Gartner analyst Will Hahn is at his happiest when he's performing for an audience.
He's been a showman from the age of six, when he played Jesus in a school production. "I think I was typecast," he jokes, flicking back his messiah-like long hair.
Hahn certainly has a charisma about him that turns audiences into admiring disciples and doubters into true believers. You don't get to be a principal research analyst with Gartner easily, and they're all highly experienced and immaculately slick. But Hahn's sessions are the ones to attend if you want offbeat humour and subversive thinking. Perhaps that comes from his previously being a history teacher with a flair for keeping bored teenagers engaged.
"I'm not analytical about my own performance but I'm an aggressively outgoing person. I can't be happier than when I'm facing a bunch of people," he says. "Gartner analysts do what they have to do, which is make complicated stuff sound simple. I'm deeply uncertain that's what I do, but I'm worth a few chuckles."
He's being facetious rather than self-deprecating, because Hahn isn't saddled with any irritating false modesty.
South African audiences aren't demanding enough, he says. It's easy to make them laugh, but harder to make them interact and extract full value from the presentations. "The audiences in South Africa are just wonderful. If anything, they're too polite and quite shy about asking questions." That stems from a reluctance to be in the spotlight rather than an unwillingness to let rival CIOs hear their problems or benefit from the answers, he believes.
Barbarians and thugs
"US audiences are more aggressive. We're pretty well-schooled in the US to think of ourselves as barbarians and thugs so we're not surprised when it happens. The audiences understand that we're on the service side and they're the customers so they butt in with a question when they feel like it," he says. "My first career was as a teacher, with kids of 15 and 16, and interaction is crucial. If you're the only one talking, you're not doing as well as you could be doing."
Hahn also satisfies his showmanship through singing and writing. He met his wife when he auditioned for a musical, and their daughter is also very musical. Together, they sing to patients in hospital and perform Christmas shows.
"I'll never not be in a singing group; it's a real brotherhood for life. But we're scattered all across the country so we only sing at each other's weddings. Pretty soon we'll get together to sing at each other's funerals," he laughs.
Hahn has been with Gartner for 18 years and, oddly, his careers have swung from one end of the time scale to the other. He studied, then taught ancient history, and now studies pioneering and rapidly evolving technologies.
His hair and beard are tinged with grey, but his enthusiasm for work and dissecting technology trends is undiminished. While his colleagues often move back into the industry, Hahn is happy to be a thinker rather than a doer. He has no desire to start implementing ideas rather than analysing them.
"I was a teacher and I'm still trying to pass knowledge along. I'm not really doing anything or making anything. But I did replace the garbage disposal unit under the sink when we first moved into our home 15 years ago. That was an enormous achievement for me and I have never let my wife forget it!"
He is content with his job and doesn't need to force any changes to keep it fresh, because ICT changes all by itself, he says. "I just want to keep doing the same thing, that's my instinct, like teaching the same body of knowledge to new kids who are all fresh-eyed and supposedly interested in learning. That's what was supposed to happen."
I was a teacher before this and I'm still trying to pass knowledge along.
What actually happened was that a teaching salary just didn't meet the bills when Hahn married and started a family. He still does some teaching, however, because his daughter is schooled at home. Twice a week, some home-taught children get together with parents who teach their own special subjects. "I get to teach history, which is a tremendous joy to me."
With three cats in his house acting as an early-morning wake-up call, Hahn is usually up by 4.30am. That gives him plenty of time to pursue his other hobby of writing epic fantasy novels. Now I picture him as a warlock rather than a messiah, wearing sweeping gowns and chanting incantations.
Epic fantasy
He has had several sword-and-sorcery tales published, including Judgement's Tale and The Eye of Kog, and he considers himself an indie-author evangelist.
One of his talks at Garter's Cape Town Symposium was about digital services, including online publishing. "Anyone can get published for practically nothing so if you have a book in you, why not? It's a bunch of electrons so the incremental cost of pushing out another copy is pretty darn zero," he says. "That makes it radically open and exciting and threatening to the incumbents. Book publishers are going through agony right now."
But writing is similar to his work as an analyst, he says, by sitting at a computer tapping a keyboard, often without producing anything solid and tangible.
If a youngster asked him for career advice, he would tell them to become a carpenter or any other profession that actually makes something, he says. "Nothing makes your wife lose respect for you more than you staring at a screen all day. There's no production."
I'm sure he's joking again. But it could explain why Hahn relishes being on stage enjoying the applause after producing an insightful and entertaining presentation.
First published in the October 2014 issue of ITWeb Brainstorm magazine.
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