Socrates to Bill Gates?
I'll go first, in no particular order:
- The Ancient Stoics
- D. T. Suzuki, Thich Nhat Hanh, and other
- C G Jung
- Alfred Adler
- Arthur Schopenhauer
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Franz Kafka
- Niccolo Machiavelli (highly misunderstood, I strongly suggest starting by watching the "Learning to Love Machiavelli: Don MacDonald at TEDxBoston"
- George Pólya
Russel Reynolds taught me the nature of software development. He was the Operations Manager at Will County Generating Station, which burned coal and turned it into power. He saw computers as a tool, and one that had to be as practical and unobstructive as possible. In the 1980s, he sought out hand-held computers for recording the inspections of fire fighting equipment. He tried running them with gloves on, spilling coffee on them, dropping them on the concrete floor. I wrote the software to record the inspections. He'd pull in a person from the staff, back in the day when most people didn't have computers, and explain to them that They weren't being judged, I was, and if anything went wrong it was MY fault, he then told them what he wanted them to do, and I had to watch. I learn huge amounts about software usability in a very compressed timeframe.
Jack Woermbke taught me that you don't every upgrade software unless you actually have to. He taught me you only change one thing at a time, so you can actually know what broke things, or fixed them.
The folks at Live Marketing taught me how tradeshows work, how marketing works, and how to keep folks who have to use computers happy and productive.
Norman Teiber taught me how to make gears, and gear shaped objects, of all sorts at his job shop, Allied Gear, sold in 2019.
My friend Jim has shown me how to repair old radios, test equipment, and the like. We've repaired TVs from the 1940s, Test Equipment and ham radios of all vintages, and even a few Cesium Beam atomic clocks.
Jim Hoover from Fermilab taught me that the world isn't as it seems, you can't just take the news at face value, back in the early 1990s.
This put some language to a shift that was already happening as a result of using the products for several years.
I’m a different person today because of this lesson and how it shifted the way I think at a pretty deep level, from purchases to problem-solving.
Related:
“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” -Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
“Less, but better.” -Dieter Rams
As for me, I've come to appreciate that I'm a fairly average thinker. Mostly I just try to make things work and watch the clouds.
There are people who's thinking I admire - Stewart Brand, for example. As for Nietzsche et al, I've never really had the time.
This is water.
The Red Green Show
Bryan Cantrill — for shaping how I think about building productive engineering teams, especially teams working at the messy and fascinating interface between hardware and software.
Alan Kay and Seymour Papert — for changing how I think about computers, education, and learning. The best tools don't just give people answers; they give people an environment where they can explore, experiment, and develop their own understanding.
Paul Akers, Norm O'Hara, and Ryan Tierney — for showing what Lean can look like when it leaves the PowerPoint deck and actually reaches the manufacturing floor. Continuous improvement works when the people doing the work are empowered to see problems and improve the systems around them.
Linus Torvalds — for the relentless pursuit of technical quality and the willingness to challenge decisions when the engineering isn't good enough.
Looking at the list, I realized there's a common thread.
Be curious. Build things. Learn by doing. Give people the tools and agency to improve their own work. Don't accept "that's just how we do it" as an answer. And when you want something, be willing to go after it.
I suspect I'm still figuring out how much each of these people has influenced the way I think.