Ex-Pat Adaptability Theory

Let me declare right up front that I am an office ex-pat. For most of my career at Quality Solutions - somewhere in the vicinity of 17-18 years - I have worked hundreds of miles away from the Mother Ship - Newburyport. It's easy for me to remember how long because I joined the company December 1990, the same year I graduated St. Mikes. For the first 4-5 months back in winter of 1991 I was living in North Andover, MA and working in the main office in North Reading. Following that, for several years we had a satellite office in Bay Shore, NY with a great team, but for the past decade or so I have been officially an Office Ex-Pat working out of my home, known affectionately as the Blue Point Technology Center. No two days are alike, which is fine by me. Add into the mix the reality that 2-3 days per week I am on the road somewhere - at clients, visiting the Mother Ship, whatever. The fact that I am out of the environment all of the time has lead me to adapt.

So if you are comfortable in your current scenario, then read my post on Transformations.

The lessons I have learned as an ex-pat can be applied to publishing in general and technology projects in particular. In a shifting environment, we have to work extra hard to be efficient and productive. What comes easy in a stable environment, has to be earned in an unstable environment. Walls are often erected in our way and we have to find ways to scale them. In an office ex-pat's world, it is usually technology walls built out of VPN's and Firewalls blocking access to emails and company files and making us work that much harder to be productive. Wherever we plug in or wi-fi connect, we have new obstacles to first learn about and then surmount. It is common for my compatriot Paul Milana and I to find ourselves in a new environment and start firing questions:
"Can you get VPN?"
"No its Blocked",
"Can you get Internet",
"No they need to allow our IP's in the firewall",
"How about Terminal Server access",
"YES!"

In publishing, I would argue the walls are built of convention, tradition and perhaps even a dash of denial. The more nimble of the larger publishing houses have been able to throw gobs of money and resources to build large digital archives, cool website book-view widgets and lots of other neat stuff.

Some of the smaller innovative houses have transformed themselves brilliantly - O'Reilly certainly comes to mind. CJ Rayhill, who will be delivering our Key Note speech at the April 8/9 User conference will have plenty to say on this. Formerly CIO of O'Reilly Media she has now joined on at Safari Books Online. I am excited to meet her and talk with her, as she is known as a persistent, nuts-and-bolts leader, knowing that it is usually in the details where grand schemes go to fail. As a an integrator of our software and services for many years, I can appreciate this perspective.

Whatever the size of the publishing house, I think book publishers can adopt the bird-dog persisence of expats, hitting walls, finding ways over, under, or around to be efficient and productive. This adaptibility and persistence has paid off through numerous projects at publishers I have worked with, and I know that it can be the foundation from which publishing is transformed.