All Revved Up

Unlimited Magazine, Nov 2010

It was parked outside the dairy. A Nissan ute, black, glistening; a celebration of anarchy by the marketers of an energy drink. In blood-drenched, Satan-worshipping typeface it made its claim: "No limits. No laws."

But there was no mud on the tyres and there were no scraps of flesh on the bumper. I guessed the driver in the dairy was dropping off posters or perhaps a display stand; living outside the law, distributing die-cut vampires across the suburbs of Auckland.

They'd left the keys in the ignition and the engine running. I thought: I could have some sport here. I could dump my bike, climb into the cab, gun the engine and drop a patch. We're taking this ute all the way to Henderson, boy.

There'd be trouble. But I'd explain that I was calling bullshit: No laws, no limits, buddy. It says it right there on the truck.

But mine's a quiet life so I just rode on, thinking about laws and limits.

There is a law of business conduct never stated but nonetheless all but universal: you only get to lean back in your chair and put your feet up if you're the boss.

Twice I did it when I was not the boss, twice I got a look of withering disapproval. From the boss.

But I find that feet up can be good for thinking.  I get some of my best ideas in that posture. Or soaking in the bath. Or lying in bed. Prone, or near-prone seems to be optimal for me.

Thinking in fresh ways, thinking boldly, thinking at length; this is what brings forth iPads and nano-technology; SMS calls and the Hadron Collider.

In principle, every business welcomes and embraces fresh, bold lengthy thinking: anything for growth. But in practice, laws and limits rein it in.

If your role is to be a biddable unit in a large machine, your feedback is welcome only through the suggestion box, and only in your breaks. If your role is to make your superior look good, thinking and speaking up must defer to that greater priority. If you do your thinking with your feet on the desk, Son, we have a problem.

I have run my own business since 1994. I have my feet up on the desk a lot; in fact I have just this moment taken them down in order to type this. I take some pride in having been one the country's first profitable dotcoms. I take less pride in having steered it through the most fitful of growth curves.

If I'm honest, the explanation is that I have had my feet on the desk too often. I do not mean that I loaf. I mean that I spend too much time considering possibilities and weighing up ideas and too little time committing to a practical one and prosecuting it determinedly.

I have a site that generates speeches for people automatically. For four years now I have been, in between other undertakings, overhauling and expanding it. The huge obstacle to completion has been endless experimentation with ways to automate the process of storytelling.

In this long, long, quest I have learned a lot. I know a lot about linguistics and artificial intelligence, and I have been down side roads and dead ends. I have had my feet on the desk a long time, because I have been thinking.

I've been weighing up options, and considering how I might harness the knowledge I've acquired and turn it into a clever programme that helps people make, out of their anecdote,  a beginning, a middle, an end, and a riveting tale.

But I have gone about three and a half years past the point where I should have been at least putting version 0.5 on the site and hitting the button to go.

I have over-enjoyed my liberty from laws and limits. I have had too eager a helping of the freedom to rest my feet on the desk. Thinking, of it itself, does not butter those parsnips.

This magazine's title expresses a laudable state of mind and being, and it has always been eager to celebrate a particular kind of business success story: the kind of company where everyone involved will enthuse about the work they are doing and the common purpose they share and the  enjoyment they get from collaborating with one another.

I like to think that such a business would also be the kind of place where you would get to put your feet up and think wide and deep and at length, without anyone rolling their eyes; but that at some point there would someone who would put their head around the door and say: "Come on David, the engine's running."