Some Personal History with Process and Product
As a teenager, once or twice I prepared mailings for a publication that my mother was managing. She taught me that I could accomplish a lot in a small amount of time if I approached it systematically. I also understood that I would earn less if I got it done quickly, but that didn’t seem to matter as much.
Working as a line cook, circa 1989, I learned how to complete high-volume work during a finite time span. There’s nothing quite like cooking and plating 100+ individual dinner orders in a few hours, by yourself, nightly. At the same time, I was continuing to learn the arts admin trade, which had a very different nature.
As a musician working with dancers and choreographers, I spent many hours collaborating in art making. Often impossibly complex and a very different equation than line cooking or administrative work, yet, deeply informative in describing the world constructed around us. In the early 90s, as Co-Director of Movement Research, everything was about process. And, a few years later, accepting my first job as a Finance Director, I began to understand certain things about systems, structures, personalities, and relationships. Also, around this time I first read about the possibilities of something called cloud computing. Read More…