The Photo of a Banana

A few days ago Instagram showed me a video of Steve Jobs. 1992, a lecture hall at the MIT Sloan School of Management, a room full of future managers. Jobs asks who of them wants to go into consulting. Then he explains why he thinks little of it.

His image for it is a banana. The consultant knows exactly what a banana looks like, and the company gets a good photo of it from him. Accurate, even useful, but flat. He can hang lots of these photos on his wall, bananas, peaches, grapes, and say he has worked with fruit. “But you never really taste it,” Jobs says. He never tasted the banana.

I watched the video three times. The thought was not new to me. But in 2004 I could not have put it that way, and that is when I would have needed it.

Six months at a consultancy

At 23 I worked for six months at a large IT consultancy. Then I quit and founded Smarter Business Solutions, rather naively and convinced that I could do it BETTER. In capital letters, that is really how I wrote it back then.

I would not sign that arrogance today. At 23 I knew very little. What I have learned since is not in any presentation. Most of it shows as wrinkles in my face or as grey hair.

The parking garage

In 2010, on a Saturday, I stood at the pay machine of a Vienna parking garage and could not pay 15 euros. Company account empty, private account empty, company credit card over the limit. Julia had to drive in from Wiener Neustadt to get me out. I have written down the whole parking garage story before. I still don’t find it funny.

Then came the bill. Paying out a partner, returning 220,000 euros of research funding, shrinking the company from 20 employees to four. Anyone could have read from the numbers that it could not go on like that; I did not need a consultant for that. I had to do it myself, over years, with names and faces. Those are exactly the years that do not hang on my wall as a photo.

The last slide

Right now I am working on one of the largest SharePoint migrations in Austria, 35 TB, more than 130 major projects. A concept of how it could work would have been written in a few weeks. Instead we are delivering it, and I am the one who answers for it succeeding.

You only feel the difference in the middle of it. A concept is finished with the last slide. Delivery is finished when the last project is across and people work with it the next morning. In between there is nobody I could pass the buck to, and I don’t want to. Harry Truman’s sign on his desk has applied in our company for years: The buck stops here.

The prototype in an hour

With AI, the photo of the banana has never been cheaper. A concept, an architecture sketch, a prototype that works in the demo: today that takes an hour. I use it every day myself, and our products come together faster than ever.

An AI made this photo in a few seconds, as a nod to Cattelan’s banana. I didn’t have a real banana at home.

But a prototype is a photo too. The tasting happens in production, when 35 TB do not fit into a test tenant, when Microsoft documents only half of an interface, and when on Monday morning someone is looking for their drawings. This year it feels like every second profile belongs to an AI expert. How many of them have kept a system running for a year is another question.

I have nothing against consultants, and certainly nothing against AI. Consultants see from outside what you miss from inside, and some of our clients work very well with the big firms. It’s just that I am still there after the presentation. When something breaks, they call me.

Rhêmes-Notre-Dame

In trail running it is even simpler, because nobody can run for you. A training plan is a photo of a banana too. The zones are right, so is the elevation per week. What it tastes like you only find out at night on the mountain.

This year I stopped at the Tor des Géants in Rhêmes-Notre-Dame, about 270 kilometres before Courmayeur. Dizziness at altitude, cramps, at some point nothing would go down any more. Afterwards I wrote that there is nobody I could hand the responsibility to. Too little to drink, too few electrolytes, a summer with too many construction sites. None of that was in any plan. Now it is in my notes for 2027.

I know what the other side tastes like from ninth place at UTMB 2018. You don’t learn either from a photo. Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn, and I have almost always learned from the second.

The migration is not finished yet. I am still here.