ROBERT OWEN — Technology Leader & Musician
Technology leadership, music, and the space where they overlap

Orchestrating Technology – Part 3

Trust: The Discipline of Vulnerability Part 2: Timing Structure makes scale possible.Timing makes scale stable. Trust makes scale sustainable, and this is the uncomfortable one. In the horn section, you cannot play someone else’s instrument for them. You can prepare.You can listen.You can support. But when the entrance comes, they are responsible for their note. And you are dependent on … Read more

Orchestrating Technology – Part 2

Timing: Leadership Has Tempo Part 1: Structure Architecture without tempo just sits there. You can design a clean system. You can define ownership. You can document everything properly. And it can still fail if the timing is wrong. Horn players learn this early. Oh, the wonders of being able to play almost an entire scale with one valve. Treacherous. Trombonists, … Read more

Orchestrating Technology– Part 1

Structure: Architecture Before Heroics Structure. Timing. Trust. What Enterprise Technology Leadership and French Horn Playing Have in Common, More Than They Should I recently fed my website into one of those AI podcast tools. The kind that reads your content and then confidently discusses you like it just binge-watched your entire life. It was pretty neat – two fake people … Read more

The Night of Two Romeos

Creation, catastrophe, and a wall of horn sound This week’s gigs with the KSO put me in the third horn chair. A thankless position, really. Not principal. Not second. Not the flashy exposed heroics or the harmonic glue everyone politely ignores. Third horn lives in the interior, structural, supportive, occasionally ominous, frequently essential. It’s an inspiring place to sit. By … Read more

The Saga of the Spinach Caserole

This is another post I originally posted on LinkedIn. Sharing here to keep a good history of the article. That original post can be viewed here. So, each year for Thanksgiving I make two dishes – by request.A cheesecake (some say it’s glorious, some bow, others simply whisper its name), and a parmesan spinach that has become… well… a thing … Read more