Name: Robert L. Glass
Title: President, Computing Trends (in lighter moments, I refer to myself
as "Despot")
Company: Computing Trends (a "multi-thousand dollar a year"
comany!)
Contact Info:
rlglass@acm.org
How I arrived at my present job (academic and other influences): Back in the 1950s, when I graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a Master's in Math, the industrial field of computing was just beginning. I had taken two courses in the subject in college, and that put me miles ahead of any competition! The courses had not been easy (they were probably the hardest of my academic career), but the work seemed challenging and rewarding, so I chose to start out in the software field at North American Aviation. I cannot imagine, in retrospect, a more exciting field to have entered - and grown with!
How I organize my day: I am self-employed. That means I make my own choices about what to to, and when to do it. I generally try to get the easy things off my plate first, since I want to reserve bigger blocks of time - without pressure - for the more important things. That system will only work so long as the easy things don't consume very much of my time.
Amount of time spent working daily (at home and office): All of my time is spent in my home office (I have no other office). Being self-employed, I can mix business and pleasure during the work day. I generally work parts of seven days a week (it's hard to avoid work when it stares you in the face at home, and besides my wife is a workaholic!) I would guess my actual working time averages 6-8 hours per seven days.
What I do to get myself thinking creatively: Generally I'm a self-starter. I also find that, if I am running out of creative thoughts, reading someone else's creative material starts the juices flowing again. (Or perhaps reading some of my own creative stuff!)
My problem-solving strategy: For any difficult problem, hard-part first. If you tackle the easy parts first, you often have to redo your work when you finally tackle the harder parts.
What I do to relieve stress: Avoid all deadline work. If it is unavoidable, beat the deadline so it doesn't impact me. I am a strong opponent of today's deadline-focused professional culture.
My hero, mentor, or person I most admire and why: Ex-president Jimmy Carter. He is an interesting blend of social conscience, activism, and financial conservatism.
What I do to mentor those who work for me: I work alone. On those occasions when I have worked with others, I treat my colleagues with respsect (or at least I think I do!) and try to treat all questions as legitimate inquiries, not annoying interruptions.
How a negative event changed my life in a positive way: Early in my career, I received a scathingly bad review of a paper I had submitted to a professional journal. Instead of giving up and sulking, I simply re-submitted it elsewhere, and it was accepted! Later in my career, I failed to receive tenure at an institution that I loved being part of. I picked up the pieces, moved on, and the rewards of my career choices became even richer than they had been up until then. It is important to remember that judgements, especially in a field as new as computing, can be sometimes very personal and occasionally very wrong!
One event or decision in my life I wish I could go back and change: Early in my life, I tended to re-think a lot of the decisions I made, and the result was a lot of self-doubt. Although I believe that self-doubt can be constructive, in my case it was leaving me indecisive and unrewarded. I began the practice, at the end of each day, of reminding myself of what I had accomplished that was positive during that day. This "power of positive thinking" approach has been an important part of my ability to feel cheerful and confident about most of what I do. Perhaps a bad result is that I cannot think, in answer to this question, about any event I would go back and change!
What values are the most important to me and what I value in others: Honesty. Openness. Being real. Integrity. I hate phonies!
What inspires, motivates, or gets me excited about my job on a daily basis: The thought that I am making a contribution (via the stuff I write, and the speeches I present) to a field that I dearly love.
Biography: Robert L. Glass is president of Computing Trends, publishers of The Software Practitioner and PERC (Practical Emerging Research Concepts in Information Technology). He has been active in the field of computing and software for over 40 years, largely in industry (1954-1982 and 1988-present), but also as an academic (1982-1988). He is the author of over 20 books and 60 papers on computing subjects, editor of Elsevier's Journal of Systems and Software, and a columnist for several periodicals including Communications of the ACM (the "Practical Programmer" column) and IEEE Software ("The Loyal Opposition"). He was for 15 years a Lecturer for the ACM, and he received an honorary Ph.D. from Linkoping University in Sweden in 1995. He describes himself by saying "my head is in the academic end of computing, but my heart is in its practice."
Last Modified:
Location: www.acm.org/crossroads/dayinlife/bios/robert_glass.html