Stories from organizations

“Imagine a bunch of kids from kindergarden¹² , each with one of those annoying drums that aunties and uncles insist on giving their little nephews and nieces for Christmas. So they sit there and make a hell of a racket. Now, imagine a new kid who comes in and says, hey, let’s make a computer. And he makes them sit like this”

he draws a circular shape on the blackboard, “and tell each to tap their drum in a given sequence, like this”, he adds numbers to the sketch“, And, there! We have a computer. It works!

I can easily imagine him as this new kid who comes to kindergarden and makes the kids play something like this. Not a computer, though, they barely existed when he was small. I have invited Wojtek as guest lecturer to teach my students how computers work. The year is 1990 and the computer is for many still a mystery machine; a hostile one (I recall one of my students of that time saying that computers were like Fenrir, the big demonic wolf of Norse mythology who is to devour the Sun on Ragnarök).

Wojtek is a freelance consultant and he makes his living helping organizations to set up their first IT systems; sometimes he is asked to order equipment as well as put it all together; and sometimes, like in the case of a large government institution, to

“perform technology check”. Much to his amusement, the latter turns out to be a collection of computers safely locked away in a big safe. He tells me how he took them all out, made sure that they were in working order and was then asked to put them back in the closet again. After having signed all the provided papers, he tried to explain that stuff sitting unused in a closet hardly can be described as “technology”. Things, yes, machines, maybe, but technology is something that works together with people. The clerk looked at him as if he were from another planet.

But he seems at home in the classroom. He is a spirited lecturer

12 Based on recollections, notes (field visit 2004) and the website of Adam’s firm IT Dragon (not real name).

and the students like him very much. They later tell me that they actually were able to understand how computers work, thanks to him, they could imagine them as something they knew already and build an own understanding on that. I ask Wojtek whether he would consider to work as a teacher.

“Nah”, he says, “not now, I’d like to work more with computers now, they develop so fast, it’s great fun”.

I ask him if that means working for a corporation. He shakes his head vehemently, no, never, he would never be able to be owned, pretending to be somebody else, dressing in a suit. But he does not tell me, then, that he will start an own firm. Perhaps he does not know yet. This happens five years later. Wojtek invites several of his friends from the University of Warsaw, from mathematics and management, and they continue working together, creating one of the most ground-breaking organizations in Poland, IT Dragon, developing original and customized IT solutions for business.

Their motto is: “sensibly, elegantly, creatively and reliably” (IT Dragon, 2013). Their clients range from small firms to giant global corporations. The Dragons offer a variety of IT solutions, in most business areas, from email to complicated financial services. They also provide consulting services, such as audit and maintenance of IT systems, systems analyses and various IT optimizations.

Success is not an unusual story in Poland’s transformation economy, I have encountered many stories of growth and fame.

IT Dragon is different because it has preserved its original mood of imaginative freedom. Power dressed displays of status would as out of place here as an UFO parked in the middle of its lawn, indeed, much more. On second thought, this is exactly where a UFO would land, one of those alien ships visiting the Earth in Szymon Rogiński’s photos (2009; Chapter 3.3). I pay the Dragons a visit one sunny autumn afternoon of 2004. The firm is located in a villa in one of Warsaw’s green inner neighbourhoods, rather

inconspicuous for am HQ of a well known company. But it is such a cosy place to work, the receptionist explains to me, as she leads me to the common kitchen. I sit there for a while and chat with three persons, two women and one man, who call themselves

“the cat people”: they take care of some stray cats who come to get fed and cuddled by them every day. They tell me that the kitchen is a place where quite a few of the employees hang around to socialize, drink tea, play games.

“But if you want to see the most popular social space you have to go to the cellar, there’s a ping pong table there, that’s a really much loved place”.

Before I go to take a look at the table, I stroll around the office spaces, a mish-mash of work stations and computers spread around two floors, each distinctly different, chaotic. There is pervasive a soft hum, in some places ascending to a rumble, like onboard a big ferry boat in motion across the Baltic sea. The whole place smells faintly of electricity, this must have been one of the things that enchanted Nicola Tessla so much. Or maybe it is the smell of heated metal and plastic fusing together in a robotic cooking extravaganza? I see people working in the most unlikely spaces, such as the mezzanine floor between staircases. An employee I ask later says that the occupant of that space insists on keeping it, as “he likes to have a good view of things”. Some rooms are populated by people sitting by the computers. They do not seem to communicate with each other but some look up at me, smiling but not encouraging me to talk with them. I have been talking with some earlier, I wave and continue my tour, I have learned from my interlocutors how they abhor being disturbed when they think, and I do not want to be one of these annoying disturbers.

One of them, Paweł, explained to me that they need to concentrate very hard, especially when they work with something new. Often they do something else in the background, play computer games

(“non-immersive ones”), listen to music (in fact, most of the people here wear head phones), even perhaps communicate via the computer. But the actual face to face exchange is what may break their concentration and they resent outsiders who do not understand or respect that. That is one of the reasons why many of the Dragons choose to come to work here, even if they easily could work from home; nobody checks on their attendance, as long as they do their job, everything is fine.

“That, and the ping pong room of course”, Paweł adds.

So, to the ping pong room. It is, indeed, interesting, even if at that time, completely empty for people. It is dominated by a large table, surrounded by some free space. However, the space by the walls are all but empty: apart from some chairs and a sofa, it contains all sorts of things, such as cartons full of papers, computer parts, a pile of used looking tires. Adjacent to this room there is an unremarkable looking door, without a plaque or any kind of sign saying that this is, in fact, the office of the President of the firm. I enter, after having knocked and heard a “come in”. We shake hands: Wojtek looks just like he used to, dressed in jeans and a sweater, with a look of genuine joy on his face, he brushes off some papers from a chair and makes a sign for me to sit down.

I do so and take in the room. Albert Einstein purportedly said that if a messy desk indicates a messy mind, then what, indeed, does an empty desk point to? This is not one of such desks. Not one of such rooms, either. The chaos of the space is happy, unabashed, uninhibited. The omnipresent piles of papers seem to be held in place only by some own mysterious gravity force; computer parts, arranged as if in a number of installations; books, caught in mid-flight, huddling together. In the corner there is a sink, complete with all the adherent plumbing.

“Does it work?”, I wonder.

“Sure. This room was converted from a bathroom”.

There is no window but the room is bright enough, with artificial lighting reminding me of sci-fi movies from the 1970s.

I think that this is art, all this is somehow art. The room reminds me of some rooms of painters and sculptors that I have seen, and envied, painfully; only the paint, the plaster, the chisels and easels are missing, and, instead, you get all these apparently mundane objects, taken separately so pristinely utilitarian and yet, assembled together, animated by something as mysterious as are these traditional tools of the imaginative trades.

IT Dragon is a team of talent: it brings together people filled with a passion, dedication and competence to use the possibilities created by new technologies (IT Dragon, 2013).