Hiding Another's Lantern Under a Basket
posted Saturday, July 15, 2006 at 2:32 am MST*touched 15JULY06 1245MDT: "You should allow imagination to be opportunistic and not shackle it to earning wealth or producing profit on the short term because that independence is at the base of scientific creativity." --John C. Polanyi on CBC Radio's "Quirks and Quarks"*
I finally got around to looking through Information Week magazine of 26JUNE06. Thomas Claburn's "Is Centralized IT Killing Tech Innovation?; A Culture of 'No'" caught my eye; the cover slug read "The apparatchiks in the IT org are stifling innovation. Here's where to draw the line on central control." Woa ... I can't recall the last time I saw someone else use the term apparatchik.
The article itself was just as entertaining: "IT pros worry about the security and management headaches of renegade apps. They should worry more about stifling innovation" Right on!
"Internet activist and entrepreneur John Gilmore once declared, ''The Net treats censorship as a defect and routes around it.'' [[FFII should use this as one of their slogans! bdt] Today that's how many employees view their IT departments." [emph. added - bdt]'Scuze me? today?! Well, that might be true, strictly speaking ... but only becuase IT depts haven't been around all that long. But mahn I don't recall ever encountering anything but friction, with the exception of a few stering individuals. Hence the need for the unholy triumverate of wizard, guru, and hero. From what I can see the rhetoric has changed but it's still opportunistic carreerists (who pre-date yuppies) and power games ... sophistry and plausible deniability.
Anytime someone wants to talk turkey I'm ready, able, and willing. But no (with all due respects to TimBL) I can't just "build it in the garage and see if it works" ... those days are passed for me ... that's why I'm writing on a 300MHz box on a scavenged WiFi connection!
"Business is a conversation and money is the punchline." ... yaaaa right. And there's nothing more condescending than a dot-bomb bourgie. The clever robber has his victims stand and deliver at the point of a pen. Entrepreneurship is just another aspect of culture ... as go society and community, so goes activity. (Has anybody read M. Scott Peck's book on the death of civility?)
