Fostering creativity

THE ROLE OF the CTO is as much business as it is technology, so I make sure to pay attention to the business press as much as the technology press to provide new insights into my job. One of my favorite sources for information is the Harvard Business Review. Each week, I await my free Harvard Business School Working Knowledge e-mail newsletter -- I would recommend it to any CTO wanting to keep up with the latest thinking in business. Recently, it contained an excerpt of a Harvard Business Review article titled "Improvising your way out of trouble" ( http://hbswk.hbs.edu/pubitem.jhtml?id=3067&sid=0&pid=0&t=organizations ). No one knows the value of improvisation like a CTO trying to manage a universe of emerging (and often buggy) technologies in an all-day, everyday environment.

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As much as one plans for operational excellence, the sheer number of ways technology can fail makes certain technology problems unmanageable at times. Because technology does fail, it's important to have creative people on your team who can roll with the punches. The author of the piece characterizes resilient people as having "a staunch acceptance of reality; a deep belief, often buttressed by strongly held values, that life is meaningful; and an uncanny ability to improvise."

The ability to improvise with whatever tools you have available was dubbed bricolage by French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, but the concept could have just as easily originated from a CTO watching his staffers improvise their way out of obtuse technical jams on a daily basis. Many of the best solutions to technical problems have originated from bricoleurs trying to solve a nagging problem with no obvious solution in hand. Often, the issue is less of a technological problem than a financial one. Sometimes you have to make do with what you have.

Take Linux, for example. In a 1997 interview, Linus Torvalds noted his frustration with Minix, the OS he was using in school at the time he created Linux. "Minix was meant to be a teaching operating system, but it had been too limited and, in my opinion, too expensive for that. It was also hard to get hold of," Torvalds said.

Torvalds took what limited resources he had available (relatively inexpensive Intel-based hardware and his own raw talent), went to work creating one of the key disruptive technologies of our time, and Minix became irrelevant next to Linux. As Linux matured, bricoleurs within corporations began using Linux to solve technical problems for which funding (or even permission from management) was unavailable. Putting Linux on available low-end hardware obviated the need to go through the purchase order process, get approvals, and buy expensive hardware -- corporate bricolage at its finest.

The tough IT budget environment combined with the constant need for database technologies means that technology bricoleurs are now moving up from the operating system layer -- where Linux is now a fact of life -- to the database layer. Large database companies will tell you that open-source solutions such as MySQL and Postgres will not scale to the same level that Oracle and Sybase can. They are right to some degree, but for most applications, you don't need Oracle or Sybase to deliver a working product that scales well enough for your purposes. In some cases, open-source databases are good enough to drive solid businesses. Amazon.com is not running MySQL (at least to my knowledge), but Powell's Books is driving 30 percent of its overall sales via its online store running a MySQL back-end.

From operating systems to databases to Web services, the practice of bricolage is the foundation of innovation.