jr conlin's ink stained banana

It seems like i've had this discussion ten times in the past week, so forgive me if i decide to share it with you. (By "share" i probably mean "beat you over the head with it".)

First off, understand that my minor in college was history, and while i can't give you the start and end dates of the War of 1812 (the real one, not the skirmish between US and Britain where a bunch of Canadians burned the Whitehouse). i studied more cause and effect relationships and general progressions. It's amazing how often those sorts of patterns show up.

Consider the pioneer. For the most part, these folks were hardy and generally anti-social types with a pretty deep entrepreneurial spirit. They're out wearing pelts and eating bugs not because it's fun, but because you have to in order to bring in beaver skins or pan for gold or whatever brings their fortunes. It's a hard life, but they love it. Of course, being practical minded, they tend to think in terms of "what works right now?"

Eventually, if the Pioneer is successful, a trading route is established between the Pioneer's base camp and the major trading post where the money comes in. Quite possibly, it's even the central Trading Post for several Pioneers if it's not more cost effective to set up another closer to the source (e.g. if there are two posts offering the same payout, and one is two days travel vs. one that's about half a day, guess which one will win?) These sorts of things attract other Pioneers and more importantly, form the start of a Town.

A town isn't just about eating bugs and finding creative uses for pinecones. It's about setting up a base support that will last longer than a lean-to or a bait shack. It takes a different mindset to build a town as there are different issues that need to cooperate with the efforts of the revenue source (the Pioneers) but also account for the godfersaken location those idiot Pioneers decided to camp in, what with the winter floods, summer wildfires and stampeding bears.

Somewhere along the line, the Townsfolk start getting more "civilized" and having a stinky Pioneer wandering around drunk off his money doesn't exactly set well with the womenfolk. It's also about that time that the Pioneers' rough efforts are replaced with more industrial and maintainable efforts that are far more organized and directed. Eventually, through action or atmosphere, the Pioneers move on.

The Townsfolk are most responsible for setting down enough architecture and efforts that the town can grow. Eventually, the town becomes large enough that the city folks start to arrive. A city is different again in that often the original means that the town was created to handle are replaced by other industries and services.

Somewhere between the town and the city, the Drones arrive. Drones are the factory workers and other folks who's job training generally consists of something like "push this button then pull this lever. See you at your retirement party." These are folks that aren't interested in much more than "doing their job". They honestly don't care about improvement and frankly fear change to begin with. There's nothing wrong with having these folks, in fact they're critical for a lot of day-to-day operations. The important thing is to realize they exist and make sure that they've got required jobs to do.

Still with me? Amazing, but here's where things fit in.

These exact same roles exist in companies. Actually, even more than that. They exist in individual projects. Pioneers are the folks that first start working on a project. They're the bright, eager folks that have a Big Idea and the will power to make it come true. They "do what it takes" and fear not the use of duct tape and chicken wire, for their idea is just that cool. Operational stuff only slows them down.

Well, not them, per se, that's the domain of the folks that come next. They're the corporate version of the townsfolk. They come in, look at what the Pioneers have done and try to repress the cold shivers as they optimize tables, defragment code and otherwise make things run smoother. Finally, come the production and business folks who try to figure out how to get this idea making money and expanding to fill a market. They are the city folk, who don't necessarily care about how things work, but more how they can be used. The Drones also settle in about then to handle the myriad of grunt task ranging from abuse management to system monitoring. (Not to say that those are by definition Drone work, but there are aspects of any job that could be classified that way.)

What makes a successful business (or city) is recognizing that these sorts of patterns and personalities exist, and using them to the utmost. What drives folks in most jobs nuts is that while they may be brought in to be The Foo Guy, and the guy continues to do foo, his role and position still changes as the project environment changes. He may be more of a Pioneer who gets things done really fast, but gets yelled at by his "townsfolk" colleagues who bitch that it's not fully spec'd and scalable. Or she may be a brilliant systems person effectively doing Drone work. It pays the bills, but it's slowly crushing her soul.

Thing is all of these groups are critical. You might be able to skip one group, but any chance of long term success generally gets compromised if you start skipping too many. Likewise, a weakness in any one of those groups can destroy the project. i've seen more than one go down in flames because Pioneer types get bored doing maintenance, or Cityfolk try to figure out how to scale and do the proper fixups.

i guess that's one of the reasons i always rankle a little at the various "Career Growth" efforts i see companies do. They're focused on making sure you're more efficient at doing whatever they've pigeon-holed you to do. What i'd rather see is a bit more of a Oklahoma Land Rush type effort where folks are provided areas of interest, and are offered opportunities to work and make it happen. Some will succeed, some won't. Some will go off and pan for gold, others will make their fortunes selling tools and jeans.

Personally, i see myself as more a Townsfolk type than anything else. i might come up with a few interesting ideas, but generally i prefer taking on something that's working but needs a bit more help to run smoothly.

Where do you think you fit in?

i think it's safe to say that Oscar the Death Cat will only really be "overdone" when someone creates a World of Warcraft mod that makes a cat show up when your character has single digit hit points.