The Digital Sublime: the myth of cyberspace revolutions (Workshop PHSS 2017)

Friday, 26 May, 18.15-19.30
“Ferdinand” Room, 2^nd Floor, Building A
Chair: ROXANA PATRAȘ, SORINA POSTOLEA

Invited Speakers

DIANA LEFTER, Management consultant at KPMG Romania
CORNEL FĂTULESCU, IT developer and coach, founder Agile Hub

We aim at extending radical management (agile, lean) concepts from software industry to the rest of the business world and to other domains, such as humanities and sociology. So, in our workshop, we will not talk about cyberspace or any other Internet metaphors (World Wide Web, virtual reality, global village, etc.). We will not cite copiously the works of Marshall McLuhan, Vincent Mosco or Ray Kurzweil. We will not envisage the forthcoming 3D-printers, flying cars or quantum computers. Instead, we will endeavor to deconstruct all these myths, and propose instead a down-to-earth approach. In fact, using radical management techniques is considered nowadays one of the revolutionary solutions in IT industry.

Diana and Cornel will explain in their presentations what radical management is and why it can be considered a Copernican revolution in the IT world. For decades, the finest management minds struggled to solve a fundamental conundrum: How do you get disciplined execution along continuous innovation? How can one discipline and structure novelty? Promising efforts to improve one dimension always seem to cause losses on the other one. Disciplined execution crushes innovation, and innovation by its nature is undisciplined. The problem has seemed insoluble. Yet, just over a decade ago, a set of major management breakthroughs occurred. These management practices, under various labels such as Agile, Scrum, Kanban and Lean, but more generally named radical management, have been field-tested and proven in thousands of organizations around the world.

We will try to figure out how the principles of radical management can be applied in projects including professionals from the fields of humanities, new media, sociology, history. We will be delighted if we would be able to figure out in our workshop ways of applying what is best in our apparently un-matching worlds. Step by step. Together.

Diana LEFTER, product owner & management consultant at KPMG Romania

An IT professional, with more than 18 years of experience in the IT industry in US and Canada, Diana started her career as a software developer and continued with various management positions. She is promoting collaboration, empathy and authenticity as key values for working in the IT world. She does not have any books published, but she has exciting “stories” about many large scale software implementations she managed through the years, working with people all around the world, often from remote locations.

She is also an artist at heart and mother of one son. Currently, she is a product owner at KPMG Romania, very much involved in the IT community, where she can be heard speaking often. A product owner is a person who designs and architects a product in such a way as to delight the customer J

Her newest passion is extending radical management (agile, lean) concepts from software industry to the rest of the business world and also other domains, such as humanities and sociology.

Cornel FĂTULESCU, IT developer and coach, founder Agile Hub

I am a fan of removing “forms without contents” through education, joint vision, focalization of energies, fair-mindedness and great patience.