I worked with Nathan Zeldes at Intel some years ago; he is one of the most electric, energetic, insightful engineers I've ever had the privilege to know. He asked a question the other day about my Medal of Defiance -- the answer I sent him is the basis for the previous post.
He has posted it on his own blog, with some contextual description, on his site. See:
http://www.nathanzeldes.com/blog/2013/05/intrapreneurship-and-the-hewlett-packard-medal-of-defiance/
What was more fun for me was to get Nathan's response to my brief essay. Here it is -- unvarnished:
To be honest, I'm not at all surprised that you did all that insubordination (I remember well your "Let's highjack the summit" that led to the founding of our VCRT) - but the thought that a senior manager would reward Defiance instead of punishing it is what I found particularly intriguing and very worth sharing.
"Highjack the summit?" Me? Maybe this is a more fun story to recall...
Well, this was circa autumn or early winter 2000. I had become a member of the Intel technical staff after they bought Dialogic. I actually missed the 'recruiting season' due to an enforced medical absence (I was immobilized, bedridden for a few months with a sports injury), and I was not a chip designer, so the question was 'what do we do with this guy?' Recently back on my feet, they invited me to a conference and workshop to talk about Information Technology (IT), or so I thought.
What it turned out to be was a group of IT managers whining about how hard their job was, how slow the network was, how many Intel 'users' beefed about their slow service, and etc. In other words, it was the typical lament of the typical IT organization, NOT a workshop to talk about possibilities for new applications and capabilities of "information technology".
Somehow, and I don't actually remember how, I had met Nathan by phone (he worked at Intel Israel), and we'd already explored what we might do with better collaboration tools. Intel hadn't yet given up on Intel ProShare or Team Station, but the writing was on the wall. Those systems were the best thing available at the time, but in truth they were clumsy, expensive, prone to technical difficulty, and worst of all, guaranteed to generate mistrust since you could never look the other person in the eye, only the eyelid. Nathan and I had 'chewed the rag' on the phone several times about what might be better.
But at this conference, to which several hundred folk had flown in for several days, we were disbarred from having a session, or even a speaking gig. Protocol meant that 'the important people' had agenda time; the troops were to listen and salute. We poked this beast several times, and got nowhere.
I was incensed, and so was Nathan. We talked about what to do, and I suggested that he stand up just before lunch on the second day with a 'spot announcement' -- saying something like "Hey, I know a lot of you folk are interested in collaboration tools across remote sites, and we don't have that on the agenda. We're (that guy in the back, Chuck House, who you probably haven't met, and me) hosting a Brown Bag workshop in the next room over lunch, if you'd like to attend, we'd welcome you."
He did it. And we got seven people. The group met, got excited, formed a volunteer project, named it the VCRT team, and started on our own time to build some things. VCRT stood for VIRTUAL COLLABORATION RESEARCH TEAM. It took us a couple of years, but we built some prototypes, filed some patent applications, GOT THEM!, got noticed by management (not just in IT, but at the Exec level), and got instantiated as the Colab research team for the company.
One paper still available is titled "3D Global Virtual Teaming Environment" which shows some of the environment. See my Research gate postings: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221338080_3D_Global_Virtual_Teaming_Environment?ev=prf_pub
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