Pop Star: Mickey McManus

It’s a hard rain comin’, and Mickey McManus wants to tell you about it. “There’s an economic impact to ignoring the complexity of information,” he says. “Scooping information out of the air – that’s where the future is going. It’s not just pc’s.

“Complexity is exploding,” he adds. “Making it easier is our business.”

Our business is MAYA, in SouthSide Works. MAYA, all in caps, not for the South American civ, which developed a written language, fab art ‘n’ architecture, and powerhouse math and astronomy, but an acronym for Most Advanced Yet Acceptable.

According to the MAYA mythology, 19 years ago three CMUers (a computer scientist, cognitive psychologist, and industrial designer) found that average folk were struggling with technology. Accurately predicting that the problem would only become worse, in 1989 they formed MAYA to ease human-technology relationships.

A dozen years later, 2001, they hired Chicago-trained industrial designer Mickey McManus as President/CEO. Coming from élan communications, whose clients included IBM, Nokia and MasterCard, among many others, McManus’ big score was the concept, design, and construction of the Samsung Electronics Pavilion at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney – a knockout that hosted a mere million visitors.

But McManus didn’t like the stress, didn’t like the fact that “we were constantly marketing things that were thrown away.”

So when he was offered the MAYA gig, he took it. His job? “Make sure we can open the doors every day,” McManus says. Seven years after arriving, he’s proud “that I didn’t break the place.

“Part of my management style is to push the envelope,” he adds. “‘Let’s do creative things and make it happen.’ I try to inspire people to do the impossible.” He pauses. “We hire people who have done the impossible.”

In a real-world sense, that translates into making life easier for people faced with the onslaught of technology and information. MAYA speaks of Taming Complexity; McManus speaks of “making technology a natural extension of the human body.”

And it’s working out just fine. With 70% of their business word-of-mouth, 60 percent of MAYA’s clients come from Fortune 500 companies. Working with the likes of DARPA (which calls MAYA's work the biggest advancement in 30 years), Merrill Lynch, Whirlpool, Kodak and Hewlett-Packard, MAYA often stays anonymous – which is fine with McManus. “They want us to be their skunk works,” he says. “So we can’t talk always about what we do. Because they want to take credit for it.”

Competing with Google, Amazon, Apple, and Adobe for recruiting, he hires from Oxford to Austin. Including spin-outs it's150 jobs and counting. “We pull people in,” he says.

McManus lives with his family on four acres in Oakdale. “It’s like going to a little resort at the end of the day,” he says. Given his travel schedule, it also helps that home is a mere eight minutes from the airport.

“Pittsburgh,” he says, “is amazing. It’s got the amenities without the challenges. And with Google, Seagate, and others, there’s a lot of interesting stuff happening here.”

Like MAYA, Mick?

“Well,” McManus shrugs, “we want to change the world.”

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Abby Mendelson’s latest book, End of the Road, a collection of short stories, is available at amazon and bn.com.

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Photographs copyright Brian Cohen