September 11.
14 years ago, I fell in love in the blink of an eye and left my heart in the hands of my better half. 9/11 remains the best day of my personal history.
I'm 38 today.
On Saturday I wrote a long post about how I feel about that. Then I quit NetNewsWire, forgetting about one of its bugs, namely that it doesn't save an entry automatically. Whether it was an acte manqué or not, I'm glad that post never saw the light.
There is only one thing I'll recover from it.
Professionally speaking, I feel like a transitional XHTML page without a stylesheet.
But the stylesheet is coming, and it will be great.
Off to London for a short holiday and less internet.
I've been having some difficulties keeping up with the blogosphere and regular readers may have noticed the slow-down in my posts over the last few months. Let's say that my life recently has been filled with very contrasting moments ranging from great satisfaction down to overwhelming sadness. Actually those visitors who read my French weblog may well know why, however I'm not willing to bother the anglophones about the ugly and heart-breaking parts of my life. With this post I'm already departing from my authoring rule of splitting my writings between two weblogs, the English one being more professionally oriented and the other one making a better use of French as the language of politics and love (even though the francosphere took shots at me with not writing enough technical stuff in French for those English-challenged frogs).
I'm slowly climbing my way back above the clouds, where I can breeze freely again, making efforts to remember to always consider the positive side of things before even thinking of their negative ones (when not inventing them). It's getting better, and I can see the end of the Russian hills, this weird journey where I've been feeling like Leonardo Di Caprio screaming "I'm the king of the world!" at the prow of the Titanic, before being remembered by my own devils how that particular story ends, sometimes way too fast to even feel any grades in between.
I have many great things going on in my professional life, things that I can be proud of and will find great pleasure to write and discuss about (you'll see it soon on this modest weblog and in some other way more classy places). I'm having fun again in the real world with old and new friends. And as for this site, I'm procrastinating over a redesign which would be a welcome change here too (though not dismissing what works).
Life continues, please excuse me while I take my breath to catch up with it.
Or am I? According to Paul Graham, to start a startup you have to be:
Someone who is a good hacker, between about 23 and 38, and who wants to solve the money problem in one shot instead of getting paid gradually over a conventional working life.
Damn, I turned 39 today. Too late! I guess I'm stuck to the "conventional working life" of a corporate drone then ;-).
The baby is out: it's my pleasure to present the new www.capgemini.com. "It looks nice and it validates, what else could anyone ask?" someone told me today ("Holidays?", I replied).
I cannot tell you how happy I am. If you excuse the use of a few superlatives, due to some champagne abuse may be, this is the biggest web site redesign I've orchestrated and the result is, IMHO, the best site ever in Capgemini's 10-year online history.
It's been a long story and I will tell you some of it once I get a chance to breeze a little bit again.
Meanwhile, I will let these fine people who have helped us create this site give you some insight on this fascinating journey: Messieurs Jeffrey Zeldman, Douglas Bowman and Brian Alvey. [P.S. and with his authorization, a special thanks to Adam Greenfield for his excellent job on information architecture.]
What Jeremy Zawodny wrote in Job Specialization and Why it's hard to explain what I do resonates a lot with me. For a lot of people at work, I'm the "Internet guy". And internet equals techie. And techie equals specialist. And for some, internet equals IT, and they stop there (especially those who see me logged in via a terminal to one of our servers). Then they discover that I write rather decently (surprise), that I can advise them on a whole lot more than just "the web" (big surprise), that the internet is a lot bigger than what they thought (panic! ;-)). When come questions about what my job is, I've been joking for years saying that my officious titles are "webmonkey, chaos manager and corporate emergency hologram", which is my way of not answering the question.
The reality is that I'm a generalist in my specialty, and I've always been digging into high-tech fields with a nasty habit of trying to look at the bigger picture. I feel like a lion in a cage when being labeled, and corporations tend to have a lot of standard labels. Like Jeremy I tend to get bored if I stagnate for a long time because I'm a change agent who keeps looking at which status quo to attack next. Corporations are filled with people who dislike change agents, because they're threatening the status quo that they are mistaking for their job. I've been a startup guy, and I might still be. Despite all of this, I've been working for the past seven years for a big corporation. But one that still allows someone like me to go against status quo and change things, profoundly. And one that allows me to change myself.
I'm now looking forward to attacking my own status quo.
Last Friday I left Capgemini, where I've been the Corporate Webmaster for the past eight years and five months. Quite a long time, quite an adventure.
I joined them in June 1998 for a mission dubbed "Stop the chaos" — they had 25 external sites at the time, each of them with its own design (and almost as many logos for the same company), and the board had started to put some pressure to align everybody on the same look & feel. What I didn't know when I joined is that two people were tasked to do that before me, and failed. I didn't know it was impossible, so I did it ;-).
From 1998 to 2005, I orchestrated five redesigns of the company web sites. Some really minor (changing the company name and logo on April 2004, although the whole rebranding was quite a feat), most of them being pretty significant (sometimes more in terms of politics than web design, especially during merger/acquisition times), and one of them, the last one, being the biggest and most challenging project to date for me. The results and the amazing people I had the chance to work with (not forgetting my colleagues) far outweighed the stress, bumps in the road and back-stabbing I had to endure (all good lessons anyway, my skin's significantly thicker now).
Being more comfortable with change than with status quo, and in equal need of thinking and doing, I couldn't satisfy myself with just owning the company web guidelines and telling the whole group to follow them. This company being built on the concept of "village gaulois", it would have failed (as it did before). My trick was to build a platform of shared services (mainly hosting, content management and audience tracking tools) and offer them for free to the other units, winning on several fronts: leading by eating my own dog food, immediately decrease their running costs, decrease the complexity of managing the whole internet presence (30 sites worldwide), decrease the long-term running and future redesign costs for the whole group. I reckon that, by designing and delivering this shared platform and succeeding in getting all countries (but North America) to jump on board, I managed to save the Group 1 M€ in running costs per year! They should be pleased with the ROI on that one (too bad I didn't have any bonus on that one :-).
More recently, after years of blogging here, I planted blogs on the intranet and got our CTOs to play along on the first public corporate blog of Capgemini: the CTO blog. Launched without more publicity than that and a mention on the site home page, the blog got noticed then praised, but what really made my day was that we won a deal through it (for a ROI of more than 10 after just a few weeks, think about it if you wonder what benefits a corporate blog can bring). I didn't convince my management about an external blog farm for employees à la Sun or IBM before leaving, but I think it's just a matter of time before they pop up, one way or another. At the end of 2004, I won a contract with a leading French editor to write a book on business blogging, which basically took away all my nights and week-ends for the whole year of 2005. The book went out in January 2006 and was well received.
I must admit that this writing gig and the last redesign of capgemini.com both had a profound impact on my professional life and perspective, just when reaching 40. Today I have the opportunity to turn a page in favorable conditions, shift gears and fly by myself (even if I'm too old for this).
That's the goal for "me 4.1" now, web n+1 since 1993 ;-).
“ — I picture the flow of life as a deck of slides”, he says. “You move from one to the next, and sometimes, one of them seems to animate, and it becomes like a movie on its own, and you can see various dimensions through it. Other slide shows.”
“ — It's called interaction”, I reply.
“ — Interaction is like radio. Sometimes you're tuned in, sometimes close, sometimes not at all. When you're tuned in with someone, the signal is like perfect and clear.
— Yeah, and sometimes it's just scrambled. Signal versus noise. I'm tuning...” planting my eyes in his.
“ — Those eyes...” he says.
“ — What?
— I don't want to hurt you.”
I'm puzzled and silent for a moment, but he's been looking at me for hours with eyes and smiles that contradict my sudden doubt about the reciprocity of our feelings. If it's not what I feel it is, we're both perfect mirrors. May be I'm just going too fast.
“ — Life could be a lot simpler, if only we didn't make it so complicated”, he says.
“ — I think it's because it looks less frightening that way. It's more reassuring to seem in charge, even if it's only a simulacrum of control.
I wish the time would stop now”, I whisper.
— It has.”
At this moment, I recall this scene from Shortbus where Severine describes her best orgasm, believing that she was alone and that time had stopped, but then realized that she wasn't alone and time hadn't stopped. He'll be gone soon and I'm sad. I feel my tears and make a useless try at hiding them.
“ — Don't go sad at me.
— I'm not sad, I'm happy.
— This is intense”, he says.
“ — How often do these things happen?” I ask, knowing the answer already.
“ — Not often.
— We're on the same wavelength. Now the question is about the bandwidth.
— And the volume! Those eyes...
— I'm looking at the dimensions in this interactive slide, where they can lead us to...
— We'll see. It's a PowerPoint show.
— I'm using Keynote!”, I reply, with a grin. I didn't know architects could be so geeky.
We've been like teenagers for three days and, oh gosh... does it feel good!
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