Independent consultant since 2000.
Helping people improve their way of working for stellar performance. Which is quite a challenge given the current typical corporate environment.
Currently coaching teams on both sides of the fence: business and IT. Interesting.
One of my current interests is innovation.
Supposed to work as a civil engineer in mechanics, my passion for Building Blocks was more readily satisfied with computers, where building things is cheaper and quicker (also funnier). So, this is what I do by now, working in IT.
I am an ENFP. Which means a crazy guy taking chances at spreading new ideas and practicing them. Also, means a lot of noise... Ahem.
On Kirton's test, I got 99. This is between I and A, meaning that I often act as mediating between management and people doing the work, hence my interests in NLP, team mangement and software engineering in general.
I love developing things and seeing them used by other people.
I designed Interactive Voice Response systems and spent some time explaining crypto principles on which the Digipass security token was based. I worked on call center design issues - mainly the Hub And Spoke part. I have also worked with defunct Net Dynamics, a CORBA based environment for internet applications (and I don't like the unclear strategy of Sun for application servers). I went back for a while to IVR business and moved after to a consulting company for architecture and knowledge management purposes.
I've started my own business (website is on philippeback.eu 
).
I have a strong interest on the ways to get a system done and how to have people building it enjoying the assignment. Hence, patterns play a great role in that. I feel that Psychology, Modeling and Patterns have many things in common, since people minds are governed by Mental Patterns. This is all patterns are about after all, having the same mental view of a concept for many people.
Now involved quite seriously with Pharo Smalltalk, including its Virtual Machine that I hack a tad on the iPad. Learning a ton there.
I like the following people very much for their work. I hope to be able to contribute something to their awesome work in the future.
Alan Kay Adele Goldberg Dan Ingalls Ivar Jacobson Ian Spence Scott Ambler Ward Cunningham Alistair Cockburn Martin Fowler Kent Beck Roger Sessions Aart Weijmer Roger Fisher Kurt Bittner Alan Sharp Fred Brooks Edward Yourdon Tom De Marco Tim Lister Peter Coad
I can be reached at mailto:phil@highoctane.be
See original on c2.com