This evening we watched A Secret Love on Netflix. It was a bit of a random pick—a movie we had never heard of, and we accidentally hit the play button while reading the description. Might as well go with it, etc.

How are you going to think of gay people as terrible deviants when you listen to two grannies talk about 70 years together—nearly all of those years unknown explicitly to family back in Canada, although surely known in whatever community they found in Chicago. Seeing the 1940s and 1950s pictures of them together was almost like a strange alternative history—all of the props and poses and styles and cars and so on that I've seen before in vintage mid-century photos, but with two women occupying the focus of the shot. Effortless subversion of an archetype, but also a half-sad look at what could have been for so many other people.

“I used to see little kids struggling with their identity at school, and not all kids are lucky enough to have a family that says, ‘That’s OK, that doesn’t matter,’” she said. “So maybe this will help those people understand it a little bit more. I really hope this documentary shows that love is love. I can hear Auntie Terry in heaven chuckling, just being so happy that she’s helping people.”

—Amy Kaufman. "Love is love: How do you go on without your ‘little darling’?" The Los Angeles Times (2020-05-08).

It is easy to see the building of a network of support, either through the appointment and promotion process or through personal favors, as activities that are somehow illegitimate or inappropriate. Such a view would be incomplete at best. The development and exercise of power in organizations is about getting things accomplished. The very nature of organizations—interdependent, complex systems with many actors and many points of view—means that taking action is often problematic. Failures in implementation are almost invariably failures to build successful coalitions. Although networks of allies can obviously be misused, they are nevertheless essential in order to get things done. And, allies must be put in place through whatever practical means are at hand.

—Jeffrey Pfeffer. "Resources, Allies, and the New Golden Rule". Managing with Power (1992).

Now reading: Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (2013).

Today at work I was talking—remotely, as ever—with an experienced software engineer. By "experienced", I mean that he said he's been working in software development for 50 years, which is both unbelievable and astounding. For all the magic that we see conjured by software, it seems like it could never be more than five or ten years old, even though we know better.

Fifty years? All of the funny lines and analogies seem insulting, and they get away from the underlying feeling: anyone with that much experience should be drawn from like a well. A deep, deep, deep well. Even if you decide later that you don't want or agree with what you get from that well, the direct and personal experience is worth the trouble.

Anyway, he recommended a few books to me while we were chatting on IM. One of them was this one. He suggested this one, out of the various suggestions, should be first because it deals with the human element of organizing projects with software and, most importantly, people. Somehow, people get treated like objects in projects, to the detriment of all.

Now reading: Pfeffer, Jeffrey. Managing with power: Politics and influence in organizations. Harvard Business Press, 1992 (Goodreads) (notes)

No, that doesn't really sound like the kind of book I would read, or the kind of topic I'd normally be interested in. But I'm taking a course called Power and Politics in Organizations this summer, and this book contains a bit of required reading, so here we are. It is a little difficult reading and studying power—Power—because it brings to mind a cavalcade of alphabros making gut decisions about things they don't understand and will have laddered their way up and out of the cleanup once the consequences have come home to roost. That is, I have a baseline distasteful feeling about.

[p. 10] By pretending that power and influence don't exist, or at least shouldn't exist, we contribute to what I and some others (such as John Gardner) see as the major problem facing many corporations today, particularly on the United States—the almost trained or produced incapacity of anyone except the highest-level managers to take action and get things accomplished.

I recognize that kind of person—it's many of the people I've worked with, and it's me. Some of the blame for not getting things done lies with those who set up and administer rigid top-down hierarchies that squeeze decisions out of the lower levels where they should be made. Some of the blame lies with the rest of us who don't do something about it.

One more line, and then we'll leave it for now. It's not explicitly about power, but it is about the frontloaded imbalance of the work to make decisions versus the work to make decisions work out.

[pp. 22-23] The important actions may not be the original choices, but rather what happens subsequently, and what actions are taken to make things work out. This is a significant point, because it means that we need to be somewhat less concerned about the quality of the decision at the time we make it (which, after all, we can't really know anyway) and more concerned with adapting our new decisions and actions to the information we learn as events unfold. [...] The most important skill may be managing the consequences of decisions. And, in organizations in which it is often difficult to take any action, the critical ability may be the capacity to have things implemented.

Hey—let's throw in some relevant Kurt Vonnegut here before we go. From The Sirens of Titan:

There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.

Good doesn't just triumph over evil because it has better ideas.