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Monday, November 13, 2006
Paying hard-to-get 
| | I'm on the 14th floor of a hotel in downtown Denver, and my Verizon cell phone (a Treo 700p) shows "No signal". I go to the window and hold the phone against the glass. No change. |
| | "It's the network", Verizon's ads say. Glad I know what to blame. |
| | Can't wait to go back to Cingular. The company was far from perfect, but network service was a lot better, overall, than Verizon's. |
More work than shop
| | The second Internet Identity Workshop (tag: iiw2006) for this year will be held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View on December 4-6. It's an unconference. No panels. No scheduled speakers. No booths. No organizers other than Phil Windley, Kaliya Hamlin and myself. Nobody makes money. The fees are low and just cover expenses. The conference is about getting stuff done. I've been to a lot of conferences and workshops over the years, and I've never seen more forward movement than I seen at every IIW. |
| | So if you're interested in user-centric identity technologies, standards, applications, use cases or whatever, IIW is a great opportunity to make something happen with any and all that stuff. |
It's not about the money
| | Why isn't Hugh McLeod known as a famous entrepreneur? One reason is that he's a famous blogger and cartoonist. It's easy to overlook the fact that he also sells clothing and wine, through his work with English Cut and Stormhoek. And that he makes money doing it. (How un-hip is that?) |
| | But even if we pay close attention to his work with those businesses (unavoidable for those of us who read Hugh frequently), we tend not to think of that work as entrpreneurial. After all, online entrepreneurs are people that leverage venture capital into fame and IPOs or buy-outs by the likes of Amazon, Google or Yahoo. Not bloggers who joyfully work on behalf of people and products they love. |
| | Yet Hugh is in business, makes money, and has a non-trivial influence in the market categories of his partners. Thomas Mahon and Stormhoek are changing Saville Row and the wine business, and not just in the way both are marketed. Both markets are becoming more human, more accessible, more interesting, more fun. Also a shitload less stuffy: |
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| | Somewhere in the vast oeuvre of Peter Drucker (a large sampling of which is buried in boxes of books here at my house, waiting to go back on shelves after months or years without a permanent home — which we now have, but the shelves aren't built out yet), the old man talks about why people go into business. It isn't just to make money, he says. It certainly isn't to "deliver value to stockholders". It's deeper and more important than either of those motivations. The most successful businesses follow interests and passions that aren't just about making money. (Even some blue-chip companies put their customers, employees and communities ahead of their stockholders, as a matter of policy. Witness the Credo of Johnson & Johnson for example.) |
| | Of course, making money matters. It's just not the only thing that matters. To focus only on the money is to miss the deeper meaning of business, of markets, of all human purpose. |
| | Which is what? you might ask. |
| | Yesterday we went to hear Garry Wills, the scholar and author, lecture on St. Paul (Wills' latest book is What Paul Meant). He closed by reading St. Paul's famous discourse on love, read so often at weddings that it has long since passed into cliché. Yet Wills wanted us to hear it again, and think anew about what it means. Here is the core text, pulled from its religious context, so it speaks only of love itself: |
| | Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, (love) is not pompous, it is not inflated, it is not rude, it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury, it does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. |
| | The word "love" appears fourteen times in the Hughtrain text, and more times again in the comments below. |
| | I think this is what Hugh and I were both trying to get at, in the latest (if not lastest... we're never sure) Gillmor Gang. I'm not sure if that section of the show will survive the editing process, but I am sure I came away from the polylogue with a lot more clarity about where Hugh comes from and why we all do what we do. |
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