Rabbit Creative

This post is mostly about the awesome Cluetrain Manifesto, available online, in its entirety, for free!

It’s been out for a while. It’s been mentioned a few times over at Creating Passionate Users (sadly, it appears CPU is but a dark, hardened shell of its former self). I’ve even read the 95 Theses at least once before.

But today, on this lame Friday, I’m reading it. At work. “Work.” Hehe…

Anywho, here’s a few kick ass excerpt:

Knowledge worth having comes from turned-on volitional attention, not from slavishly following someone else’s orders. Innovation based on such knowledge is exciting, inflammatory, even “dangerous,” because it tends to challenge fixed procedures and inflexible policies. While collaboration has been paid much lip service within corporations, few have attempted it beyond their own boundaries. Ironically, companies that remain “secure” within those boundaries will be cut off from the global marketplace with which they must engage in order to survive and prosper.

The fervor that produced the first wild-oats crop of intranets surely didn’t come from the CIOs who got quoted in Business Week. Workers have had it with repressive management that just gets in the way. Markets have had it with hyperbole-laden corporate rhetoric that’s 99 percent hot air. The next huge opportunity for business is to bring workforce and market together. And companies smart enough to realize this start instigating a potent form of internal anarchy.

Unfortunately, such companies are rare exceptions. Most are hanging on for dear life to the one thing they think they can’t live without: control. But they only think they’re in control. Feeling their real abilities and contributions have gone unappreciated, many employees simply do what they feel like doing anyway, giving as little as possible to the company. They punch the clock and that’s it. The relationship is adversarial as hell. If you look into it closely, though, the company has almost invariably set things up this way — by not trusting people to take the initiative, to be engaged, motivated, intelligent, creative, innovative. It’s a long, sad story with roots that go back to the early industrial era.

One definition of community is a group of people who care about each other more than they have to. This isn’t a business exchange, even remotely. It is conversation, the verbal glue binding people separated by geography into a community. Chat’s important to us corporate types because it’s a medium where it’s almost impossible to operate within the old rules. Because chat is a “live” medium, there’s little leeway for faking a voice, for a sophist approximation of a person. You can adopt a new persona, but youíre going to need to button it all the way up and live it, or we’ll be able to tell there’s someone else underneath. Chat is CB radio on steroids. It’s immediate and unwashed. If you can’t type and think at the same time, you’re in deep weeds. We can’t broadcast, can’t message, can’t spew corporate pabulum in a chat environment. If business could successfully integrate chat into its marketing universe, companies would be on their way to shaking off some of the mass-media shackles separating them from customers.

We know that the real purpose of marketing is to insinuate the message into our consciousness, to put an axe in our heads without our noticing. Like it or not, they will teach us to sing the jingle and recite the slogan. If the axe finds its mark we toe the line, buy the message, buy the product, and don’t talk back. For the axe of marketing is also meant to silence us, to make conversation in the market as unnecessary as the ox cart.

Ironically, many of us spend our days wielding axes ourselves. In our private lives we defend ourselves from the marketing messages out to get us, our defenses made stronger for having spent the day at work trying to drive axes into our customers’ heads. We do both because the axe is already there, the metaphorical embodiment of that wedge Toffler wrote about—the one that divides our jobs from our lives. On the supply side is the producer; on the demand side is the consumer. In the caste system of industry, it is bad form for the two to exchange more than pleasantries.

Okay, I now I feel like I’m ripping half the book. Hmm… I know! I’ll provide a link (scroll back up, it’s on top!).

But how can a business be authentic? Authenticity describes whether someone truly owns up to what she or he actually is. Since corporations and businesses aren’t individuals, ultimately their authenticity is rooted in the employees. If the company is posing, then the people who are the company will have to pose as well. If, on the other hand, the company is comfortable living up to what it is, then an enormous cramp in the corporate body language goes away. The marketing people won’t create throwaway lines that are clever but false. The sales folk will walk away from the “sales opportunities” that the company is better off losing than having to support. The product developers won’t propose features that look good on paper but do their customers no real good.

Emphasis my own. Those last two sentences are SO FUCKING TRUE! I wish the people in this shitty company (that’s right, I said it) could see themselves running around trying to act like a big, bad ass corporation (something they’re clearly not, and at least in my mind, shouldn’t want to become). Losers.