Jameson Watts

For those of you that know Peter F. Drucker’s history, you know he’s had an opinion or a prediction about nearly every aspect of doing business. His collection of essays–compiled meaningfully in Managing in a Time of Great Change–is no exception. For myself, I took most heed to his notes on management in a knowledge society, his advice about personal brand, and his insight on emergent business structures.

The Financial Understanding of an Agency

I manage at an agency where every ounce of business we get is entirely dependent on the individuals doing the work. Creative agencies are the epitomy of the knowledge industry; we have nothing to distribute or stockpile and our entire product is in the transfer of expertise from our employees to our clients. (more…)

Several great programmers I know have recently made the switch from full-time employee to full-time contractor… and I understand why. Clients and corporate structure can be a real drag. You have to deal with politics and personalities all while trying to actually get some work done. What I don’t know is whether this is going to be an industry-wide trend or a phase in what is now a very favorable economic cycle for interactive developers (more…)

The Seed Conference was on the beautiful IIT campus on the south side of Chicago in a relatively new building designed by Rem Koolhaas (a student of Mies van der Rohe), but I’ll get into that in a bit…

Main topics — Stop meeting. Stay small. Say no. (more…)

I thought for too long about whether to keep the default Wordpress title for my first post. I then spent too long trying to think about how many “Hello world!” applications I’ve written over the years. As a matter of introduction, I’ve been writing software (mostly in the interactive world) for over a decade using the web language du jour (I’m now high on Rails), but I’ve remained somewhat silent even while intently observing my piers blog away. I was trained to write code in college then learned how after college, then got an MBA and now I’m running the technology circus at Vermilion. Anyway, I attended the Seed conference in Chicago recently and there was much talk about doing business in public so it kind of inspired me to start organizing my projects in a more open way. Stay tuned for a post on that conference.