|
Foreword
by Thomas Petzinger, Jr., The Wall Street Journal
Take a pot of water that's just above the freezing mark. Now,
crank up the heat and wait. Temperature rises. Wait some more. Go
all the way to 211 degrees Fahrenheit and nothing looks much
different. But then, turn it up one more tiny degree, and wham! The
pot becomes a roiling, steamy cauldron.
Don't look now, but you're holding such a catalyst in your hands.
The Cluetrain Manifesto is about to drive business to a full
boil.
Let me tell you how it took me to the tipping point. Not long ago
I was sitting in the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco on a reporting
mission for "The Front Lines," a weekly column I spent four years
writing for The Wall Street Journal. Between interviews, I was
checking e-mail from my readers. (The Internet puts me in touch with
thousands of them who act as my scouts.) On this particular day, one
of my correspondents urged me to check out a new site at
www.cluetrain.com.
I was dumbstruck. There, in a few pages, I read a startlingly
concise summary of everything I'd seen in twenty-one years as a
reporter, editor, bureau chief, and columnist for my newspaper. The
idea that business, at bottom, is fundamentally human. That
engineering remains second-rate without aesthetics. That natural,
human conversation is the true language of commerce. That
corporations work best when the people on the inside have the
fullest contact possible with the people on the outside.
And most importantly, that however ancient, timeless, and true,
these principles are just now resurging across the business world.
The triggering event, of course, is the advent of a global
communication system that restores the banter of the bazaar, that
tears down power structures and senseless bureaucracies, that puts
everyone in touch with everyone.
Scrolling through the hundreds of signatories who had endorsed
the manifesto, I realized this if nothing else: The newspaper gods
had just blessed me with one of my favorite columns ever, enabling
me to articulate much I knew to be true but never previously had the
words to say.
Because "The Front Lines" was usually a narrative tale, I bored
into the manifesto's origins. Befitting its message, the document, I
learned, was born in an extended electronic conversation among four
Internet denizens spread from coast to coast. The authors were not
the ultra-hip, just-outta-college webheads I had imagined. One was
Rick Levine, a Boulder-based engineer for the giant Sun
Microsystems. Another was a Boulder consultant named Christopher
Locke, late of such hoary outfits as IBM, MCI, and Carnegie Mellon.
There was a well-known Silicon Valley publicist named Doc Searls and
a longtime high-tech marketer from Boston whose name, David
Weinberger, I recognized from his commentaries on National Public
Radio's "All Things Considered."
They were, in short, fixtures of the high-tech establishment
— but being establishment made their renunciation of
business-as-usual all the more powerful.
The manifesto URL leaped between cubicles like mononucleosis
through a co-ed dorm. Some readers found it pretentious, bordering
on smug. (To those of delicate sensibility, it was.) Some found it
nihilistic. (It wasn't.) But all found it arresting and impossible
to ignore. The manifesto became a kind of user's guide to the
Internet economy —a world of new online communities; of
self-organizing corporate employees; of Linux and other "open source"
movements that seem to erupt from thin air.
So now, for anyone who missed it the first time and for everyone
else who wants more, we have The Cluetrain Manifesto, one of the
first books written as sequel to a Web site.
I look at a huge number of business books. I actually read some
of them and have published reviews on more than my share. I'll
mention a few ways The Cluetrain Manifesto is like no other.
First, this is no feel-good book. Though the broad theme is
overwhelmingly optimistic, the details will make you squirm. This is
an obituary for business-as-usual. It shows how your Web strategy
may be minutes from obsolescence. It reveals how the Internet has
made your entry-level employees as powerful as your senior vice
president of marketing. Recall what The Jungle did to meat packing,
what Silent Spring did to chemicals, what Unsafe at Any Speed did to
Detroit. That's the spirit with which The Cluetrain Manifesto takes
on the arrogance of corporate e-commerce. (Notably, some of the best
material comes from the authors' own experiences within big
companies, and they name names.)
Second, this is not a how-to book, unless you need a remedial
lesson in being human. For all their righteous self-assuredness
about the Internet revolution, these authors don't presume to tell
you how to run your business or your career. One-size-fits-all
"programs" and "methodologies" are just ways for consultants to
gouge clients and book buyers. Instead, this book simply describes
business as it really is and as it's really becoming. You'll come
away from these pages with a new set of eyes for redirecting your
career or rehabilitating your company according to its own unique
circumstances.
Third, this book is not boring. The whole message here, after
all, involves speaking with a human voice. That means stories
instead of lectures, humor instead of hubris, description instead of
PowerPoint pie charts. (Imagine In Search of Excellence crossed with
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.) When was the last time you laughed
out loud reading a business book?
And why not laughter? It's one of the signature melodies of human
conversation. This book shows how conversation forms the basis of
business, how business lost that voice for a while, and how that
language is returning to business thanks to a technology that
inspires, and in many cases demands, that we speak from the heart.
To rip off what rock critic Jon Landau once said about Bruce
Springsteen: I've seen the future of business, and it's The
Cluetrain Manifesto. At first you may be tempted to hide this book
inside the dust jacket for Customers.com or something equally
conventional. But in time you'll see the book spreading. It will
become acceptable, if never entirely accepted. It will certainly
become essential. Why am I so sure? Because like nothing else out
there, it shows us how to grasp the human side of business and
technology, and being human, try as we might, is the only fate from
which we can never escape.
Thomas Petzinger, Jr.
The Wall Street Journal
[back to table of contents]
Introduction
What if the real attraction of the Internet is not its
cutting-edge bells and whistles, its jazzy interface or any of the advanced
technology that underlies its pipes and wires? What if, instead, the
attraction is an atavistic throwback to the prehistoric human
fascination with telling tales? Five thousand years ago, the
marketplace was the hub of civilization, a place to which traders
returned from remote lands with exotic spices, silks, monkeys,
parrots, jewels — and fabulous stories.
In many ways, the Internet more resembles an ancient bazaar than
it fits the business models companies try to impose upon it.
Millions have flocked to the Net in an incredibly short time, not
because it was user-friendly — it wasn't — but because it
seemed to offer some intangible quality long missing in action from
modern life. In sharp contrast to the alienation wrought by
homogenized broadcast media, sterilized mass "culture," and the
enforced anonymity of bureaucratic organizations, the Internet
connected people to each other and provided a space in which the
human voice would be rapidly rediscovered.
Though corporations insist on seeing it as one, the new
marketplace is not necessarily a market at all. To its inhabitants,
it is primarily a place in which all participants are audience to
each other. The entertainment is not packaged; it is intrinsic.
Unlike the lockstep conformity imposed by television, advertising,
and corporate propaganda, the Net has given new legitimacy — and free
rein — to play. Many of those drawn into this world find themselves
exploring a freedom never before imagined: to indulge their
curiosity, to debate, to disagree, to laugh at themselves, to
compare visions, to learn, to create new art, new knowledge.
Because the Internet is so technically efficient, it has also
been adopted by companies seeking to become more productive. They
too are hungry for knowledge, for the intellectual capital that has
become more valuable than bricks and mortar or any tangible asset.
What they didn't count on were the other effects of Web technology.
Hypertext is inherently nonhierarchical and antibureaucratic. It
does not reinforce loyalty and obedience; it encourages idle
speculation and loose talk. It encourages stories.
These new conversations online — whether on the wild and wooly
Internet or on (slightly) more sedate corporate intranets — are
generating new ways of looking at problems. They are spawning new
perspectives, new tools, and a new kind of intellectual bravery more
comfortable with risk than with regulation. The result is not just
new things learned but a vastly enhanced ability to learn things.
And the pace of this learning is accelerating. In the networked
marketplace it is reflected in the joy of play. On company intranets
it is reflected in the joy of knowledge. But it's getting difficult
to tell the two apart. Employees go home and get online. They bring
new attitudes back to work the next day. Enthusiastic surfers get
hired and bring strange new views into corporations that, until now,
have successfully protected themselves from everything else. The
World Wide Web reinforces freedom. The Internet routes around
obstacles. The confluence of these conversations is not only
inevitable, it has largely already occurred.
Many companies fear these changes, seeing in them only a
devastating loss of control. But control is a losing game in a
global marketplace where the range of customer choice is already
staggering and a suicidal game for companies that must come up with
the knowledge necessary to create those market choices.
While command and control may have reached a cul-de-sac, the
intersection of the market conversation with the conversation of the
corporate workforce hardly signals the end of commerce. Instead,
this convergence promises a vibrant renewal in which commerce
becomes far more naturally integrated into the life of individuals
and communities.
This book tells a story. Four times. Many times. It is the story
of how these things have happened — and some powerful hints about what
could happen from here on out.
[back to table of contents]
from
Internet Apocalypso
by Christopher Locke
NOTE: The entire first chapter of the book — Internet Apocalypso — is
now available on the site. Click here to read it.
Waiting for Joe Six-Pack
A few years ago, you could make an interesting distinction between
people who thought there was something special about the Internet and
those who saw it as no big deal. Now of course, everybody sees it as a
big deal, mostly because of those weirdball IPOs and the overnight
billionaires they've spawned. But I think the distinction is still
valid. Most companies with Net-dot-dollar-signs in their eyes today
are still missing the "something special" dimension.
Yahoo has already made it, financially speaking, but forms a good
example nonetheless. Despite the funky hacker roots of the initial
directory Yang and Filo built, Yahoo now describes itself as a "global
media company," thus claiming a closer spiritual kinship with Disney
and Murdoch than with the culture that originally put it on the map.
To this mindset, the Net is just an extension of preceding mass
media, primarily television. The rhetoric it uses is freighted with
the same crypto-religious marketing jargon that characterized
broadcast: brand, market share, eyeballs, demographics. And guess
what? It works. If nobody was getting rich off this stuff, you
wouldn't hear about it.
It's the fast new companies that are reaping these monetary
rewards. But guess what again. They're reaping them from an even
faster market — one that, for the most part, has only discovered the
Internet in the last year or so. The people who make up this new
market naturally bring a lot of baggage from their previous experience
of mass media. To someone who just got an AOL account last Christmas,
I suppose a Web page looks like a v-e-r-y s-l-o-w TV show.
But this is where the something-special effect comes in. It is
assumed in some quarters that if you missed the early days of Usenet
and didn't use Lynx from a Unix command line, you missed the Magic of
Internet Culture. I don't think so.
Sure those were very different days and there was a certain
fervor — almost a fever — that was hard to mistake for sitcom fandom. But
I think the Internet still has a radicalizing effect today, despite
all the banner ads and promotional hype and you-may-already-be-a-winner sweepstakes.
The something special is what the Manifesto calls voice.
Imagine for a moment: millions of people sitting in their shuttered
homes at night, bathed in that ghostly blue television aura. They're
passive, yeah, but more than that: they're isolated from each other.
Now imagine another magic wire strung from house to house, hooking
all these poor bastards up. They're still watching the same old crap.
Then, during the touching love scene, some joker lobs an off-color
aside — and everybody hears it. Whoa! What was that? People are rolling
on the floor laughing. And it begins to happen so often, it gets
abbreviated: ROTFL. The audience is suddenly connected to itself.
What was once The Show, the hypnotic focus and tee-vee advertising
carrier wave, becomes in the context of the Internet a sort of reverse
new-media McGuffin — an excuse to get together rather than an excuse not
to. Think of Joel and the 'bots on Mystery Science Theater 3000. The
point is not to watch the film, but to outdo each other making fun of
it.
And for such radically realigned purposes, some bloated corporate
Web site can serve as a target every bit as well as Godzilla, King of
the Monsters. As the remake trailer put it: size does matter.
So here comes Joe Six-Pack onto AOL. What does he know about
netliness? Nothing. Zilch. He has no cultural context whatsoever. But
soon, very soon, what he hears is something he never heard in TV Land:
people cracking up.
"That ain't no laugh track neither," Joe is thinking and goes
looking for the source of this strange, new, rather seductive sound.
So here's a little story problem for ya, class. If the Internet has
50 million people on it, and they're not all as dumb as they look, but
the corporations trying to make a fast buck off their asses are as
dumb as they look, how long before Joe is laughing as hard as everyone
else?
The correct answer of course: not long at all. And as soon as he
starts laughing, he's not Joe Six-Pack anymore. He's no longer part of
some passive couch-potato target demographic. Because the Net connects
people to each other, and impassions and empowers through those
connections, the media dream of the Web as another acquiescent
mass-consumer market is a figment and a fantasy.
The Internet is inherently seditious. It undermines unthinking
respect for centralized authority, whether that "authority" is the
neatly homogenized voice of broadcast advertising or the smarmy
rhetoric of the corporate annual report.
And Internet technology has also threaded its way deep into the
heart of Corporate Empire, where once upon a time, lockstep loyalty to
the chairman's latest attempt at insight was no further away than the
mimeograph machine. One memo from Mr. Big and everyone believed (or so
Mr. Big liked to think).
No more. The same kind of seditious deconstruction that's being
practiced on the Web today, just for the hell of it, is also seeping
onto the company intranet. How many satires are floating around there,
one wonders: of the latest hyperinflated restructuring plan, of the
over-sincere cultural-sensitivity training sessions Human Resources
made mandatory last week, of all the gibberish that passes for
"management" — or has passed up until now.
Step back a frame or two. Zoom out. Isn't that weird? Workers and
markets are speaking the same language! And they're both speaking it
in the same shoot-from-the-hip, unedited, devil-take-the-hindmost
style.
This conversation may be irreverent of eternal verities, but it's
not all jokes. Whether in the marketplace or at work, people do have
genuine, serious concerns. And we have something else as well:
knowledge. Not the sort of boring, abstract knowledge that "Knowledge
Management" wants to manage. No. The real thing. We have knowledge of
what we do and how we do it — our craft — and it drives our voices; it's
what we most like to talk about.
But this whole gamut of conversation, from infinite jest to
point-specific expertise: who needs it?
Companies need it. Without it they can't innovate, build consensus,
or go to market. Markets need it. Without it they don't know what
works and what doesn't; don't know why they should give a damn.
Cultures need it. Without play and knowledge in equal measure, they
begin to die. People get gloomy, anxious, and depressed. Eventually,
the guns come out.
There are two new conversations going on today, both vibrant and
exciting; both mediated by Internet technologies but having little to
do with technology otherwise. Unfortunately, there's also a
metaphorical firewall separating these conversations, and that wall is
the traditional, conservative, fearful corporation.
So what is to be done? Easy: Burn down business-as-usual. Bulldoze
it. Cordon off the area. Set up barricades. Cripple the tanks. Topple
the statues of heroes too long dead into the street.
Sound familiar? You bet it does. And the message has been the same
all along, from Paris in '68 to the Berlin Wall, from Warsaw to
Tiananmen Square: Let the kids rock and roll!
So open the windows and turn up the volume. If the noise gets loud
enough, maybe even CNN will cover.
[back to table of contents]
from
The Longing
by David Weinberger
We don't know what the Web is for but we've adopted it faster than
any technology since fire.
There are many ways to look at what's drawing us to the Web: access
to information, connection to other people, entrance to communities,
the ability to broadcast ideas. None of these are wrong perspectives.
But they all come back to the promise of voice and thus of authentic
self.
At the first Internet World conference, the vendors were falling
over one another offering software and services that would let you
"create your own home page in five minutes." Microsoft, IBM, and a
hundred smaller shops were all hawking the same goods. You could sit
in a booth and create your own home page faster than you can get your
portrait sketched on a San Francisco sidewalk.
While the create-a-home-page problem proved too easy to solve to
support a software industry, there was something canny about the
commercial focus on the creation of home pages. Since you could just
as adequately view the Web as a huge reference library, why did home
pages seize our imaginations? Because a home page is a place in which
we can express who we are and let the world in. Meager though it may
be, a home page is a way of having a voice.
The Web's promise of a voice has now gone far beyond that. The Web
is viral. It infects everything it touches — and, because it is
an airborne virus, it infects some things it doesn't. The Web has
become the new corporate infrastructure, in the form of intranets,
turning massive corporate hierarchical systems into collections of
many small pieces loosely joining themselves unpredictably.
The voice that the Web gives us is not the ability to post pictures
of our cat and our guesses at how the next episode of The X-Files will
end. It is the granting of a place in which we can be who we are (and
even who we aren't, if that's the voice we've chosen).
It is a public place. That is crucial. Having a voice doesn't mean
being able to sing in the shower. It means presenting oneself to
others. The Web provides a place like we've never seen before.
We may still have to behave properly in committee meetings, but
increasingly the real work of the corporation is getting done by
quirky individuals who meet on the Web, net the two-hour committee
meeting down to two lines (one of which is obscene and the other
wickedly funny), and then — in a language and rhythm unique to
them — move ahead faster than the speed of management.
The memo is dead. Long live e-mail. The corporate newsletter is
dead. Long live racks of 'zines from individuals who do not speak for
the corporation. Bland, safe relationships with customers are dead.
Long live customer-support reps who are willing to get as pissed off
at their own company as the angry customer is.
We are so desperate to have our voices back that we are willing to
leap into the void. We embrace the Web not knowing what it is, but
hoping that it will burn the org chart — if not the organization
— down to the ground. Released from the gray-flannel handcuffs,
we say anything, curse like sailors, rhyme like bad poets, flame
against our own values, just for the pure delight of having a voice.
And when the thrill of hearing ourselves speak again wears off, we
will begin to build a new world.
That is what the Web is for.
[back to table of contents]
from
Talk is Cheap
by Rick Levine
Every Web page we see has a person behind it. Sometimes their
individual decisions are eroded and digested by being passed through a
corporate colon of editors, gatekeepers and other factota, but there
are clear signposts to individual care and concern on much of today's
Web. While all print and broadcast media have at least some indirect
personal authorship, there's a key difference on the Web. The
percentage of "raw" content published, direct from a creator's fingers
to our eyes, is much higher than in traditional media. The Web's low
cost of entry to publishers, both small and large, and the amount of
unfiltered chat/newsgroup/e-mail text finding its way into search
engines guarantees our daily browsing experience has a very strong
flavor of individual authorship. Inevitably, our heightened awareness
of distinct, individual voices engenders the urge to talk back, to
engage, to converse. The software and mechanisms developed
helter-skelter for the Net cater to these urges. Chat, free e-mail, automatic
home pages — all reinforce our feeling that not only is it easy
to enter into discourse with others, but also that we're by-god
entitled to wade into the conversational stream. Heaven help you if
you get in my way, or try to stifle my voice.
The good or bad news, depending on your perspective, is that it's
hard to fake your end of one of these conversations. Ever been on the
phone with a friend or coworker while sitting in front of a computer
and trying to read or respond to e-mail when your wire addiction gets
the better of you? I'm very good at multitasking, and can fool many
folks some of the time, but I get caught more often than I'll admit.
(By my wife, for instance. Every time.) We can tell when someone is
engaged, listening, responding honestly, and with his or her full
faculties. We're wired to interpret subtle clues telling us whether a
person is all there, if we're the center of their attention, if we're
being heard. No matter how starved for detail our communication
channel, our brains manage to get a gestalt reading on the other
party's presence.
In the same way we distinguish personal attention from inattention,
we can tell the difference between a commercial pitch and words that
come when someone's life animates their message. Try snipping
paragraphs of text from press releases and a few pieces of printed
person-to-person e-mail. Shuffle the paper slips. Hand the pile to
your office-mate, your spouse, or your next-door neighbor. Can they
sort them? Of course they can, in short order. People channel from
their hearts directly to their words. That's voice. It comes of focus,
attention, caring, connection, and honesty of purpose. It is not
commercially motivated, isn't talk with a vested interest. Talk is
cheap. The value of our voices is beyond mere words. The human voice
reaches directly into our beings and touches our spirits.
Voice is how we can tell the difference between people, committees,
and bots. An e-mail written by one person bears the tool marks of
their thought processes. E-mail might be employee-to-employee,
customer-to-customer or employee-to-customer, but in each case it's
person-to-person. Voice, or its lack, is how we tell what's worth
reading and what's not. Much of what passes for communication from
companies to customers is washed and diluted so many times by the
successive editing and tuning done by each company gatekeeper that the
live-person hints are lost.
Authenticity, honesty, and personal voice underlie much of what's
successful on the Web. Its egalitarian nature is engendering a
renaissance in personal publishing. We of genus Homo are wired to
respond to each other's noise and commotion, to the rich, multi-modal
deluge of data each of us broadcasts as we wade through life. The Web
gives us an opportunity to escape from the bounds imposed by broadcast
media's one-to-many notions of publishing. Nascent Web publishing
efforts have their genesis in a burning need to say something, but
their ultimate success comes from people wanting to listen, needing to
hear each other's voices, and answering in kind.
[back to table of contents]
Markets Are Conversations
by Doc Searls and David Weinberger
An extensive selection from this chapter appeared in
The Industry Standard on January 17, 2000.
In the same issue, see
Get A Clue and The Wrong Kind of Buzz,
also by Doc Searls and David Weinberger.
[back to table of contents]
from
The Hyperlinked Organization
by David Weinberger
The Hyperlinking of the Organization
Your organization is becoming hyperlinked. Whether you like it or
not. It's bottom-up; it's unstoppable.
Despite the wet stink of fear, you ought to be delighted.
Hyperlinked organizations are closer to their markets, act faster, and
acquire the valuable survival skill of learning to swerve.
Of course, they also are impossible to manage — although they
can be "unmanaged" — and you'll have to give up your pretense of
power, status, and lordliness. But, then, as the old saying has it,
you can't make an omelet without nuking the existing social order.
Here's the drill for the rest of this chapter. We've just discussed
seven key characteristics of the Web. Now we're going to go through
them one at a time, in order (no talking in the hallways and please
stand to the right to enable those in a hurry to pass) to see what's
happening inside organizations touched by the Web — that is, all
organizations to one degree or another.
Let's put the hyper back into hyperlinks
Here's one example of how things work in a hyperlinked
organization:
You're a sales rep in the Southwest who has a customer with a
product problem. You know that the Southwest tech-support person
happens not to know anything about this problem. In fact, she's a
flat-out bozo. So, to do what's right for your customer you go outside
the prescribed channels and pull together the support person from the
Northeast, a product manager you respect, and a senior engineer who's
been responsive in the past (no good deed goes unpunished!). Via
e-mail or by building a mini-Web site on an intranet, you initiate a
discussion, research numbers, check out competitive solutions, and
quickly solve the customer's problem — all without ever notifying
the "appropriate authorities" of what you're doing because all they'll
do is try to force you back into the official channels.
It's a little thing. But it's a big change in the ground rules of
work. The official structure is of little use to you. Instead, your
network of trusted colleagues becomes paramount. Your effectiveness
depends upon how networked you are, how hyperlinked you are.
The hyperlinked teams you form may not be as project-centered as in
the example above. As organizations become hyperlinked, they spawn
hyperlinked committees, hyperlinked task forces, hyperlinked
affiliations, hyperlinked interest groups, hyperlinked communities,
hyperlinked cheering squads, hyperlinked pen pals, and hyperlinked
attitudes. Humans seem to fill up every available social niche just as
nature itself abhors an ecological vacuum.
These hyperlinked relationships are, like the Web of hyperlinked
documents, a shifting context of links of varying importance and
quality. They are self-asserting, not requiring anyone else's
authority to be put in place. And the value of the individual "node"
to a large degree depends upon the node's links.
This last point is a big shift. Links have value by pointing away
from themselves to some other site. All Web pages derive some value
from the links on them. (A page with no links is literally a dead end
on the Web.) In fact, the single most-visited site on the Web, Yahoo!,
derives almost all of its value not from what it contains but from
what it points to. Yet our understanding of the nature of knowledge,
education, and expertise is bound up with things that contain value,
not with things that point you out of themselves to find value
elsewhere. Books get their value from their content. Education is the
transfer of content into the receptacle that is the student. And an
expert is someone who contains a lot of information, like a book
contains information. In fact, experts are people who can write books.
But, with today's huge increase in the amount of information, you can
be an expert only in something sliced so thin that often it's trivial.
Increasingly, a useful expert is not someone with (containing) all the
answers but someone who knows where to find answers. The new experts
have value not by centralizing information and control but by being
great "pointers" to other people and to useful, current information.
In short, your most valuable employee is likely to be the one who,
in response to a question, doesn't give a concrete answer in a booming
voice but who says, "You should talk to Larry. And check Janis's
project plan. Oh, and there's a mailing list on this topic I ran into
a couple of weeks ago — "
How could you hope to capture this on an org chart? And how do you
compensate people fairly if their value depends upon their
participation in a shifting set of hyperlinked associations? How do
you hire great hyperlinked people? How could this ever be expressed on
a resume?
Great questions — because there aren't clear answers yet.
Epochal changes are not Q&A sessions. We're at the beginning of the
biggest Q since the Industrial Revolution. It's a time to make things
up, try them out, fail a thousand times, and laugh at how stupid you
look.
The urge to "solve the problem" is nothing but the voice of the old
command-and-control psychosis trying to reassert itself.
("Premature elucidation": the plight of men who come to answers way
too soon.)
[back to table of contents]
from
EZ Answers
by Christopher Locke and David Weinberger
Hit One Outta the Park
Business-as-usual being what it is, the questions never quit.
Companies have said yes, the Cluetrain ideas are interesting, but
give us a place to start. A methodology. A suite of best practices
maybe. A set of guidelines. For God's sake, something!
"What's the bottom line?" they want to know. "How can my company
profit from the coming transcultural train wreck? How can we leap
tall buildings in Internet time, innovate faster than a speeding
data packet, and establish Peace, Justice, and the American Way in
hyperlinked global markets?"
Well... OK. Because you've been so patient and read so bloody
much, we'll let you in on the Secret of Our Success. Just follow the
twelve easy steps below and you're sure to be on your way to fame
and fortune in the exciting new world of Webusiness. (Caution: It is
vital that you follow these steps precisely in the order given.
Otherwise, we are not responsible for the mutant hellspawn you may
inadvertently call forth from the realm of the undead.)
The Cluetrain Hit-One-Outta-the-Park Twelve-Step Program for Internet Business Success
- Relax
- Have a sense of humor
- Find your voice and use it
- Tell the truth
- Don't panic
- Enjoy yourself
- Be brave
- Be curious
- Play more
- Dream always
- Listen up
- Rap on
Do these things and you just can't miss.
Of course, there's as much distance between this advice and the
decisions you make every day as there is between "Go forth and
multiply" and "100 Ways to Pick Up Hot Chicks and Radical Dudes."
Still, we yearn for easy advice. It's so hard to give up the old
wish for stimulus-response marketing and management. Hard to go back
to the days of the "talking cure" when psychotherapy meant years of
slogging through memories and dreams instead of a slap on the back,
and instructions to "nurture the inner child" and eat two bran
muffins every day. Hard to forget the televised version of Anna
Karenina that goes from start to finish in two hours (the train
comes to a screeching halt just in time) and reopen the musty volume
and soak into every snow-flecked page.
Look, we'd love to derive twelve happy instructions from the wash
of ideas swirling around us. Really. We could market those puppies
like Tang in a sauna. Seminars, workbooks, T-shirts, coffee mugs…
But it doesn't work that way. This is an existential moment. It's
characterized by uncertainty, the dissolving of the normal ways of
settling uncertainties, the evaporation of the memory of what
certainty was once like. In times like this, we all have an impulse
to find something stable and cling to it, but then we'd miss the
moment entirely. There isn't a list of things you can do to work the
whirlwind. The desire to have such a list betrays the moment.
There may not be twelve or five or twenty things you can do, but
there are ten thousand. The trick is, you have to figure out what
they are. They have to come from you. They have to be your words,
your moves, your authentic voice.
The Web got built by people who chose to build it. The lesson is:
don't wait for someone to show you how. Learn from your spontaneous
mistakes, not from safe prescriptions and cautiously analyzed
procedures. Don't try to keep people from going wrong by repeating
the mantra of how to get it right. Getting it right isn't enough any
more. There's no invention in it. There's no voice.
Maybe we'd have more luck with the Cluetrain List of Don'ts than
with a List of Dos. The first ninety-four items would be things
like: don't snoop on your employees, don't build knowledge
management systems and corporate portals that are nothing but
funnels for the same old propaganda. Don't hire people who claim to
be experts at increasing morale. And right at the bottom of the
list, number ninety-five, would be the most important one: don't
rely on lists, self-styled "gurus," or business books.
Scary, isn't it? Good. You ought to be scared. That's a realistic
reaction. You want comfort? Invent your own. Exhilaration and joy
are also in order. But face the facts: the tracks end at the edge of
the jungle.
[back to table of contents]
from
Post-Apocalypso
by Christopher Locke
"What do I know of man's destiny? I could tell you more about
radishes."
Samuel Beckett
More About Radishes
So whaddya think? Will Cluetrain be the Next Big Thing? Not if we
can help it. Deep-six the bumper stickers. Forget the catchy slogans
and the funny hats. Let's not write the bylaws and pretend we did.
Let's not start another frickin' club. The only decent thing to do
with Cluetrain is to bury the sucker now while there's still time,
before it begins to smell of management philosophy. Invite the
neighbors over, hold a wake. Throw a wild and drunken orgy of a
party. Because only death is static. Life moves on.
How do you speak in a human voice? First, you get a life. And
corporations just can't do that. Corporations are like Pinocchio. Or
Frankenstein. Their noses grow longer at the oddest moments, or they
start breaking things for no good reason. They want to be human, but
gosh, they're not. They want the Formula for Life — but they
want it so they can institutionalize it. The problem, of course, is
that life is anti-formulaic, anti-institutional. The most
fundamental quality of life is something the corporation can never
capture, never possess. Life can't be shrink-wrapped, caged,
dissected, analyzed, or owned. Life is free.
And so, finally, the question we've all been waiting for. In the
newly humanized and highly vocal global marketplace the Internet has
helped create, can corporations survive at all? Not if they're
unable to speak for themselves. Not if they're literally dumbfounded
by the changes taking place all around them.
But maybe — and it's a big maybe — companies can get
out of their own way. Maybe they can become much looser associations
of free individuals. Maybe they can cut "their" people enough slack
to actually act and sound like people instead of 1950s
science-fiction robots. Gort need more sales! Gort need make quota! You not
buy now, Gort nuke your planet!
Easy there, Gort. Calm down boy. Here, chew on this kryptonite.
Everybody's laughing. No one gives a rat's ass. So here's another
question. Perhaps you even thought of it yourself. How come this
book ended up in the business section of your local bookstore
instead of under Humor, Horror, or True Crime? Hey, don't look at
us.
Fact is, we don't care about business — per se, per diem, au
gratin. Given half a chance, we'd burn the whole constellation of
obsolete business concepts to the waterline. Cost of sales and
bottom lines and profit margins — if you're a company, that's
your problem. But if you think of yourself as a company, you've got
much bigger worries. We strongly suggest you repeat the following
mantra as often as possible until you feel better: "I am not a
company. I am a human being."
So, no, at the end of all this we don't have a cogent set of
recommendations. We don't have a crystal ball we can use to help
business plot its future course. We don't have any magic-bullet cure
for Corporate Linguistic Deficit Disorder. Did that much come
across? OK, just checking.
However, we do have a vision of what life could be like if we
ever make it through the current transition. It's hard for some to
imagine the Era of Total Cluelessness coming to a close. But try.
Try hard. Because only imagination can finally bring the curtain
down.
Imagine a world where everyone was constantly learning, a world
where what you wondered was more interesting than what you knew, and
curiosity counted for more than certain knowledge. Imagine a world
where what you gave away was more valuable than what you held back,
where joy was not a dirty word, where play was not forbidden after
your eleventh birthday. Imagine a world in which the business of
business was to imagine worlds people might actually want to live in
someday. Imagine a world created by the people, for the people not
perishing from the earth forever.
Yeah. Imagine that.
[back to table of contents]
|
