Approach to “Work Ethic”

Visions - not goals, not plans

Just Doing - not consistency, not discipline

Showcases - not deadlines, not accountability

Meaning - not numbers, not just results

Great Ideas - not just execution, not just implementation

Deep Thinking - not just action, not quick reactions

Equal Collaboration - not juniors, not seniors

Though such “nots” may be imposed on me, and it will probably look like I’m adhering to them, they are the enemies of great work if I am chained to them internally.

Giving a professional illustrator a goal for a poster usually results in what was desired. If one tries this with an artist, one will get what the artist needed to create that day. Sometimes we make, to have, sometimes to know and express. The pursuit of Art always sets off plans and goals, but plans and goals don't always give rise to Art. If "visions not goals" opens the heavens, it is important to find artistic people to conceive the projects.

Thus the "people not projects" principle was the other cornerstone of ARPA/PARC’s success. Because of the normal distribution of talents and drive in the world, a depressingly large percentage of organizational processes have been designed to deal with people of moderate ability, motivation, and trust. We can easily see this in most walks of life today, but also astoundingly in corporate, university, and government research. ARPA/PARC had two main thresholds: self-motivation and ability. They cultivated people who "had to do, paid or not" and "whose doings were likely to be highly interesting and important". Thus conventional oversight was not only not needed, but was not really possible. "Peer review" wasn't easily done even with actual peers.

The situation was "out of control", yet extremely productive and not at all anarchic. "Out of control" because artists have to do what they have to do. "Extremely productive" because a great vision acts like a magnetic field from the future that aligns all the little iron particle artists to point to “North” without having to see it. They then make their own paths to the future. Xerox often was shocked at the PARC process and declared it out of control, but they didn't understand that the context was so powerful and compelling and the good will so abundant, that the artists worked happily at their version of the vision. The results were an enormous collection of breakthroughs, some of which we are celebrating today.

— Alan Kay (The Power of Context)

— 11/15/25