My Management Experience, or, Ode to 5408
by Rich Ackerman.

When I was a starving college student, my grandfather sent me to the American Management Association's boot camp, "Operation Enterprise." They were passionate about capitalism, but I was more impressed by the quantities of roast beef. It was a weird place. For instance, a really terrible recital by an OE staffer who decided to learn French horn late in life was supposed to teach the value of goal setting. Goals or no goals, he was just bad. The dominant mantra was "Do not criticize, condemn, or complain!" which, as you can surmise, I've always remembered but sometimes found hard to embrace. The primary thing I learned from Operation Enterprise is that the French horn is a really tough instrument.

When I started working for a living, I remembered the roast beef and quickly moved into technical management, where I ran a variety of software projects developing office automation and electronic publishing products. My job titles were things like project leader, section leader, department head, technical director, project lead, section manager, etc. I've done the management stuff: budgets, schedules, architectural design, hiring, firing, planning, developing groups, teams, and departments, forcing people to work unpaid overtime. Managing commercial software product development is a stressful occupation and I'm glad I don't do it any more, although I do miss the roast beef.

I have no experience managing library projects, or, for that matter, working in libraries. I doubt librarians embrace roast beef the way those capitalists from the American Management Association did.

Here's a true story. In 1979, radical Iranian students overran the United States Embassy in Tehran, Iran, in which the Central Intelligence Agency had stored a large cache of unencrypted intelligence documents. As a result of the loss of this information, many field agents were assassinated. The CIA decided they wanted to secure the information stored in our embassies and initiated a search for the necessary computer systems. I happened to be development manager of a second generation office automation product at Wang Laboratories; it happened to be the most secure office automation system in the world at that time. It didn't take long for the CIA to find us.

They set very clear goals: make the system even better, and then get it into every embassy in the world. In six months we had audited all the software and put a hardware encryption device on the disk controller data path; in the following twelve months we rolled out this system to every embassy in the world. I learned a lot about decision making under pressure during this process. I also learned about cultural differences between business and government; these guys did not eat roast beef. Instead, they ate crab and drank beer: lots of crab and lots of beer. They stayed up very late in Georgetown on many a night, and, somehow, got together again the next morning to save America's secrets. I hope librarians like crab and beer too.

Links

• The New York Times (abstract) (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/1104-04.htm) describes how lessons learned in Iran helped minimize losses in the September 11 World Trade Center attack. It's interesting that they don't talk about how secret information is really protected.
• Earlier biographical sketches are available if you need more data about me: fall semester and spring semester, for instance. The "criticize, condemn, and complain" was featured in a class blog for an LIS class at USF.