When I worked at Salon.com I got to work with Scott Rosenberg. I never reported to him and barely got to collaborate with him directly, more's the pity, but I did get to witness him in meetings. He would listen for most of the meeting, then speak up, insightfully and concisely summarize others' viewpoints, and then say what he thought and why. (He was also the first person at Salon to predict that Schwarzenegger would win the governorship.) And he wrote Dreaming in Code, a book I frequently recommend to help non-programmers understand the infelicities and headiness of software engineering.

These days Scott is targeting his insight into our industry, long-term perspective, experience as theater critic and tech manager, and delightful prose at the issue of "being ourselves in a post-social world" -- or, life after Facebook. I love how he's working on it and I look forward to watching his work. And hey, I am still not on Facebook, so maybe I already live in Scott Rosenberg's future! I AM A TIME TRAVELER. WHOOOO. SPOOKY NOISES.

Anyway. Thinking about Scott's influence on me makes me think about management. I'm taking a break from formal management at my job right now, but I'm still on the board of directors of the Ada Initiative, and besides that there's my interest in influencing my communities informally. As Frances Hocutt put it,

when I talk about leadership and influence I am not talking about coercion or manipulation. I define influence as the ability to connect with others, and discover that their goals are also your goals.

(Hocutt and Rosenberg are also both saying interesting things about authenticity and leadership, by the way, in case you want to go read about that on their sites.)

A few years ago, I read the Project Gutenberg text of Florence Nightingale's On Nursing, and I thoroughly recommend it. Nightingale focuses on executive energy, attention, and putting the proper processes into place such that patients (employees) have the resources and quiet they need to get better (do their work). Once you get to a certain administrative level, instead of solving problems ad hoc you have to think strategically. As she puts it, a manager's question is, "How can I provide for this right thing to be always done?" You know, scaling.

One of the best thinkers on that particular question as it applies to the software industry is Camille Fournier, whom I hope to work with someday. She writes interestingly about autonomy, mastery, and introspection, making it easy for people to do the right thing, choosing to ignore easy problems, becoming the boss, and growing new engineering leaders. You can also watch or read her !!Con talk "How To Stay In Love With Programming" on the !!Con site.

And in case you want to play a game, try the manual text adventure "Choose Your Own Troika Program For Greece" (author's note) by Daniel Davies.

One of the motivations for the post was a discussion I had with @PabloK on twitter about the Greek negotiations, in which he said, rather succinctly, that the purpose of protest was to change the space of what was politically possible. I think this is a crucial point; although it is important to make a good faith attempt to understand the constraints that people work under (which is why I wrote the post), it is equally important not to regard those constraints as necessarily being imposed by Ultimate Reality.

(As long as I'm mentioning wacky takes on European financial crises I have to link to John Finnemore's analogy monologue.)

I am being super digressive today, thinking about the fact that I'm grateful for the chorus of thinkers and activists who sing so I can go take a breath, thinking about my choice to manage and lead adults and to probably not bear or raise children, thinking about how it gets tiringly abstract sometimes to always be setting up leveragable scalable systems, and thinking about the joy of mentoring future leaders. If I had to try to tie all of this together, I would say that the power of leadership is the power to change the constraints that people work under. And that I see a lot of my friends not-very-willingly constrained by Facebook, and I'm looking forward to seeing that go away.