Cluetrain.org | Corporate Authenticity
In my twelve or so years in the techie trade I’ve come across many companies who offer me employment. Some of them - Gateway, America OnLine, eHelp, Novatel Wireless, to name a few - I’ve accepted.
From each of these I’ve learned many lessons and I shadowed certain people at each in order to learn how to best do their jobs even if it was outside my field. My goal, after all, was to be internally promoted to a different job. Work in Tech Support, get promoted to Applications Engineering. That sort of thing.
Techie Tradescraft Rule One: Always Remain Employable By The Market
Keeping my personal budget small and nimble worked extremely well for me since I was always able to snag a position just about anywhere due to my social network and ‘mad skillz’. 
This was how I came to be at eHelp during the dotbomb days when Tech Support Managers were competing with me for Tech Support jobs. Linear promotion didn’t do those TSMs too much good, which was why I always focused on a slight lateral promotion as a goal. Otherwise you end up competing for your boss’ job and nobody likes that dynamic.
Other companies I’ve refused. I’ve had my reasons and most of the time it was due to a question of their corporate values conflicting with my personal ethics.
Fewer Clients. Less Money.
The Cluetrain Manifesto gave voice to these ethics I hold fairly dear, and after reading the Cluetrain site and the book in 2000 I felt like Tom Cruise’s character in the first act of Jerry Maguire where he writes his Mission Statement:
Let us start a revolution. Let us start a revolution that is not just about basketball shoes, or official licensed merchandise. I am prepared to die for something. I am prepared to live for our cause. The cause is caring about each other. The secret to this job is personal relationships.
– Cameron Crowe, Jerry Maguire’s Mission Statement
In 2001, I was laid off from my wireless engineering position after yet another outsourcing story, this one enhanced by the pre-Enron collusion of the CEO with the TS company that did the contract. Daring to jump into the wide open spaces of individual consulting rather than work yet another replaceable technical support / IT / technical writing position was risky.
April 20, 2001: 3nW Corporation was founded by three disillusioned and laid-off Novatel Wireless employees focusing on Disruptive Technology in all markets. Wireless Data, Energy, Software, Gaming. Six years later, it’s still in operation. The secret to our job was our social network. Personal Relationships. Cameron Crowe is a god.
No More Small And Nimble Budgets… I miss those days!
The Jerry Maguire analogy doesn’t end there. Recently I’ve launched the largest personal venture of my life - the Vets2Vines project.
In writing the business plan, securing over a half million dollars in funding, and executing most of the daily operations required over the past three years, I’ve used my past lateral shadowing experience and also learned a tremendous amount. I’ve also retained that innate ability to pass a gut check.
Often I ask myself, how authentic are my company’s goals? Well, they’re posted on the Vets2Vines site so I don’t lose focus. I’m there to use my core competency in training
Leadership Gut Check: Is Your Company Authentic?
When I look at the products that some monolith corporations produce it seems to be all about the yearly updates. They seem to scream,
“Stay in our maintenance circle, keep pumping your dollars at us and we’ll get you the best product EVER.”
Sounds like flim-flam. Overused makeabuck sentiment with underdelivered promises. I’ll quote Cluetrain.org on corporate authenticity:
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.
Sometimes, if a software product is not a good fit, it shouldn’t be sold. Sometimes, if a feature introduced into a software product is totally foreign to the intended market, the development money shouldn’t be spent.
I’ll be focusing some articles on the feature sets introduced in this year’s releases of RoboHelp and Flare in the very near future with the intent of examining whether the feature sets fall into the authentic need category, or just plain fall flat.
Earlier this year I was disappointed in the RoboHelp 6 introduction. In fact, I was outraged at the sleight of hand that occurred with the removal of several features within the RoboHelp Server. I’m hoping their RoboHelp 7 release has more vigor.
Posted by Charles in Corporate Authenticity, Software |
August 30th, 2007 at 4:03 pm
[...] up the ExpressJet debacle, it seems that my recent topic of corporate authenticity works well in analyzing the ongoing situation with ExpressJet (Nasdaq: XJT), the startup airline [...]
August 31st, 2007 at 8:39 am
[...] And not only will they leave, they’ll also scorch you online. My previous post about Corporate Authenticity talks about this in [...]