Aidan continues to interview

 Surprise, surprise.   When Aidan McCullen interviewed me a few months ago, he was enthused to mention that an upcoming guest for his program was Bruce Vojak.  I 'knew the name' but couldn't place it at the time.   Wednesday this week I got a note from Bruce, sort of a "blanket mailer" invitation to have a consulting meeting with him for 30 minutes.   Still unclear on whether we'd met, I went to the Web and found an interview that Aidan had done on May 7, for 2 hours 24 min.

I thought, "why not" and opened and began to watch the YouTube interview.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5XxoUNvkj4

And, as it turned ouit, at 15:02 in the video, my name came up, and the two of them chatted about some of my work for two and a half minutes.  Seeing Vojak, and hearing his recall of my COPD work, triggered the thought--"I know this guy".

Well, it turns out that we'd met, just once, for maybe 5 minutes, in January 2010.   Bruce was a colleague of Ray Price at U of Illinois, and when Ray and I gave a talk about our HP book at UIUC, he introduced me to Bruce briefly.   The sequel was that Ray and Bruce, along with colleague Abbie Griffin, did a great book, "Serial Innovators" and Ray was able to insert several anecdotes about career steps of mine.    The additional sequel is that Bruce and I never met again, until today on Zoom, nor did I ever meet Abbie.  Pity.

Well, we played "catch-up" or, rather, intro'd ourselves to each other.  We have lots in common, and I look forward to some solid time together.   I think he felt the same, so I'll keep you posted

Intrapreneuring "costs"

 I've mentioned Aidan McCullen's program, the Global Innovation Show, on previous posts.   His interviews with me were done well, which is not surprising given that he has done hundreds of them by now.   What inpresses me most is that he is consistently amassing new quotes and perspectives on this crazy INNOVATION question, and in particular, who these innovators are, and what kind of response they typically encounter.

Many of the comments resonate for me, and I thought it might interest some of you as well.

Let's start with this great cartoon, dating to the fall of Byzantine (Constantinople) in 1453.  I did not know the story, but it is a good one.   McCullen's thought, "Honor the intrapreneur". Here's the link:  

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7415715638503247872/

As McCullen relates it: In 1453, the Byzantines rejected a gunner named Orban. He claimed he could build a cannon to shatter their walls. They listened and said "no."

So he went to their enemy, Mehmed II. Mehmed said (hell) "yes."
47 days later, Constantinople fell.

As Wikipedia tells it: "Orban (d. 1453) was an iron founder and engineer from Brassó, Transylvania,, who case large-calibre artillery, Basilic, for teh siege of COnstantinople by the Ottomans in 1453.  He built the large gun in three months, and sixty oxen dragged it to Constantinople.

Ancient Origins printed the deeper story: https://www.ancient-origins.net/history/orban-man-whose-cannon-brought-down-walls-constantinople-part-i-008056

"Orban visited the court of Byzantine Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos (8 February 1405 – 29 May 1453), soon to be the last Byzantine emperor, to pitch his cannons.  Orban entered the capital of Constantinople and offered his services to the emperor. The emperor was delighted in meeting with him, for he had an interest in using this new technology to his advantage after seeing it first-hand at the Hexamilion, which is a defensive wall constructed across the Isthmus of Corinth and seeing the power this new device of war, as it smashed through rock.

"However, Constantine had not the resources such as timber for the foundry fires or even the money to offer Orban to build the desired weapons. Constantine also did not want the man to leave his capital and sought to keep him as long as he could. In order to do this, he provided a stipend from scraps to keep the man. This only lasted for so long and after the money ran dry, Orban left the city seeking a new customer. He made his way to the court of Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II (30 March 1432 – 3 May 1481), best known as Mehmed the Conqueror, (the very man who would soon lay waste to Constantinople).

"Once Orban arrived, he requested an audience with Mehmed to sell him his services. After Mehmed was informed of Orban's engineering skills, he was happy to welcome this traveler and to show him that his skills would be appreciated, and showered him with gifts. Mehmed asked Orban if were possible to build a powerful enough cannon that could breach the walls of Constantinople. Orban said, “I can cast a cannon of bronze with the capacity of the stone you want. I have examined the walls of the city in great detail. I can shatter to dust not only these walls with the stones from my gun, but the very walls of Babylon itself.”

Global Innovation Show followup

 I first mentioned herein about the Global Innovation Show in a post on November 1, 2025.  And then 'poof' no more mentions?

Well, the big news is that the host, Aidan McCullen, got genuinely intrigued, as did I, and we wound up taping four successive interviews for a total of nearly six hours between November 7, 2025 and February 18, 2026.    It stimulated me to re-connect with a number of the specific charts and graphs in the Permission Denied book from 2012, as well as reflect about how well those concepts still resonate.

All told, there were 26,000+ views of these programs, and a decent number of the book (still available from several sources) have been purchased in the meantime.   And Praise the Lord--I thought it might even be worth a revised version, complete with more illustrations and some updates.   So, ta-da, this is a premature announcement that I will be issuing ap update by mid-summer.

Meanwhile, some of you might enjoy some of the interviews, so I will post the notes from Aidan in four successive posts.  Here is the first of those (1:30:22)

https://youtu.be/ROquLKw8Yxs?si=zjnzwBObKMULFxth

And yet more about Rob and his contribution

 Alain urged me to check out the eulogy written by a close friend and colleague, 

Earlier this week we lost a person that was very important to my life and our family, Rob Burgess.

I’ve knew Rob for over 30 years. My introduction to him was soon after he started at Alias Research (a Canadian 3D graphics pioneer). I was working in an ineffective role, and watching others get laid off as the company struggled to meet payroll during a corporate rebuild. A coworker and I made an appointment with the terrifying new CEO, to tell him we were watching good people go while we added nothing. I will never forget his response. “As a CEO, do you know what the most valuable thing you can bring me is?”. We stuttered… we had no idea. “Truth. That’s what you have brought me. Leave it to me.” The next day we had been moved to productive roles, and the VP’s we had been working with were effectively gone. It was the start of my real ‘career’.

Over the years, Rob was my friend, my supporter and my guide. I followed him to Macromedia; “We have this little company we just bought, how would you like to help us figure out what to do with it? We just renamed it Flash.”

Years later, after the dot com boom, when a few of us decided to leave and start Greenbox, he was nothing but appreciative, and the first person to offer support - no questions asked - “Go change the world again”.

It is no exaggeration to say that without Rob, I (and my family) would not have had the life we have lived, or the success i have enjoyed. I’m not alone - I’m confident that those who joined us on these journeys would all say the same thing.

He was a generous soul. A captain of industry. A straight shooter. A caring man. And always a Canadian. He will be sorely missed.

Isn't that a nice tribute?   How many people in your constellation would rate praise of this sort?   Thank you to Peter and to Alain for these pointers at this time of loss of a great leader, and a great intrapreneur.  

Give the point of this blog, I think it is important to note that Rob never founded a company--he worked for others, and in those roles, he achieved incredible things for the companies.  Even the leadership he did for the Alias/Wavefront merger, and the later work for Macromedia, were ASSIGNMENTS basically, done with skill and aplomb, and all that it took for magnificent success.   And people miss that factoid about so many wonderful talents who are INTRAPRENEURS, not ENTREPRENEURS.  That needs much higher recognition.  The world basically runs because of INTRAPRENEURS, not their more famous and morelauded brethren.

More about Rob Burgess

 One of my long-time colleagues, Alain Chesnais, worked for Rob along the way.   Alain himself is a terrific graphics designer, who started (get ahold of this) working for Nicholas Negroponte in Paris in the 1980's, and then for Henri Gouraud on computer graphics.   Alain is a past ACM President, and a major award holder from SIGGRAPH.  Here's a bit about Alain from a 2023 SIGGRAPH interview

https://www.siggraph.org/inside-siggraph/member-profiles/profile/?member=alain-chesnais

Alain shared the following about Rob when I queried him this morning, as follows: Alain, its’ been awhile since we talked.

I hope you are well, and enjoying this phase of life.  I’m not sure that the “Golden Years” are quite as good as I’d hoped, but hey, still upright and breathing.

I just saw the obituary for Rob Burgess.  And naturally, I thought of you.  Any stories I could share?   I worked briefly with Rob in Santa Barbara when he was running Alias/Wavefront, and I think he was SGI’s first Canadian employee circa 1984, which ironically is the year I briefly worked at SGI also.

All the best

Chuck House

Alain quickly replied: "Hi Chuck,

Happy New Year! I have many stories concerning Rob. He was the best CEO I ever worked for. He knew how to set clear high level goals and then get out of the way to allow us to do our best work. For Maya, he gave the engineering team two goals:

• Be the number one 3D package in sales in the entertainment market within the first quarter of release
• Maintain that position for at least ten years

Those two goals helped us make the hard choices in terms of what we would implement. Every proposed new feature was compared against those two goals and we prioritized the features that would help us achieve both. One of the key choices that this helped us make early on was to make Maya multi platform. In a brainstorming session we asked which OS would be dominant in the 3D creative space ten years in the future and realized that we could not make that call. So we decided to design Maya to be portable from the beginning. We abstracted out all of the system dependencies into an OS abstraction that all calls had to go through. The first release would be SGI only, but we already knew we needed to have a Windows version quickly. I had been benchmarking how quickly graphics performance was accelerating on the various OS platforms and noticed that PC graphics performance was doubling roughly every 6 months and that was supported by a platform where you could simply swap out your graphics board rather than have to replace the whole machine, like you did on SGI. What became apparent to us way before Maya 1.0 released in February 1998 was that we had less than 3 years to provide a PC version before the cost effectiveness of PC based solutions would far surpass dedicated UNIX based solutions at SGI. We ended up hiring a team of 6 engineers in Seattle in secret to implement the PC version of Maya. Work started before the release of Maya 1.0 and we released the Windows version at SIGGRAPH in the summer of 1998 when nobody knew that we were working on it. The project was so secret that only the senior management and the engineering team actually working on it knew what we were doing until we were almost ready to release it. The story we told MS, who was a direct competitor since their acquisition of Softimage,  when requesting an MSDN subscription was that we were looking to port Applied Geometry NURBS library to Windows.

All the best,
=Alain

How about that?   "BEST CEO I EVER WORKED FOR".     I couldn't resist, so I asked Alain for permission to post this superb response.   Here's his reply:  

Absolutely! All of this is OK to share. I first spoke about it publicly 2 years ago for a Toronto SIGGRAPH chapter meeting at the Autodesk facilities in Toronto to celebrate the 25 years of the first release of Maya.

There are many people posting about Rob. I'm sure that Mark Sylvester has quite a few tidbits to share as well. One thing that Rib always did extremely well was to recognize the accomplishments of the people who worked under him. It was so motivating to get called out during a company meeting when you delivered on a goal. You knew that Rob noticed what everyone did and made a point of recognizing it publicly. He pushed hard for results, but always remembered to say thank you. I learned a lot about effective leadership from him.

Pete Santangelli posted a great anecdote about working for Rob (which I have included in the next post).

Rob Burgess

 Another stalwart falls.   Rob Burgess died just before Christmas, at a mere 68 years old.   Known perhaps best in Canada, Rob was a great intrapreneur, known throughout the computer graphics industry.    About the time that I joined Silicon Graphics (albeit very briefly) in 1984, Rob was hired as SGI's first Canadian employee.   He eventually set up SGI-Canada, and then rose to executive ranks by 1990, moving to Silicon Valley.   He soon returned to Toronto however, to take over Alias Research, which was floundering in the computer graphics tools market.   Leading a resurgence, he piloted them to a merger with Wavefront in Santa Barbara, and then to an acquisition by SGI in 1995.   Alias had invented Maya along the way, the leading animation program for movie making.  We used that extensively at Cogswell College for our movies.

Two years later, he was recruited to lead a turn-around for Macromedia, replacing Bud Colligan as CEO.  It was very successful, and that led to an acquisition by Adobe, where Rob served for years on their Board.  He also served fifteen years on the Nvidia board, as they continued their industry -leading graphics chips.

I first met Rob in Santa Barbara when he was competing with, and occasionally partnering with, the Wavefront team.   Doug Chance saw a primitive Office WorkStation from a fledgling company, Santa Barbara Labs (or something like that name), which built a dual station system for an executive and his assistant, which could swap files (not by email, but by walk-mail).  Doug, VP for computing at HP at the time bought shares in the company for HP, and got two sets of workstations to 'play with.'   I volunteered to be one of the two users, with my associate Judy Grenard while running Corporate Engineering in HP"s building 26 (DeerCreek).   It was a great system, even though primitive.   Our conclusion though was that most executives would deign such a system--they much preferred to talk to their associate than to send them floppy discs or tape cassettes.  The company died soon thereafter, but in the meantime, I got to Santa Barbara and for some reason met Wavefront and Rob.   Smart, affable, visionary--quite a combination.

When I took the CEO job at Spectron Microsystems in Santa Barbara some 10 years later, I commuted from the San Jose airport weekly.   Two constant companions on the plane were Bay area executives working in Santa Barbara--one for Alias-Wavefront, which had been merged by then under Rob and sold to SGI, and the other was a small division of networking company Stratacom, about to be bought by Cisco.  We'd trade stories weekly, and the two leaders who were most often mentioned were John Chambers at Cisco, even though Morgridge was still CEO, and Rob Burgess.   Fascinating stories.  And Rob was admired by his associate, even more than Chambers by his.

Here's the obituary for Rob, as printed in the San Jose Mercury-News today

Robert Kenneth Burgess
https://edition.pagesuite.com/popovers/dynamic_article_popover.aspx?artguid=05ef7b77-2dac-45e8-ac14-6bedfef3896f&appcode=SAN252&eguid=5de0b2cf-371e-4b5c-ba2a-dacf67a9bdce&pnum=45#

Program and Strategic Life Cycles

 In the last post, we covered the use of the Return Map for a Project, throughout its Life Cycle.

Here, we will augment that with some diagrams for Program Planning.   We use something like this for a Business Plan, to manage a group of three to six projects of similar technology.

The notion here is that the tactical plan 'fits' all of the projects using these strategic choices.  But naturally, time reveals new information, and changes occur.   The next diagram shows how we manage those evolutions

Obviously, the successive Product Plans shown to the right are archived just as was the Project Plan shown in the previous Post.   The post-mortem learnings from studying these iterations later is invaluable

Finally, because a program has multiple threads, there is a concomitant investment strategy for the projgram, showing various specific outcomes, project by project.   This is an old "actual" set of data

The more important investment strategy to focus on, though, is the longer-term one of multiple successive programs, each with relatively new technologies, etc.  These, in today's terminology, are the disruptive successive waves that must be dealt with to stay abreast of dynamic competition.   Note that the stakes get higher with succeeding waves (making an assumption that the company has successfully mastered each round vis-a-vis competitors.  In my experience, many corporate management teams stumble on the third round--"can't we wait until we see if "4Y" is going to happen before we commit to "9X" investment in the third?"   Metaphorically, NOPE.   But many, even most, do.   

So, lots to think about with these two posts.  The intriguing point for me is that this quick succession of six graphs (and the concomitant aperiodic review adjustments) is essentially unknown in Technology Management programs at every college and university.  Their focus is on bullet point-by-bullet point lists for Project management only--dull, uninspired, almost never followed, and certainly not too useful.  To go beyond project management to program or multi-program strategic management is totally absent.

Sigh...  and we wonder why large corporations stall and wither.