I have a very collaborative style of working, and I've brought that approach both to my design work and to my management style. In 1994, I wrote a paper about collaboration between design and engineering. The paper came out of my experience working with two wonderful software engineers at Sun to build Forum, an application that supported video-based presentations over the newtwork. Rather than pitting design against engineering, we found a way to create something that we felt was both well-implemented and well-designed.

In 1998, after I had been directing at Electric Communities for about six months, I wrote a paper about our collaborative style of managing. I was officially co-directing for a while and then became the sole director, but all along, we were in fact collaborating with two other senior engineers to run the 35-member engineering department. We found that by working closely together, we were able to take advantage of each of our strengths and temper each other's weaknesses, communicate more effectively and extensively, and generally have more flexibility. This required extensive communciation and mutual respect, which to my mind made it all the more gratifying. After this experience, I became a believer in the notion of pairing people with complementary skills and having them share a leadership or management role.