[bsenftner]

Amazing it has been this long: back in '91 I was working for Philips during the development heyday of CD-ROMs. I was in the CD-I division, basically CD-ROMs with a special file format for streaming media. A Dutch executive was sent to the States to "show the yanks how to produce" because that division had only managed to pull off production disasters to date. Of course, the American management wanted this guy to fail, so he was assigned a tiny team of 1 staff developer (me) a medium skilled contract developer, two graphic artists, and two production assistants. We were all recent hires, and were given 30-days to produce a product that all other productions were typically given a year. This Dutch guy was a gift from heaven. He collected us into a small office suite, with programming, art, and editing each in separate rooms of two, a shared space each opened into, and best of all, people had to travel through his office to get to us, so people could not bother us without his knowledge. But the real key to his management style was an idea he called "interfaces": he believed people did their best work when free, but working towards a well defined interface that their work hands off to the next person in a production flow. As long as you respect the needs of the people before and after you in the work flow, everything goes smooth. And that is accomplished by teaching those before and after you the importance of your work and why it is critical to the projects flow. This idea sounds simplistic, but it embeds "care of process" where, and only where, it is required. Needless to say, our 30-day deadline was met, the production team went on to create a fairly big award winning series of "Ken Burns style" documentaries, and that Dutch executive graduated to become the CEO of global Philips: J.P. Isbouts.