|
Friday, March 2, 2007
Let's call it heart 
| | Companies that have a character do so thanks to countless individual souls working in concert. |
| | Doc Searls doesn¹t really speak about soul in the post linked below; instead, he¹s analyzing the experience that Starbucks provides to its customers. These two are different animals. The experience is a sum of values exchanged in the transaction; it Starbucks, this translates to the coffee I drank, the music I listened to (willingly or not), the barista's smile or lack thereof, etc. Put in another words, experience is an aggregate product that companies build and customers consume. |
| | I imagine the company's soul is a manifestation of an invisible network of relationships and is co-created and experienced by those inside. It¹s a set of values and principles governing day-to-day tasks. |
| | The soul and its shape and quality affects that product in some way, though I would argue that even soulless companies can provide a wonderful experience. For instance, my friends in a symphony are often forced to submit to a sadistic conductor who makes their job a living hell; when they go on stage, however, they uplift and caress and ennoble the audience with an experience that is a direct product of the orchestra's hellish soul. |
| | He's right that I didn't unpack "soul" in that post. I did unpack it, a long time ago, in this section of a much longer piece I wrote in 1997 for Reality 2.0, which I was kind of a blog before there were blogs. (Though I thought of it mostly as a place where I could put articles no print publication would accept.) |
| | I didn't call it "soul" then. I called it where you come from. It's the source of originality that can't come from anywyhere else. Nordstrom began as a shoe store. It still has the DNA of a shoe store. Microsoft came from desktops. Still does. Apple comes from Steve Jobs' art. |
| | And Starbucks comes from coffee. Or whatever Howard Schultz was trying to do with coffee in the first place. |
| | When I gave this speech to a retail conference in Lucerne back in 2000, I said that companies have souls, and gave several examples. The next morning an American guy buttonholed me in the restaurant of our hotel and told me he agreed with what I said in my speech. Later he came over to join my wife and myself at a table outside the conference. There he explained that his company's soul was that of a 5 & 10¢ store — and is still run, essentially, by its dead founder. The guy was Lee Scott, the CEO of Wal-Mart, and the dead founder was Sam Walton. |
| | CRM is mostly concerned with the experience, and I am afraid that by emphasising processes, tools and technologies, CRM is hurting the soul. It¹s fine to have a company-wide survey system so that management can get an answer it needs from everybody, but ³companies that relate to their employees only through surveys and emails² are ³soulless places to work² indeed. (Adriana) I sincerely hope that the efforts put in defining CRM 2.0 will address the cultural issues as earnestly as the technological and business ones. |
| | I agree. That's why we started ProjectVRM. Think of VRM — Vendor Relationship Management — as a way for customers to help companies get back in touch with their souls. CRM 2.0, whatever it becomes, won't work unless it engages VRM 1.0 (whatever it becomes too). |
Everything is Muscilaginous
| | The short answer: I don't. |
| | The longer answers: I start fires. Or I roll snowballs. Cluetrain was a fire. Still is. It took communication (not community) to start it. The four authors of that tome have only seen each other in the flesh, as a group, twice. If there's a cluetrain "community", I'm not sure what it is. A lot of friends and fellow-travelers, sure; but not "community". User-centric Identity is a snowball. It's also a community, to the degree that it's organized, sort of. |
| | I grew up in the '60s, when any group on the Left suddenly attained the status of "community". Most famously there were the "anti-war community" and the "black community". Neither were, in the literal sense of the word. But the label stuck. I was a "community organizer" for awhile in an anti-poverty organization. I sucked at it, but I got to see how the good organizers succeeded: they had practical purposes. They worked to get things done. The best I knew was Andy Marshall, who ran a program called HOWTO (Housing [something that started with O] With Training Opportunity) out of a defunct bowling alley at the south end of Greenwood Lake, New Jersey, back around the turn of the '70s. HOWTO was a project to get unemployed folks from Ringwood's Mine Area to learn the construction trade while building houses which they would end up owning. It worked because it had a purpose and because Andy was a tireless fighter for the HOWTO cause. |
Maybe Solomon had the right idea
| | I see Anna Nicole Smith is being planted in the Bahamas, rather than in Texas. Though perhaps not permanently. According to this AP story, Smith's mother, Virgie Arthur, will likely try to get the body out of the Bahamas, said her lawyer, Tom Pirtle without elaborating. It also says her corpse is dressed in a beaded designer gown and tiara, but that the funeral is a closed-casket affair. This is presumably because Dr. Joshua Perper, the Broward County Medical Examiner who will announce the cause of death next week — one month after Ms. Smith unexpectedly (though not too surprisingly) croaked in Miami at age 39 — described her death as an unusual case from a medical point of view, and had told (Circuit Judge Larry) Seidlin during the hearing that she was decomposing. |
| | Well, since Dr. Perper has already conducted a complete autopsy, requiring the admitedly temporary reassembly of Ms. Smith's remains, why not divvy them up like the relics of a saint? Perhaps bits of the pop culture goddess could repose in reliquaries at CNN, Playboy (which should get the implants, don'cha think?) and other shrines, sparing members of her faith long trips to the Bahamas, Texas or wherever. |
| | Hey, just trying to help out here. |
There are responses to this message:
Copyright 2009 The Doc Searls Weblog
|
