Perhaps no one is more responsible for making ‘TRON come true’ than Alan Kay — who, no coincidence, is married to the original TRON screenwriter, Bonnie MacBird. Kay consulted at length with the TRON filmmakers and MacBird named the character of Alan in the film (whose alter-ego was the Tronster himself) after her husband.

A graduate student who studied and collaborated with computer graphics pioneer Ivan Sutherland at the University of Utah, Kay was one of the legendary Xerox PARC geniuses who helped lay the foundation for the billions upon billions of dollars in new wealth spun out of Silicon Valley in the 1970s and -80s. His resume reads like a history of popular computing: PARC; Apple Fellow; Chief Scientist at Atari; Disney Imagineer; HP Fellow; created the Dynabook design that became the prototype for laptop computers and, years later, the model computer for Nicholas Negroponte’s One-Laptop-Per-Child project.

The way windows can overlap on your computer screen in what we call a Graphical User Interface (GUI)? That’s an Alan Kay trip.

The Object-Oriented Programming that underlies some of the most potent computing languages being used today, like Ruby, Python and Cold Fusion? Alan Kay and his collaborators at PARC and the Norwegian Computing Center created the language, gave it its name, and used it to build the operating system Smalltalk, which was then commercialized by Apple in its Mac computers. Good system.

Kay has won almost every major award given in the field of computer science, including the Kyoto Prize, the ACM Turing Award and the Charles Stark Draper Prize. He holds honorary doctorates from Georgia Tech, the Universita di Pisa in Italy, and the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden.

He and his team wrote the open source language Squeak that became the basis for eToys.

Today, he teaches at universities all over the world and is founder and president of Viewpoint Research Institute, which got its start-up funding from the National Science Foundation. Viewpoint recently developed an open source 2D and 3D programming language called Croquet that is simple enough for children to use.

Kay has said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” That is a statement that can only have been made by a GameChanger.

So you’re saying, “Okay great for Alan Kay, but I’m no Alan Kay. He is inventing the future and most days I feel as if I’m a victim of it; most days I’m lucky to fight the future to a draw.”

Here’s the thing, though — Alan Kay has not cornered the market on inventing the future. Everyone has the potential to create his or her own future. To do it, you have to improvise.

Here are two significant ways in which Alan Kay improvised his way into the future:

1) He stayed with his themes. In the unmapped frontiers of the future, it is the exploration of a theme that guides a business improviser toward productive outcomes, and keeps one from losing one’s bearings and, if you’re in Silicon Valley, becoming just another VC whore. Two strong themes run through Kay’s work: ‘Learning’ and ‘Dawning of an Era’. His focus on the learning, especially learning by children, helped him stay emotionally engaged with his work. The ‘Learning’ theme gives Kay his mission, his sense of purpose. He’s not in the computer science business — that’s about cold circuitry. He’s in the learning business — that’s about human beings. You could say that TRON was one big fat learning project for the entire entertainment business. An industry (CG animation) that didn’t exist before TRON today stands on its back-lit shoulders. The second theme, ‘Dawning of an Era’ is what I call Kay’s perspective that we are in the primitive era of the networked world. This perspective gives him patience and tolerance for the painstaking process of invention, as well as an essential optimism that the best is yet to come.

2) He is an artist. It is not insignificant that Kay is an accomplished musician. Musicians (with the possible exception of lead singers in rock bands) understand the sharing of ideas, the give and take, the harmonics that create the distinctive sound. Business in the Networked World is the art of creating wealth. Of communicating with one’s audience. Collaborating with one’s peers. Expressing emotions that connect people to your brand, your song…your future.

In the mythology of the Networked World, Xerox PARC was Camelot. And King Arthur was John Seely Brown.

Yesterday, my partner, Dr. Virginia Kuhn, and I saw ‘J.S.B.’ as he is widely known, speak at USC, where he is an Annenberg Fellow, about the conditions that led to the breakthrough work by the barefoot geeks at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) from the 1970s through the 90s. Much of what he talked about had a familiar ring, and not just because PARC is legendary. Turns out their work, and their culture, were highly improvisational in nature. I grokked it like crazy.

When I pulled out a pad to take notes, I discovered that all I had to write with was a Sharpie, so I Elphed some of J.S.B’.s slides instead. (I still have to get his permission to do this, so make notes while you can, he may ask me to yank them down tomorrow.)

J.S.B. noted that PARC had no ‘adult supervision’. By this, he meant that they were not required to predict what their output would be in the course of a year. The lack of oversight meant that the PARC team put extra pressure on themselves to turn out viable product. Their very existence was at stake, and the fear of failure drove them. (Sometimes it drove them mad.) At the same time, failure was honored as a learning opportunity. The lack of project oversight enabled them to re-purpose the learning from their failures into new projects.

PARC was only possible because other engineers and designers in the company did have to be predictable, and stay on plan, budget and schedule. The predictability of other departments at Xerox was a necessary condition for the existence of PARC. It’s like this (my wording not his): Monkeys need trees. Without them, things get ugly in monkeytown.

They had white boards by all the coffee pots, and all the coffee pots were wired to the ethernet. When coffee was on, people would congregate, and when they’d congragate, they’d white board some ideas.

Teams were always cross disciplinary, with artist/physicist/philosopher types co-mingling with designer/scientist/engineering folks. Poaching members of other teams was allowed. Poaching was the term he used, but J.S.B. described it more as a kind of seduction, which is very much in the spirit of improvisation. (One of my favorite improv sayings is Elaine May’s “When in doubt, seduce.”) J.S.B. finds it interesting that Google permits poaching while Yahoo does not.

He noted that the interesting stuff always happens on the periphery. Where things are riskiest and most fragile, of course.

One of the most intriguing things about the PARC story is how much of their development work they basically gave away to people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. The 250-person team was a key enabler of products that, in J.S.B.’s estimation, today generate $14 billion a year in revenue, and whose combined market value he estimates at $41 billion. He further notes that innovations by the PARC team helped Xerox survive when inexpensive Japanese-made copiers hit the U.S. market in the early 90s, and have enabled it to prosper mightily since then.

He says the talent in Singapore, China, and the next generation of scientist/artists from other Asian countries are today fully capable of doing the kinds of breakthrough work that happened at PARC from the 70s through the 90s.

After his talk, I gave him the very first advance review copy of my book, which had arrived in the mail that morning. I signed it, “To J. S. B., Who lives it!” I consider it a very good omen that King Arthur accepted an offering from this humble scribe…