The Demonic Paradox

We will strive to listen in new ways -- to the voices of

quiet anguish, to voices that speak without words, the voices

of the heart, to the injured voices, and the anxious voices,

and the voices that have despaired of being heard.

Richard M. Nixon, first inaugural address, 1969

chapter seven

And increasingly, we value only two qualities:





1. The engagement and passion-for-quality of genuine craft.
   
2. Conversations among recognizably human voices.

Tell ‘Em What You Told ‘Em

chapter six

The Longing

We don’t know what the Web is for but we’ve adopted it faster than any technology since fire.

We are all victims of this assault on voice, the attempt to get us to shut up and listen to the narrowest range of ideas imaginable.

It is only the force of our regret at having lived in this bargain that explains the power of our longing for the Web.

And yet... we feel resentment. Find someone who likes being managed, who feels fully at home in his or her professional self. Our longing for the Web is rooted in the deep resentment we feel towards being managed.
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However much we long for the Web is how much we hate our job.

How to Hate Your Job

A managed environment requires behavior from us that we accept as inevitable although, of course, it is really mandatory only because it is mandated. We call it "professionalism."

This fervid desire for the Web bespeaks a longing so intense that it can only be understood as spiritual. A longing indicates that something is missing in our lives. What is missing is the sound of the human voice.
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The spiritual lure of the Web is the promise of the return of voice.

What Is the Web For?

chapter two

the following is the complete second chapter of



The Cluetrain Manifesto:

The End of Business as Usual

Copyright © 1999, 2001

Go out and commit a whopper. Then embrace it publicly.

It’s a good feeling. It’s liberating. It’s how you find your voice.

• Mistakes give us something to talk about.
  
• Being wrong is a lot funnier than being right. The right type of laughter -- laughter at what the mistake reveals about our situation rather than laughter aimed at a person who dares to be human -- is enormously liberating. In fact, laughter is the sound that knowledge makes when it’s born.

• Errors are how assumptions become visible. And there is nothing more valuable than a newly discovered assumption, because only then can you see what’s holding you back and what could propel you forward.
  
• There’s too much to know, so all important decisions are, to some extent, random. By being free to make errors, you can try more paths until you stumble on one that takes you somewhere interesting (albeit probably not where you at first thought -- mistakenly -- you should be heading).

But wrongness has a lot going for it beyond the fact that some things can only be learned through trial and error. For example:



• Some people are great at generating ideas but terrible at thinking through their impact. You want them to have as many bad ideas as possible because they will thereby randomly generate more good ideas. (I tell my clients that I try to maintain a 9:1 ratio of bad ideas to good. And, no, I can’t tell which are which. If only.)

But it’s not just systems that are imperfect. More important, so are we humans. Say it with me: humans are imperfect. I am imperfect.

Feels good, doesn’t it?

• Unlike information, they have a start and a finish. The order counts a lot.
  
• They talk about events, not conditions.
  
• They imply a deep relationship among the events, a relationship characterized overall as "unfolding" as if the end were present in the beginning

This may not sound revolutionary, but consider:



• People used to keep their drafts secret for fear of looking like idiots, but now they post them and acknowledge they may be completely wrong.
  
• Work has gone from an individual task to a group task.
  
• The old model of keeping drafts secret until the moment of publication has been broken; ideas are now public from their inception.
  
• Ideas are assumed to be given out freely rather than hoarded.
  
• People are brought in not because they are in a chain of command but because they have necessary skills, share interests, and are fun to work with.
  
• Sober-sided reports that were the mark of professionalism are often replaced by humor-filled interchanges.

Information wants to be free, sure. But it wants to be free because it wants to find other ideas, copulate, and spawn whole broods of new ideas.

Controlling information is like trying to control a conversation: it can’t be done and still be genuine.

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 résumé?

Great questions... because there aren’t clear answers yet.

To have a conversation, you have to be comfortable being human -- acknowledging you don’t have all the answers, being eager to learn from someone else and to build new ideas together.

You can only have a conversation if you’re not afraid to be wrong.

To be human is to be imperfect. We die. We make mistakes.

Sometimes we run from our fallibility by being decisive. But doubt is the natural human state, and decisiveness -- more addictive than anything you might shoot into your veins -- is often based on a superstitious belief in the magic of action.

Hyperlinks Subvert Hierarchy

Fort Business’s assumptions are being challenged by a meek little thing: a hyperlink.

chapter five

"Markets were conversations" doesn’t mean "markets were noisy." It means markets were places where people met to see and talk about each other’s work.

Conversation is a profound act of humanity. So once were markets.

What’s happening to the market is precisely what should -- and will -- happen to marketing. Marketing needs to become a craft. Recall that craftworkers listen to the material they’re forming, shaping the pot to the feel of the clay, designing the house to fit with and even reveal the landscape. The stuff of marketing is the market itself. Marketing can’t become a craft until it can hear the new -- the old -- sound of its markets.

By listening, marketing will re-learn how to talk.

Who Speaks?

But who gets to speak?

Equally vague and common are platform, open, environment, and support when used as a verb. A veterinarian using TechnoLatin might say that a dog serves as a platform for sniffing, is an open environment for fleas, and that it supports barking.

This isn’t language. It’s camouflage.

The Wrong Kind of Buzz

Corporate Voice

Here’s a syllogism. Your company needs to engage in the new market conversations. Conversations occur in human voices. Your voice is the public expression of your authentic identity, of who you really are, of where you really come from. So let’s draw the logical conclusion: on the Net at least, your company can’t engage in the market conversation without its authentic voice.

There are other clues that a company is having an identity crisis:





1. Is there a spark of life in its marketing materials? Do they smack of focus groups and the safety of the lowest common denominator, or do they take the risk of being as interesting as its best customers?
   
2. Do its marketing programs keep people out or invite them in? Do they help customers and prospects make connections to the relevant employees?
   
3. Is the company able to admit a mistake? Can employees admit they disagree with management decisions or the latest marketing mantra? Or must they always explain why everything is perfect in this, the best of all possible companies?
   
4. Is the company so jealous of its "image" that it has surgically implanted a lawyer where its sense of humor used to be?
   
5. Does it drill its employees on the corporate catechism, or can the workers tell stories that for them capture the essence of what the company is about?
   
6. Do the employees routinely sign their e-mail "Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the management"?

When Push Comes to Suck

The reluctance of business-as-usual to break out of its set way of thinking was perhaps epitomized best by the Web’s own infatuation with "push technology." This reached its zenith in May, 1997, when Wired, the computer industry’s utopian fashion monthly, boldly declared its wish to supplant the Web with media more suited to advertising.

Networked Markets

The long silence -- the industrial interruption of the human conversation -- is coming to an end. On the Internet, markets are getting more connected and more powerfully vocal every day. These markets want to talk, just as they did for the thousands of years that passed before market became a verb with us as its object.