. But it's also clear which culture is still in charge inside large corporations. And it's a culture my father would still find very familiar.