Rocking at work

So many topics, so little time... I figure I take a little time to actually be timely on a thought.

So I'm listening to a Greg Behrendt comedy bit titled Metal Music on Sirius's new Blue Collar Comedy channel, and he's basically relating Rock and Roll idioms to aspects of daily life and at 1 point, he asks, "Why can't we Rock at work?" and gives an comedic example of after turning in a report, having a flash pot go off with a banner unfolding which shows "Greg Behrendt - Investment Banker!"

"Rocking" is a recurring theme I've been both reading about as well as trying to be part of. Very prominent examples, include Kathy Sierra's Creating Passionate Users blog (true to form Kathy has already blogged on something I would talk about look at this example of how to rock), and the 37 Signals mentality (finally tried out Campfire 2 days ago, it does indeed Rock).

"Rocking" seems notably missing from much of the corporate world (the source of Corporate Boring). Sure, the corporate world has a notion of "excellence" but it seems constrained to a very narrow definition of excellence. You could sum it up as "if you do all these bullets faster than the others, you're excellent." Not that there is anything wrong with the contents of the bullet list, but they can be artificially constraining, and some times not all that pertinent. Google seems to consistently break the rules of how corporations should be run, after all, tech people seem largely in charge there and there is very little management, and we know that's not Corporate Excellent.

I'm about to start on an internal web project in which I'll actually get to apply much of the Getting Real method, including the building up buzz, and support portions. I work for a company that does the bulk of it's work through government contracting, which by default excludes Rocking because the business model is "lowest bidder wins" and the traditional methods of cutting costs pretty much excludes software that rocks. Instead it encourages rather the "least amout of work to back up requirements lawyerese." That model and a lot of the government bureaucracy mindset permeates the company. However, since my customers are internal to the company, who aren't held captive by the lowest bidder, I have an opportunity to make a web app that rocks. In doing so, I can hopefully sew the seeds for more Rocking at the company.

Terminology matters. I think I'm one of a very small number of folks at this company who has an explicit goal of making "software that rocks." Sure, most want to do a good job, and a lesser number want to do excellent or outstanding work, but I'm talking about that intangible extra step of making excellent software Rock. Because it's more of an art than science, Rock the technical term, which will cause all kinds of consternation to management world wide.

Rocking is a mindset/philosophy/attitude more than anything else. It certainly requires and derives from passion. The hacker(1) community pretty much derives from passion -- we just love to code. In this we share from the extreme sports community, in which passion can fuel the desire to do, which results in tremendous ability --- the amazing athleticism (gongfu) that extreme sports folks demonstrate, almost all w/o any sort of formal training -- all fueled by passion. So in this vein, hackers(1) would be the original "extreme programmers" in the extreme sports sense.

So back to Greg Behrendt's question, the answer is you can Rock at work, and you should.

Rock on!



(1) original, positive meaning of hacker, not the sort of person who breaks into computers, writes viruses, conducts phishing scames, etc.