The Empress

Originally published in the Informanté newspaper on Thursday, 9 March, 2017.

In the year 500 CE, a woman was born. Her name was Theodora. History has forgotten the place, with claims being made for Cyprus and Syria, but that is not important. She was the daughter of Acacius, a bear trainer in the hippodrome (or colosseum) in Constantinople (today knowns as Istanbul). At the age of four, however, her father died, and her mother took her and her sisters to the hippodrome to work.

Thus, at the age of 5, she became an actress, a mime, a dancer, an artist, a comedienne and a prostitute. To be an ‘actress’ in those days was not a savoury occupation, but she performed well. By the age of 14, she had her first child. It is said that her performances at the hippodrome were close to the extremes of modern burlesque, and her salacious portrayal of Leda and the Swan brought her many admirers. 

At age 16, she became the mistress of Hecebolus, and accompanied him to his post as governor of Libya at the age of 18. When they broke up, she started travelling back to Constantinople, and at Alexandria in Egypt, she converted to Christianity. From there, she continued onwards, first to Antioch in Syria, and reaching Constantinople in 522 CE. She gave up her previous lifestyle, and became a wool spinner in a house near the palace. 

Given her beauty and wit, it should be no surprise that she drew the attention of a young Justinian. Justinian, son of a pig farmer, had moved to Constantinople at age 11 after being adopted by his uncle Justin, a member of the Royal Guard. But 4 years before, Justin had been appointed Emperor of the Roman Empire after the previous emperor had died without an heir.  Justinian was quite taken with Theodora, but the law forbid anyone of high position in the Empire from marrying an actress, even if she was a former one.

Justin’s wife, the Empress Euphemia, who ordinary did not refuse Justinian anything, was dead set against this marriage. But in 525 CE, she died, and Justinian got his uncle Justin to repeal the law, and he married Theodora. Two years later, the Emperor Justin I died as well, and Emperor Justinian I and Empress Theodora was crowned. 

Theodora shared in Justinian’s plan and political strategies, and he referred to her as his ‘partner in his deliberations.’ Theodora had her own court, entourage and imperial seal. In 532 CE, however, she showed her mettle. During the Nika riots, when opposing factions had proclaimed a new emperor, Justinian was fearing for his life, and preparing to flee. While discussing this at their government council, Theodora interrupted them, and said, 

“My lords, the present occasion is too serious to allow me to follow the convention that a woman should not speak in a man’s council. Those whose interests are threatened by extreme danger should think only of the wisest course of action, not of conventions. In my opinion, flight is not the right course, even if it should bring us to safety. It is impossible for a person, having been born into this world, not to die; but for one who has reigned it is intolerable to be a fugitive. May I never be deprived of this purple robe, and may I never see the day when those who meet me do not call me empress. If you wish to save yourself, my lord, there is no difficulty. We are rich; over there is the sea, and yonder are the ships. Yet reflect for a moment whether, when you have once escaped to a place of security, you would not gladly exchange such safety for death. As for me, I agree with the adage that the royal purple is the noblest shroud.”

Her speech convinced Justinian to make a stand, and he attacked the hippodrome, where the rioters had congregated, killing all 30 000 of them. Justinian never forgot that it was Theodora who saved his throne. Afterwards, they rebuilt Constantinople, which had burned in the riots. One result of this was the Hagia Sophia, one of the architectural wonders of the world. They carefully supervised the magistrates, to reduce corruption. But Theodora did not stop there.

Justinian recodified Roman law, into the Corpus Juris Civilis, and Theodora took the time to pass much needed reform. She passed laws to increase the rights of women, prohibited forced prostitution, she closed brothels and made pimping illegal. She expanded the rights of women in divorce and property ownership, and instituted the death penalty for rape. She gave mother guardianship rights over their children, and forbade the killing of wives who committed adultery. 

But on 28 June 548 CE, Theodora succumbed to cancer. Justinian wept bitterly at her funeral, and after her death, he passed very little effective legislation. She was buried in the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople, and to this day is considered a saint by the Greek Orthodox Church. 

Theodora was but one woman, from very lowly beginning, and yet she achieved so much. In the wake of International Woman’s Day, it is perhaps time that we realise that that same power is inside every woman around us. These Empresses in ordinary clothing looked after farms and children, while their men were off working at the far edges of our country during the contract labour era. 

Even today, they keep the communal farms going, teaching the children, while their husbands are off working wherever they find it. In a country with such reverence for heroes – in a country with a Heroes Acre! – why is it then that these heroes of our country are not venerated with a single monument?

The Gamut of Beauty

Originally published in the Informanté newspaper on Thursday, 2 March, 2017.

“Some people choose to see the ugliness in this world, the disarray. I choose to see the beauty.” Since the dawn of the human race, we have always been captivated by beauty. With the rains washing over Namibia, we all have experienced that graceful bliss that envelops us when we see the effect is has on our thirsty land. 

It should thus be of no surprise that we have always sought to capture beauty in any form possible. In the beginning, all we had rudimentary pigments, and crude tools, but still we tried to capture and record the beauty we saw in the world. With pigments on rock, we captured as much as was possible. Here in Namibia, our busmen paintings, such as the White Lady, provides evidence of this. 

As humanity progressed, our tools and materials became more complex, and we could capture beauty more effectively. As a result, we could not only capture the beauty as it appears, but also as we imagine it to be – we could be creative. We could create art. 

Our first foray into busmen paintings blossomed into a veritable portmanteau of skills with which we could capture the beauty of a moment. From the White Lady, we progressed to Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, and Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. But these forms captured beauty in a two dimensional plane, and sometimes that’s not enough for an artist. In parallel, another form of art developed – sculpture. First done with ceramics, made from clay and developing from pottery, it soon expanded into a form all of its own, with Michelangelo’s David probably the most well-known of these.

Still, these forms could only capture a moment, and too often, beauty last more than a moment. While we had yet to develop the technological sophistication to be up to the task, we harnessed that other master computer we all carry with us – the human brain. We turned more abstract, letting the human intellect and imagination fill in that which we could not capture. We began recording narratives with words, enabling a story to be told. We invented literature, and poetry. 

As we went abstract, we found beauty in even more things. The abstract world of mathematics opened up for us, and as Bertrand Russell said, “Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.”

Being capable of recording the abstract enabled us to record the ineffable – music. By developing musical notation, those sublime notes that touch the heart could now be spread far and wide, and as the centuries progressed, we had more and more instruments to strum the strings of emotion with. Beauty had come to pierce the soul of humanity. 

Lest it be said that we started to rest on our laurels, we continued to progress technologically, and new forms of art opened up to capture the beauty of this world. We used the literary arts to ‘replay,’ as it were, the events recorded, and the theatre opened up to the world. Master of the theatre, William Shakespeare, certainly left his legacy there. And when theatre used music instead of literature as a basis, we got the musical. 

Soon, we could capture beauty perfectly, via a new-fangled invention called the camera, which produced photographs. We had, however, become used to artists enhancing beauty, and when cameras were developed that could film moving pictures, another art form emerged – the movie. But it was not only the visual arts that got an upgrade. Soon, a device emerged that allowed for the visualization of mathematics – the computer. It too, spawned its own form of art, as immortalized in Donald Knuth’s volumes on The Art of Computer Programming.

And so, the great convergence began. Movies were combined with drawing, and animation began, with Walt Disney’s masterpieces sure to be seen by many a child. Drawing combined with literature, and the graphic novel emerged, culminating in the legends of today’s comic books, such as Jack Kirby and Frank Miller. Computer programming and literature combined to produce interactive novels. When they combined with drawing, the video game made its debut.

Today, we are all conversant with capturing beauty. Social media is filled with photographs and videos of people capturing remarkable moments across the world, and sharing them with friends and family. Even as this is occurring, we are discovering new ways to capture the beauty of this world – sculpture is today done via 3D printing and its modelling is instrumental in moving the art of video games beyond a 2D plane on a screen into the 3D virtual reality devices slowly coming into prominence. 

Beauty is all around us, if you just know where to look. Once you choose to see the beauty in this world, you’ll find that you feel spaces opening up inside you, like a building with rooms you’ve never explored. It’s time you started exploring, for there is much to discover yet.

The Nimble Dinosaur

Originally published in the Informanté newspaper on Thursday, 23 February, 2017. 

It is well known that in today’s market, you cannot afford to be slow. The pace of technological change is rapid, and if you fail to make the changes required to your business, a newer, young competitor will pull the rug from under you and take over your market. You cannot let your company be locked into a single way of doing things, lest you sign its death warrant. Why is it then, that big companies are often the ones that fail? That get out-innovated by their smaller rivals into insignificance? Do they not recognize that they need that speed to survive?

After all, the economic benefits of a fast-moving enterprise are many. Being first to the market has obvious economic value – you get the media attention, build customer loyalty and often earn bigger margins. This also means that firms will quickly identify and move on opportunities, ensure that no opportunity is one missed. They can reduce the impact of potential problems, because any solutions will be out the door quicker, mitigating the damages. And, of course, it allows them to quickly respond to changes in market conditions.

Often, the charge is laid that big companies are bureaucratic, more interested in their pet projects than innovation and reinvention. But the lessons of the market are clear, and big companies have recognized the folly of allowing bureaucracy to doom them. After all, they too were once young start-ups that fought their way through entrenched businesses to get to the top. 

No, companies usually rise to the top due to a new competitive formula they’ve discovered, one that allows them to outmanoeuvre the competition. A combination of business strategies, efficient processes, well-handled relationships and strong corporate values build them into a strong behemoth – one that competitors are too happy to ape. 

But success reinforces the belief that the company has found the ‘one true way.’ This starts to blind the strategic thinkers, and new strategies are hamstrung by being forced to fit into the ‘one true way.’ Information gets ignored as it does not fit into the strategic vision, and the way is lost. These strategies, of course resulted in efficient processes, and those get locked in. Instead of processes, they become something far worse – routines. Instead of continually searching to improve processes, no newer efficient methods are tried because that’s not the ‘one true way.’

Even customer relationships become shackles – the need to maintain existing customers keep them from trying new innovations, for fear or losing them. And even a company’s values, as you’d expect from finding the ‘one true way’ can turn into dogmas. Values turn into rules and regulations, within which innovation dies. 

 But it doesn’t have to. Back in 1989, Dave Cutler was a legend in the software industry. He’d programmed the VMS operating system for Digital Equipment Corporation and was spearheading a new team on the west coast of the USA, developing a new operating system for their PRISM computer. Then DEC cancelled the project. Microsoft heard about this, and Steve Ballmer, their Sales Manager and later CEO, contacted Cutler and offered him a job developing a new version of their current operating system, initially called NT OS/2. 

Microsoft had identified nascent threats from two sources: the potential of new chips replacing the Intel chips their software was based on, and the danger of the Unix operating system from mainframes coming to personal computers and destroying their MS-DOS based hegemony of the PC market. Dave Cutler, with a few colleagues who joined from DEC, was tasked with building a ‘Unix-killer’ that would operate on any chip.

By the end of 1989, Cutler and his team has a working prototype, and was ready to show it to the world. But something else happened – Windows 3.0 was released, and it sold 16 million copies in 6 months. Microsoft decided that it would not do to have this NT New Technology based on OS/2, which it had developed with long-time partner IBM, and Cutler was tasked with turning it into Windows NT.

It took him another 3 years to reach that goal – his team having expanded to 150 people from the initial 6, and the project ultimately costing Microsoft US$ 150 million, at the time the most expensive computer program ever. But it reached it goals. It became the core of the Windows operating system we continue to use until today, and Windows 10 is the latest descendant of Windows NT. Because it could be ported to any chip, when 64-bit chips made their debut, Windows was ready. Due to Dave Cutler and Windows NT, Microsoft became the company that it is today.

Many companies had tried similar projects before, and had failed. Cutler’s move to Microsoft was the result of one of those failures at DEC. What was different? First, Cutler was given the resources to do what he must – US$ 150 million is no small sum. Furthermore, Gates had ceded authority to Cutler and Paul Maritz, who kept an eye on the market, and made sure Cutler stayed informed. 

Then there was the teamwork – but not the usual kind. Teams are generally homogenous – quite antithetical to creative work. Cutler’s team were full of very opinionated people. They broke old rules and made new ones when the old no longer made sense. They didn’t ask permission before taking important decisions that they believed would improve NT. And they ignored any prohibitions that seemed nonsensical.  And finally, when they had to make a choice, Microsoft broke from the shackles of their IBM alliance to chart its own course. 

Microsoft was already an established giant when the NT project launched, and the 150 people that it blossomed into is far larger than a start-up. Yet they still managed to bring about that innovation that saved the company from ruin, and gave it life for another 15 years. They changed the world. No start-up would have had the resources for a project such as this. Perhaps the lesson to be learned here is that all big companies can turn into dinosaurs, too big to move. But if you want to survive, you have to learn to be nimble.