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	Phil's Blogservations Saturday, April 23, 2005 Posted by philgomes 2:42 PM Executive Happiness Continues Breakthrough Rally, Surges Additional 45.2% Executive Happiness Continues Breakthrough Rally, Surges Additional 45.2% Okay, guys. You gotta start sharing whatever you've been bogarting all to yourself. Clearly, with a dramatic week-over-week gain of 45.2%, there's enough to go around. The Gomes Index is now at 134.43. I would've never guessed. Is it the new Pope? George "Webvan" Shaheen as Siebel's new CEO? What? I'll tellya what pleased me this week. By way of IT Conversations, I downloaded Larry Magid's excellent interview with Gordon Moore. Listened to it at the gym this morning. Moore is remarkably modest for having built the idealogical railroad upon which technological progress has traveled for decades. This got me thinking. Some tech industry folks I've talked with in the past have taken the provocative stance that Moore's Law is kind of silly when taken in the context of its namesake's remarkable body of scientific work. I've often wondered how Moore privately feels about the tech mantra his ideas created — that maybe this "law" unfairly overshadowed so many more concrete accomplishments, like running the seminal R&D lab at Fairchild. Likewise, Doug Engelbart is revered the world over as the inventor of the computer mouse, but he did so much more. (Check out the video archive of his groundbreaking 1968 demonstration.) In fact, Doug has often gone on record as saying that we have so much further to go, even. "That's why I'm grey," the then-seventy-six-year-old said in a 2001 CNN interview. "I'm really only forty." Or think about poor Douglas Coupland. He coined the term "Generation X." While, on one hand, it's pretty remarkable to write a book and have the title be almost universally understood (whether or not you've actually read the thing), it's also an accomplishment that overshadows a larger and arguably more compelling body of work. Huey Lewis had a good answer. He simply stopped trying to out-do the blockbuster Sports album. Do you remember Small World? Two albums after Sports, he and his band allowed themselves the freedom to explore jazz and world-music. The result was a creatively liberating album, though perhaps not an aneurysm-generatingly successful one. Sometimes when the railroad ends, you have to hop onto another track. It's amusing to imagine that Gordon Moore might have dinners with CalTech's Carver Mead (the one credited with somewhat offhandedly coining the term "Moore's Law") and say, "Darn it, Carver. I'm never going to get out from under this!" Then again, if your ideas are to become the pre-emptive metaphor for modern technological progress — even to the exclusion of everything else you've done — then there are certainly worse cards to be dealt. Time to play... Until next post... HOME | OBSESSIONS | FAQ | HEROES | CAREER | BLOG | CONTACT Note that the views expressed on this site do not necessarily reflect those of Phil's employer, its business partners, its clients, or anyone or anything that doesn't come from Phil.	ABOUT THIS BLOG This blog not only discusses PR and media matters, but Phil's everyday observations about a variety of topics. EMAIL phil[at] philgomes[[dot}]com SYNDICATE Feedburner ARCHIVE YAHOO! IM SKYPE WISH LIST PITCH POLICY MY PHOTOS www.flickr.com Photostream RSS Enter your Email Powered by FeedBlitz COMMENT AND TRACKBACK POLICY Comments and trackbacks are unmoderated, though I will delete the patently offensive ones. Any comments and trackbacks are the opinions of the individual writer of those comments and trackbacks, and not those of Phil Gomes, his employer, its clients, or its business partners. If you have a bone to pick, bug the people who wrote the comment or trackback.