Aug 1, 2002 12:00 PM

The Peacekeeper

Andrew Cowie: Commander of an anti-tank platoon in Bosnia at age 25. Learned how to do things military-style. Now producing mobile apps as director of operations for mobile messaging service Upoc. In combat in the wireless theater of operations.

I went to Bosnia in 1999 on a peacekeeping tour with NATO's stabilization force. It was tense because I was there during the Kosovo War. NATO was bombing the shit out of Serbia and Kosovo next door. It was an enormous challenge, making it clear to the Bosnian Serbs that they weren't to retaliate and to the Bosnian Muslims and Croats that they weren't to take advantage of the situation.

More on this Topic

Industry News

Blogs

Briefing Room

Any hierarchical business works almost identically to the military. Everyone thinks it's different, but it's not. The North American way of doing business evolved largely from all the veterans coming home from WWII who had just had a six-year exercise in how military hierarchies work.

As a combat officer, my job was to make decisions quickly under pressure of time. To think clearly, think on my feet, but most of all THINK. That's the difference between being in operations and being in any other corporate department: decision-making under time pressure. Whether the corporate e-mail is down or the entire platform is offline because something broke at 3:00 in the morning, you constantly have to assess what haven't we done, what are we missing. I don't always know what's GOING to happen, but I know what HAS to happen.

Coordinating different departments is the hardest part because everyone's under pressure. We have a month-long development cycle. Then there are bug-fixes and change requests that evolve over a week, and oh-my-God emergencies that take three hours.

My tour in Bosnia lasted seven months, but telecom never stops. You rarely get a sense of completion before you move on to the next thing. Managers need to give their people a sense of closure. That's important to me, and I don't get it much. I sure as hell try to give it to my guys. Because the pressure doesn't let up. -As told to Ed Gubbins