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.

Project Life Cycles and the Return Map

 I've enjoyed several meetings with Aidan McCullen now.   He "fell in love" with my semi-memoir PERMISSION DENIED a mere twelve years after it was published.

We have now conducted two in-depth interviews of the book material, with a third one scheduled for nest week.   I'll post some of the material later (these are 90 minute interviews, so they're not a 'quick look').

What has impressed both Aidan and me is that this material feels very relevant today, although some of the exmaples are ancient (1970's era, for crying out loud).   In particular, the segments about Project Life Cycle and the use of the Return Map (Harvard Biz Review only 35 years ago), coupled with what we now know about using multi-display comparative graphics in Situation Rooms (see AstroVirtual THIS YEAR, not 35 years ago), are incredibly powerful techniques.

Importantly, though, the segments about Program and Strategic Life Cycles are novel--he and I agree that this material is NOT KNOWN WIDELY, in fact is hardly known at all, and certainly is not taught in any college or university, nor hardly covered by any business consultant.  Why not?  And would it help?

So, I am toying with doing a 2nd edition.   Here's a snippet from the wrap-up for the current Section IV.

See what you think . . . . 

"The key message is that there is an important inter-relationship between the life cycle of a specific project, where it fits into a larger contemporaneous program, and where that program fits into an overall strategic plan.  Teams that understand this build much stronger long-term success rates for their company

"Some significant points arise regarding the Return Map

1. This sales and profitability forecast is compiled originally AT THE START OF THE PROJECT from input of every business department -- R&D, Marketing, Sales, Manufacturing, and Quality Assurance -- thus helping to build team cohesion

2. The Return Map is redrawn, adjusted in other words, at EVERY checkpoint along the way.  This means checkpoints during development, at product release to manufactuing, and to sales, and KEY, at the 6 month, 1 year, and 2 year sales anniversaries.   

3. Those intervening Maps are KEPT, archived, and put into a multi-display Situation Room for periodic reference and certainly for Post-Mortem assessment.   THIS IS ALMOST NEVER DONE, and this is the most significant team-building learning experience that any group can indulge in, IMHO.

AstroVirtual Inc. has both a White Paper about a major project for which this was done, as well as a White Paper about Situation Rooms and their utilization.   

Here's an incipient Return Map:

And here is the Updated one, at the next Checkpoint

 

Whoops, profitability is eroding.  Why?   First of all, R&D is late by 7 months.  And Sales are now predicted to slow dramatically, from 50,000 units total in 24 moths to 8,000 units in 17 months.  Profits? this activity will break-even at 41 months after sales release instead of 22 months originally estimated, and total profit at 42 months will be only $300K instead of $2M.   

Such a graph will generate lots of discussion, along with some finger-pointing and jousting.  But what it might also do is generate action on a possible new sales strategy or a cost-saving approach, or ???.  In other words, all departments might be able to help, instead of just blaming R&D for a bad schedule.

Done over the life of a project, these maps provide ample areas of debate and tuning of estimates, and in my experience, garnering a much more cohesive 'team' approach to the difficult question of project management and success.

Thoughts?

The Global Innovation Show synopsis

 I have reported a version of this post in the InnovaScapes Institute blog   https://innovascapes.blogspot.com/ so I will try not to be repetitive here, but just get the word out.

The big news is that a long-running show, The Global Innovation Show by Ailan McCullen, based in Ireland, and aired around the world, does focus on Innovation topics, and they got interested in material in our book Permission Denied (Lulu, 2013), a book still available from Lulu Press, Goodreads, Amazon, and Bookshops.org (an organization of independent bookstores).  

Amazon's posting has three reviews, one great, one terrible, and one with (at the time) a very legitimate complaint).   The first is by Miles Kehoe, a noted innovation consultant in Silicon Valley.  He got the essence of the book!  The seoncd is a review by a youngster who thought the book to be a commissioned flak piece for HP, who treated it as an autobiography of an uninteresting product family written in mediocre style.  He instead recommends David Packard's autobiography (which by the way includes several paragraphs about me).  The third one is from a maligned industry colleague, who was mis-identified, to my surprise at the time.   I apologized to him at the time, tried to remove all references to the situation from both online versions and the printed copy, and have had no further feedback in more than a decade.  Unfortunate--yes.   Fact-checking is a great concept, but as all authors know, it is really more difficult than you might expect.   I lamented the early death of a XeroxPARC colleague once (in the HP Phenomenon book), and a guest at a dinner party said sweetly, "I had dinner with him last week".  I called the person the next day, apologized for the error, and he blithely intoned, "Glad it wasn't true."

Long intro, sorry.    The point is that this next Friday, Nov. 7, will be an interview about the book and about Intrapreneuring Innovation.  So I had to re-read the book, to see what I said, and indeed what I thought some years back.   

I then penned the following to McCullen:

So, we'll see where the interview goes.   But what impressed me, upon re-reading, is that (A) I liked what I read (even thinking that I'd have a hard time expressing it better now), and (B) the rules and the stories seem as relevant, maybe even more so, for the events and experiences we've had at AstroVirtual over the past two or three years than they did in those long-ago anecdotes when I was a mere stripling youth.

Maybe there should be a second edition or updating???  We have, after all, delivered several thousand books against an old theme.  WHAT HAVE YOU DONE LATELY?