More from The Cluetrain Manifesto by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger. They write about what the Web has done to terminate business as usual. I would further assert that their thesis stands when substituting "education", "health care", or "spirituality" for the word "business". The Web, or the web, as I think it prefers to be called now, has provided the space for our voices to speak true and strong as we wake up from our culturally-induced sleep.
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The idea that we can manage our world is uniquely twentieth-century and chiefly American...It wasn't always thus. For millennia, we assumed that being in control was the exception and living in a wildly risk-filled world was the norm:
As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods.
They kill us for their sport.
King Lear
Today these awful words sound like one of those quaint, primitive ideas we've outgrown.
The belief in the managed environment is a denial of the brute "facticity" of our lives. The truth is that businesses cannot be managed. They can be run, but they exist in a world that is so far beyond the control of the executives and the shareholders that "managing" a business is a form of magical belief that gets punctured the first time a competitor drastically lowers prices, a large trading partner's economy falters, a key supplier's factory burns down, your lead developer gets a better offer, your CEO becomes felonious, or an angry consumer wins an unfair lawsuit.
As flies to wanton boys are companies to their markets. They pull off a company's wings for sport.
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A business has a voice. You can usually hear it--authentic or unauthentic--most obviously and transparently, on its Web site. Even before the last graphic finishes downloading, you can usually tell if the company speaks with passion, if it's lost or uninterested, or if it's online just because a consultant said it has to be. You can tell if the business has some perspective on itself or whether it's all wrapped up in being the Number One Provider of Something, Anything, Please! You can tell if it wants to talk with you or just to pick your pocket. You can tell if the people who work there really care or carry their resume with them, just in case. You can tell if the company is basically lying or basically telling the truth.
Ah, but can you really tell? All the customer has to go by are bits on a screen. Couldn't a clever marketing person pony up a page that looks hip and happy, successfully masking the cries of anguish coming from the corporate cube farm?
Yes, for awhile. Marketing has been training its practitioners for decades in the art of impersonating sincerity and warmth. But marketing can no longer keep up appearances. People talk. They get on the Web and they let the world know that the happy site with the smiling puppy masks a company with coins where its heart is supposed to be. They tell the world that the company that promises to make you feel like royalty doesn't reply to email messages and makes you pay the shipping charges when you return their crappy merchandise. The market will find out who and what you are. Count on it.
That's why you poison your own well when you lie. You break trust with your own people as well as your customers. You may be able to win back the trust you've blown, but only by speaking in a real voice, and by engaging people rather than delivering messages to them.
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People on the planet crave authenticity, whether it be on the part of government, at the corner store, in their child's third-grade classroom or from the pulpit on Sunday. The walls we've built through unspoken cultural agreement about what we believe is acceptable have holes and cracks and the light shines through at the most inopportune places.
That's where the craving is at its most intense--where the pretense shows the most. The fear that keeps those holes getting replastered and refilled won't be able to keep up with the ruse. It's been exposed and seen by too many, and the reasons to maintain the facade just aren't holding water any longer.
We've woken up.
Of course, not all of us have. But it doesn't take 100 per cent participation to initiate momentum toward something new. There is a critical mass, a tipping point phenomenon, around 11 per cent if I remember Malcolm's words correctly--and please correct me if I'm wrong--that begins the wild ride.
"Wild" in some people's definitions, in comparison to where they've been spending their awareness most often. If authenticity is already a part of your psyche, then it doesn't feel so wild to live it. The wild part is getting over the fear that the other shoe is going to drop, that there is some calamity about to ensue since some procedure isn't being followed, that independent thinking might start a revolution.
Well, it does. But revolutions don't have to bloody. They don't have to marginalize anyone. They don't even have to be all that painful, change-wise. That's pretty much up to the folks who push against what's coming with we can't do that, we've always done it this way, there is no precedent, we can't envision it.
That's OK. Because there are plenty who can envision it. They already are. They see in their minds' eyes how it could be. They see the possibilities. They see how things can work just fine.
All we have to do is get over the fear that we've been taught so well, and we can join them, these blissmongers--people who understand that the power of climbing the emotional scale can and does indeed change their worlds, one erroneous belief at a time.
And in turn, changes ours.
