This is apropos of nothing, just something I was thinking about this afternoon due to its absence in my current job. Maybe it will be a thought provoking diversion from the how-doya questions (not that there's anything wrong with that....) and the endless angst over the future of FoxPro. God, we all need a break from that and an open-ended question worth pondering.

A few years ago I went to a C developers conference at the Marriott in downtown San Francisco. My conference fee was paid for by Microsoft, and thank you very much. There was a keynote speaker every morning. This one particular morning it was a guy named Jim McCarthy. He was a honcho on the first version of Visual C++ and then Actor, one of the first object oriented languages when that was still a quaint phrase. From the conference brochure it didn't sound like there was going to be much technical meat, the bits and the bytes, and I seriously considered blowing it off and sleeping in. Boy, am I glad I didn't.

The session started right on time, straggly assed developers still walking in. Jim McCarthy didn't look any less straggly assed than the rest of us. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and jeans. Beard, growly. He looked like some guy you might meet walking the beach. He picked up the microphone and spoke into it as he wandered back and forth across the stage.

His topic was successful software projects. And his main point was that the key ingredient is shared vision.

Shared vision, he said, is when your heads go up and down at the same time and side to side at the same time. Something is said at a meeting and you exchange glances? Nothing said? (Quoting as best I can remember). And you know as soon as it's said you're already on the same page.

That's shared vision, he said. And without it your project is doomed. He went into finer detail but that was my takeaway -- you want to be on a team with shared vision. That's developer nirvana.

He said one other memorable thing in his talk. He said if you're working 60 hours a week you better believe in what you're doing. Some smartass lady down front shouted out, "You mean we can only work 60 hours a week now?" Laughter. He stopped. He went off his notes and talked straight to her. "If you're working 80 hours a week you're evading something," he said.