It's a bit of a boast, but here goes anyway! I invented the Blog!! Or at least, when I published my very first blog page, I had never heard about blogging myself and I'm fairly certain the term hadn't been invented yet. According to the Oxford English dictionary, the word 'blog' was first used in 1999, while I wrote the text below on 10th April 1998, the day on which the "Good Friday Agreement" on Northern Ireland was signed. At the time, then, there was no such thing as a blogging site, so I published these thoughts on a website that I drew up in primitive and very clunky HTML, fully intending to update the website on a regular basis with stream of consciousness insights into my life and times. I never did.
But for the record, here is the first entry on my website, written on that far-off Good Friday:
This is a paragraph which will in time be part of a project which will set out my current thoughts about life. It is not my intention that anyone in particular, or in general, will see these words, but, should they happen to do so, so be it. It is for me, my first exercise in publishing. I have written for a specific audience before, and I have on a few occasions, written for myself. I have always imagined myself writing for a wider audience, but I have had neither the courage nor the time.
The Internet has changed that. Now it seems there is no conceit in writing down my thoughts. For those who browse by, and are arrested for an instant, theirs is the choice. Move on, at no cost, at no embarrassment to either of us, or stay. Indeed, if some of the dark introspection which will follow these opening remarks provokes in the traveller the need to respond, or indeed to communicate, let him or her do so. My e-mail address is attached.
Here I am in the middle of a beautiful forest near where we live, in my little car, wondering quite how I got here. My wife and the girls are all riding in a sponsored event, and I couldn’t resist the temptation to see them all on horseback together at the same time for the first time. It’s Good Friday, and there is a real prospect of peace in Northern Island. I feel strangely uneasy. Things are going too well for me and that can’t last. It is indeed a good time to reflect.
I like the idea of smoke, mud, rain and manure all mixed with ISDN lines, scanners, laptops and networks. Working from home is a great success for me.
It all started back in Windhoek in Namibia, where for the first time, I was able to get home for lunch. There was a quality to those lunchtime encounters in that bright desert sun, that added perspective and value to my working day. On the one hand, I was planning visits to Lusaka to meet freedom fighters and politicians to talk about an independent Namibia, feeling inadequate and frustrated, while my daughter, two years old, was telling me about the really important things in life. And my wife was at her best at lunchtime, despite the morning sickness.
I suppose it continued in Boksburg, where our home was in the middle of the factory. Perhaps the agony of the change in South Africa was a little too close for comfort, as the struggle manifested itself in incessant industrial unrest, continuously threatening to break into uncontrolled violence, simmering all around our house.
The girls were still too young to understand, but my wife couldn’t get away from it, and I wondered constantly whether I was risking their safety for the benefit of remote shareholders. But even there, the hard reality of the working day interwoven with the intimacy of real domesticity, profoundly affected the quality of my management decisions. It made me more independent, removed me from the ‘group think’ of so many office environments. It made it easier to see the context, the fundamentals forcing all of us to do the things we were doing.
It didn’t make the decisions any easier, and when the time came to close the factory, another victim of 'the struggle', the implication for the families of all those redundant workers was all too immediately apparent. As I stood at the gates, and shook the hands of the departing workers, there was a curious lack of vindictiveness in their genuine good wishes.
I have often wondered whether the proximity of home and hearth affected not just me, but also the workers themselves. Perhaps they forgave me those awful decisions, because they too were aware of my vulnerability. Perhaps, my own values were that much more transparent. Not much good as a negotiating tactic, but perhaps a little more authentic than the usually sterile work-place relationship. Perhaps they were fatalistic about our trials and tribulations, convinced that we were acting out a necessary evil in the struggle, all much more perceptive and educated than me, caught as I was in an almost uncontrollable urge to apply straightforward management science, imported from overseas, hermetically sealed, a testament to my professional competence. They saw me not as a manager, but as a man with a family, and they could forgive me.
Since then, a long, arid period of isolation between work and home. Ten years, three countries, three completely different environments, but a constancy of isolation. In retrospect, there is a similarity about those outwardly very different environments that I hadn’t noticed till now. In all cases, it again comes down to a lack of authenticity, a need to put on airs, to fill a role based on the needs of others, their own perceptions of the right way for me to behave. This led to a curious duplicity, an industrial schizophrenia. I talked to a friend about this. I know that he at least had difficulty seeing me in a work context, because my domestic behaviour seemed so inappropriate to his perception of the sort of manager I had become. He was right, of course, and hence my current satisfaction with the latest arrangements.
It is forcing me to unify my two selves. This isn’t easy, and I’m sure there are a whole lot of people who are finding the result a little uncomfortable, but for me, it is a process of discovery, a much deeper questioning of real and present values. I do have to smile sometimes when I am asked about it, because most people feel that that the adjustment to a virtual world is about a loss of personal contact, about the difficulty of combining work and relaxation in the same space, about the technical challenges and about isolation. It is not. It is about an inner journey. It is indeed about ISDN and manure, but not just on the outside. It is about integrating oneself, and I have just started on this journey. It will be a fascinating process, if only for me.
So there we have it! Actually, it turned out to be a rather disappointing journey, at least in the professional context. Those words were written at the high point of my career. Even as I was inventing the context for the first completely virtual, multi-national team in the 100 year history of the major international company for which I worked, in my virtual isolation I was losing touch with my colleagues, the luddites in head office. I remember hearing from an ally about an up-and-coming young turk, who thought my ideas were "completely nuts". He went on to become one of the most senior people in the company and my career plateaued and then, as the cancer took hold, gently declined until I retired....
If only I had really had the courage of my convictions!
But then again, from my present perspective, it doesn't seem so important after all....
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