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Friday, May 25, 2007
What I also said 
A Hail to Harvey
| | I just discovered that Harvey Silverglate is blogging at The Phoenix. Harvey was a student of legendary dimensions when I was a kid growing up in Maywood, New Jersey. Harvey was many grades ahead of me. His younger brother Sam was one of my good friends in Junior High. Sam was a great student too. (I wasn't.) In fact I think the first bar mitzvah I attended was Sam's. That was also probably the first and last time I saw Harvey, though I've run across his name and byline many times over the years. I last saw Sam, by the way, when I ran into him in line for the bus to Newark from our draft board in Hackensack in 1969. We had both just graduated from college and were going down there for our draft physicals. |
| | Now I see by that last link that Harvey lives in Cambridge and has lots of ties through Harvard Law School, next to which I get to hang out at the Berkman Center for about a week per month (including next week, when I'll also be participating in IS2K7 — which is free, and registration is still open). |
| | Anyway, just fun connecting dots. |
Beyond Fort Business
| | Blogs do not support hierarchies or vertical silos, they tend to be lateral and networked and and all-over-the-place. Blogs are not respecters of walls, whether inside the firm or at the firm¹s boundaries. |
| | Not having an inside or an outside. That¹s how tomorrow¹s customers will figure which of today¹s companies to bless. (The emphasis is JP's.) |
| | I've always thought that companies exist ideally for the good of more than themselves and their owners (whether public or private). |
| | We believe our first responsibility is to the doctors, nurses and patients, to mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services. |
| | It goes on to say its second responsibility is to employees. |
| | Community comes third. Then this: |
| | Our final responsibility is to our stockholders. |
| | It doesn't say "highest" responsibility. It says "final", and concludes, |
| | When we operate according to these principles, the stockholders should realize a fair return. |
| | Note the word "fair". Not "huge". Not "windfall". But, fair. |
| | It's hard for any company to adhere absolutely to a set of policies like this one, but I know J&J tries mightily to do exactly that. From what I can tell, everybody there knows the Credo. It's not just something they salute. They have meetings and conferences to talk about it, debate it, figure how to apply it. |
| | Right after The Cluetrain Manifesto came out, J&J was one of the first companies I heard from. They brought me in to do a workshop with them — one in which I learned at least as much as any of the J&J people did. Six years later, last Fall, I was brought in to speak to a J&J gathering again (yes, it was a paying gig). Several people brought me copies of Cluetrain to sign. Turns out Cluetrain continues to provide guidance to at least some folks at J&J. |
| | Why did Cluetrain resonate there? I think it's because Cluetrain was Credo-compliant, rather than vice versa. It was an outside thing that made sense inside. |
| | Companies today increasingly live at the grace not only of their customers, stockholders and communities, but of their employees as well. It's with employees that the inside and outside are both embodied. Employees may make a "living" with a company, but they sleep at home. They have lives outside. |
| | Webs have blurry boundaries. Fort Business, on the other hand, makes an enormous investment in maintaining the integrity of the walls. |
| | Hyperlinked organizations never met a wall they liked. |
Wisdom of the crowding
| | Jim Bursch: I believe there is a sort of Gresham's Law at work in the world of media. In this case, ad-supported media (bad money) drives audience-supported media (good money) out of the marketplace. |
| | His bottom line: I believe consumers under-value their mindshare, and as such, they tolerate more advertising than they would if they realized the true value of their mindshare. |
| | Which is why I hated giving a share of my mind (except to blog critically) to eWeek for the slide show I wrote about in the post below. eWeek cares more about advertising than about what readers actually do with the "content" (an advertising word for fancy packing material) between the ads. |
| | While I think Jim overstates his case a bit (are all the good money media being driven away?), I also think he puts his finger on what I've disliked about advertising in blogs since the beginning. It's annoying. And that annoyance gets a share of my mind. While not always, there is often a cost to what the blogger actually writes. |
| | Yes, the money is good to have. But it has a way of crowding out something else. |
Advertising where the moon don't shine
| | The answer is: because there's less advertising to sell. |
| | Which is one more reason why I believe advertising, for all its goodnesses, is still too often a pain in the ass. |
They're right
| | I've had some constructive pushback from Kent Newsome, Matthew Ingram, Sean Upton and others on my suggestion yesterday that daily papers make their fresh printed stuff available only to subscribers online — and then make it free and open after that. (They had no quarrel with the latter, but definitely with the former.) |
| | I'll confess that the suggestion was a bit of a red herring, and I'll grant that their points (the numbers don't work, and free alternatives will kick the paywall's ass) are right. But my larger point was about the enduring values and advantgages of print — and in giving them their due respect. On those I'll stand. |
Quote du jour
| | Adam Fields: There¹s really only one rule for community as far as I¹m concerned, and it¹s this - in order to call some gathering of people a "community", it is a requirement that if you¹re a member of the community, and one day you stop showing up, people will come looking for you to see where you went. |
Betting on Obama
| | Andrew Sullivan: the most attractive persona and best-developed arguments since JFK. Sullivan is a conservative. In some significant and literal ways, so is Obama. The gist: |
| | This guy is a liberal. Make no mistake about that. He may, in fact, be the most effective liberal advocate I've heard in my lifetime. As a conservative, I think he could be absolutely lethal to what's left of the tradition of individualism, self-reliance, and small government that I find myself quixotically attached to. And as a simple observer, I really don't see what's stopping him from becoming the next president. The overwhelming first impression that you get - from the exhausted but vibrant stump speech, the diverse nature of the crowd, the swell of the various applause lines - is that this is the candidate for real change. He has what Reagan had in 1980 and Clinton had in 1992: the wind at his back. Sometimes, elections really do come down to a simple choice: change or more of the same?... |
| | There's a reason for his wide appeal. The over-whelming question for me at this point in this historic campaign is a simple one: who will stop him? |
| | I'm hoping it's not the same thing that stopped both Kennedy brothers, plus Martin Luther King, plus the history that would have been much different had they lived. |
| | That's my concern for Obama. It's so easy to kill hope when it rides on one man. |
| | The killing of Martin Luther King was more than an awful tragedy. It was a deep, true and absolute loss. There was more than a sense of hopelessness and despair. There was the real thing. I don't think we've ever recovered, and perhaps we never will. |
| | Bill Clinton talked about hope and change, and still sounded like a politician making promises (which he very much proved to be). Barack Obama does the same and sounds like a thinker and a leader, as well as a politician. |
| | It could be that the U.S. is reaching the end of its age of empire in any case, and that it doesn't much matter who we elect president. But I think it does matter. |
| | I'm liking Obama, even though I share some of Andrew's quixotic concerns. But I'm old enough to remember what happened to the people Obama most reminds me of. And it worries me. |
Applied synergistics
Is there any good video search?
| | In this interview, Jim Lanzone, CEO of Ask.com, says Today video search is basically e-mailing links. But soon video search will become the equivalent of image search. No one yet is doing video search particularly well. |
| | Hmm... when will Ask.com's video search appear? |
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