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Thursday, August 16, 2001
Changing its name to Was 
| | For most of the time we were writing the Cluetrain book, its working subtitle was — |
| | Markets are conversations |
| | In my own opinion, Be's death is livid proof that silence is fatal. If Jean-Louis Gassée had not developed his platform in absolute secrecy — and then kept the source code under wraps when there was real market demand for opening it up — the company might be worth more than the pennies per share it sold for today. |
| | By all accounts it was a fabuous platform — a great show, by a great showman. But thanks to Jean-Louis' distrust and secrecy — and indeed his showmanship — that's all it ever was. |
A Standard Death
You don't say
It's not the old man's looks. Unless...
| | Jeffrey to Joyce this morning: "Papa's funny, huh Mama? That's why we love him." |
| | Joyce just went off on a weekend trip, so it's just me and the boy until I leave for Jabbercon on Sunday. The show is in Keystone, which is back in the mountains a ways. Looking forward to it, since I haven't ever driven through any part of Colorado other than the highway from the airport to Denver, Colorado Springs or Boulder, so it should be fun. Wish I had more time to visit folks I know there. |
Kinda literal, no?
| | I have a note here from an old friend and Sun veteran volunteering Scott McNealy & pals as true examples of Icarian corporate souls. Makin' me think, these people. |
| | Speaking of which, Norlin has more to say on the matter of soul vs. whatever. Also a deep new TDCRC missive, that I'll find the link to after I get the phone. |
How can companies have souls when even a lot of humans seem to be lacking them?
| | A soul can only exist in the context of death. And while corporations do die, public ones (at least) are in extreme neurosis over their fate. Indeed, corporations seem to be a vehicle for the Icarian in us -- attempts at reaching the sun, some vaunted effort doomed to failure, a testament to our inability to really face death. |
| | I believe most of us regard soul as the deeper substance of self that survives death. Or something like that. In any case, I think he's right about our Icarian urges, although I'm not sure that applies to everybody or in every case. |
| | Somewhere or other (was it Cluetrain? I should know but I'm not sure), Chris Locke reminded us that, while work has always been with us, the job was an industrial invention. Some time after Industry won the Industrial Revolution, most of us no longer had a craft worthy of a surname, but jobs as replaceable parts in the industrail machinery described by org charts. Nothing Icarian about it. Unless, of course, you wanted to be the dead guy in the painting that hangs in the foyer. |
| | This, by the way, is what makes Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Herb Kelleher different than the rest of us. Those guys really are Icarian. Something of their personality-DNA — perhaps even their souls — survives in their companies, which will probably outlive them. |
| | Last summer I did an all-day offsite thing with some folks from Johnson & Johnson. We were talking about the problems conversational markets present to a company whose speech is highly regulated (J&J's biggest biz is pharmaceuticals, which are described in very formal language by precise FDA regulation). As we talked about what could and couldn't be done in real markets where real people speak in real voices (as opposed to the abstract markets we describe as demographics and categories and have nothing especially human about them), conversation came around to the real (as opposed to regulated) pesonality of the company. I said I believed that the most binding regulations on a company are the persistent qualities of its founders' personalities: that in fact most older companies were still run by the ghosts of the dead white guys whose pictures hang in foyers at corporate headquarters. "Who's your dead white guy?" I asked. |
| | What they came back with was the story, which everybody knew by heart, of General Johnson and his mission to bring better health practices to the world. In fact, nearly everyone knew the General's lengthy credo by heart. There even seemed to be agreement in the room that this credo, and the qualities it manifested in the company, answered the question about why more people didn't leave to go join the dot-com movement, which still had its appeals at that time. |
| | I'm sure we can find some bad stuff to say about J&J. But I think that company has a soul. Lee Scott, the CEO of Wal-Mart, told me "I truly believe that companies have souls" in response to a speech I gave the night before his own keynote at the same event last Fall in Lucerne. And given Lee Scott's reticence about having a high public profile, I'm sure he'd say that his dead white guy — Sam Walton — is still running Wal-Mart. We can debate whether Sam's soul survived the death of his body; but it's plain that the man's ghost continues to inhabit his company. |
| | All that said, we need to remember that Peter Drucker, pushing a century on earth himself, points out that the modern corporation is only 125 years old or so. So the big question may not be whether any one corporate tree can grow to the sky, but whether the whole species can survive in a world it no longer dominates. |
Proof that few of us speak in final draft
Coming up: more about media, my kid and stuff I haven't thought about yet. Back after these messages...
Ruling out BS
| | I love Dan's guidance for PR folks. Too bad common sense needs to be explained. (And that it still doesn't work.) |
| | Not that there aren't good PR people, by the way. The folks at Edelman, a company that has taken even more flack than they employ (sorry for the stretched pun there) have been exceptionally patient with my sloth on reviewing OS X. |
None of which applies to companies from Mars
| | While I agree with everything Craig says in his blog about the "box of tornadoes" big companies tend to be, and the inherent falsity of broad generalizations about what a company "thinks" or "says" — companies being very complex and contradictory social organizations (or dysorganizations) — I also believe that companies have souls, or at least a kind of DNA that is anchored in where the company comes from. No matter where a company's vector points, its persistent originality derives from its origins. |
| | Wal-Mart will always come from Sam Walton and his five-and-dime in Bentonville, Arkansas. Nordstrom will always come from the family's shoe business in Seattle. Motorola will always come from the Galvin family's car radio business. Apple will always come from Steve Jobs' obsession with Art. Microsoft will always come from personal computing. Johnson & Johnson will always come from General Johnson and his altruistic credo. |
| | I could explain more, but I've already done it here. |
| | Since you didn't ask, I come from radio. That's what I'm doing right here. My blog is my station and my show, rolled into one. I've said a little bit about that too, but it's mostly in German. |
Accept no substitutes
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