Thursday March 31, 2005
Thursday March 31, 2005 Benefits Blogging Brings to Business
I was talking to a friend of a friend who works at a company that does not yet promote employee blogging a la blogs.sun.com.
This conversation made me wonder - if you work for a company that doesn't yet encourage employee blogging, and you're wondering about whether you should influence your company to start blogging, where do you go from there? How do you go from wondering about whether to encourage blogging to articulating the benefits to the business to assessing cultural compatibility to persuading key influencers - and finally, to working the logistics?
Tim Bray recently wrote an articulate list of Ten Reasons why Blogging is good for your career that garnered lots of attention, and I particularly like Jim Grisanzio's addition to the list - that Blogging is fun. But still, these (albeit excellent) writeups primarily focus on the benefits to the individual.
What about the benefits to the company? The first book I read when I started directing the OpenSolaris effort back in the fall of 2003 was the cluetrain manifesto (arguably I should have read it before I was asked to lead the effort, but I suppose I must have had other redeeming qualities.) Cluetrain's opening paragraph captures the compelling attraction of "authentic voice" and the benefits of allowing individuals to speak in unvarnished fashion:
"These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can't be faked."
"Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal."
A talented program manager once told me a story about a friend of hers in startup land, who proudly forwarded their first press release after being in stealth mode. Being a good friend, she read it, with the intention of emailing back congratulations and some kind of witty indication that she'd read the press release. She read it, and re-reread it, then re-read it again, and again. It made no sense. She finally emailed her friend with congrats - and a sheepish "but what exactly have you announced? I don't get it." Even well-written press-releases (which was not the case in this case) require a filter to interpret. Some companies now recognize this, and realize that blogs and authentic voice can help them reach more customers, more easily (since not everyone is willing to employ a filter to figure out what something means.)
Wade Roush recently profiled Sun's blogging efforts in a MIT Technology Review article titled Sun Microsystems: Blog Heaven and expounded a bit on the benefits to the business. From the article (link to Simon's SunMink blog is all mine):
"Sun’s Simon Phipps, whose job title is chief technology evangelist, says that researchers and developers can swap more ideas, build better software, and meet customers’ needs faster if they are active in online communities, where blogs play the dual role of soap- and suggestion-box. "In a world where you must speak with an authentic voice," says Phipps, "the obvious way is to let the people you most trust—your employees—speak directly to the -people you most want to appeal to—your customers.""
and further down in Roush's article:
"consumer-oriented companies that abjure the blogosphere are missing out on opportunities to generate buzz, monitor customer concerns, and—perhaps most importantly—show their human side."
The Economist, king of the witty subtitle, recently profiled Robert Scoble with an article titled Chief humanising officer. From the Economist:
"[Scoble] has also succeeded where small armies of more conventional public-relations types have been failing abjectly for years: he has made Microsoft, with its history of monopolistic bullying, appear marginally but noticeably less evil to the outside world, and especially to the independent software developers that are his core audience. Bosses and PR people at other companies are taking note."
Consistent with the sentiment in the Economist, but more colourful (yellow bricks come to mind), is an excerpt from Jason Theodor's blog:
"Robert Scoble has done the unthinkable with me: he has humanized Microsoft. He has convinced me of something that I always knew but was afraid to admit: companies, especially huge ones like Microsoft, General Motors, Nike, etc, are made up of individuals. It is far harder to hate individuals than it is to hate a faceless corporate monolith. Our world works because of people like you and me doing our jobs, often behind an iron curtain. If people knew what was really going on they would… what? Perhaps sympathize with you! When did Dorothy and the Tin Man and the gang really get the most out of their Oz experience? When they looked behind the curtain, when they realized that the Great Oz was a falible human being, and that the real power lay in their own abilities…"
Joshua Allen, the first Microsoft blogger, talks about corporate blogging here. I like his analogy to having dinner, and to playing golf. Blogging doesn't put buzzwords and a formal tone of voice in between you and the reader. Rather, it's like having a conversation, and building a relationship. And at the end of the day, it's our personal relationships that help drive all sorts of business opportunities, by connecting people to ideas and back to people. From Joshua's blog:
"To me, a “blog” is a personal, unedited, and authentic journal of a single individual who you come to know over time. Hosting a blog is like having dinner with some people you meet at a conference, friends, neighbors, or whoever. While we encourage employees to be active in their communities and interact as much as possible with peers, customers, and so on -- and we selectively hire for such engaged people -- it's difficult to put a metric on “played golf with some customers”. To me, blogs in the truest sense of the word are just like that."
Finally, Om Malik wrote a great article recently titled, How Yahoo Got Its Mojo Back, and spoke a bit about the impact of key bloggers:
And what it also has a couple of guys, I like to call them blog evangelists, who knowingly or not, have brought the right kind of attention to the company. Russell Beattie who recently joined Yahoo has been blogging furiously (much to my annoyance) about Yahoo and its wireless efforts. In normal course of events, Yahoo would have issued a press release, and many of us would have paid little or no attention. Jeremy Zawodny is the other and has helped the company focus on some of the newer social media trends. I have never met him, but if his blog is anything to go by, then perhaps he is spreading the open media religion at Yahoo."
Ok, enough quotes and links to give you background on the benefits blogging brings to business. Let's move on. If you're convinced that you want to start up a company blogging area, Tim Bray has written about the effort to get blogs.sun.com off the ground in his Making Sun Policy writeup. And I highly recommend your company create a "blogging policy" to set the tone and try to avoid misunderstandings. Tim also blogged about Sun's Policy for Public Discourse - which includes his thoughts (and he is most certainly in a leadership position here) and a pointer to the official Sun policy.
In recent weeks, many of us have watched the wonderfully transparent evolution of the blogging guidelines for Thomas Nelson Publishers. The COO, Michael Hyatt, posted the initial Corporate Blogging Rules in his blog, and based on great feedback he received, he subsequently revised the rules because:
"Many readers were put off by the formality and legalese of the document. They felt it should be more conversational and less intimidating—after all, we are trying to promote blogging within our company not stifle it. ... Some even noted items that we had neglected to address, like who owns the content."
It's worth a peek to look at the much-improved second-draft on Michael Hyatt's Working Smart blog - now called Corporate Blogging Guidelines.
The next decision has to do with software and infrastructure. A company can: 1) Host their own blog service, 2) Pay someone else to host the service, or 3) Setup a "blog aggregator page" and ask the employees to individually select their blog hosting services (there are free services and for-fee services available for individuals.) Dave Johnson of Roller fame recently sent me the following on blogging software (thanks, Dave):
These seem to be the most popular options for hosting your own server:
- Movable Type (commercial, written in Perl)
- Wordpress (GPL, written in PHP)
...
- Roller (Apache license, written in Java)
MovableType users seem to be switching to Wordpress in droves since the MovableType licensing changes introduced last year. Roller is actually pretty far down the list, mostly due to the lack of ISP support for Java servers. ISPs that support Perl and PHP are a dime a dozen, but a good Java ISP is hard to find (they do exist). I usually only recommend Roller for those who want to host a very large number of blogs and/or prefer a Java-J2EE based solution.
And the link above to the Thomas Nelson Corporate Blogging Guidelines includes a list of blogging services that individuals can choose. Owen of Asymptotic created a detailed breakdown of blogging software, coupled with a description of the blogging software choice that Owen made as a result. For those of you who are detail-oriented, well, have fun with this. :-)
Finally, if blogs (and wikis) are still new to you and you want to know more, Lauren Wood recently published a Gilbane Report titled, Blogs & Wikis: Technologies for Enterprise Applications? Enjoy...
(2005-03-31 13:24:16.0) Permalink Comments [5]
Thursday March 24, 2005 I've taken the plunge into things delicious and have started to use del.icio.us to organize, track and tag links in a more social manner.
You can find out more about del.icio.us - but so far, the best beginner's guide that I've found is here. (Thanks, John.)
Here's my first set of del.icio.us/claireg links.
Beelerspace: Us.ef.ul - A beginner's guide to the Next Big Thing
A useful beginner's guide to del.icio.us
tecosystems: Alan Taylor's At it Again
Stephen O'Grady raves about Alan's useful del.icio.us bookmarklet - check it out
Blogs & Wikis: Technologies for Enterprise Applications? | Gilbane Reports
Lauren Wood on the use of blogs and wikis in business
AdaptivePath: A New Approach to Web Applications
Answers the question "What is Ajax and why should you care?"
Stephe Walli: Does not compete
Comparison of SpikeSource and Optaros (from Stephe at Optaros)
AC/OS: Rules from O'Reilly
Matt Asay talks about Tim O'Reilly's rules for successful apps at ETech 05
AC/OS: Linux at the high end
What does the future hold for the embedded mobile market?
(2005-03-24 00:22:01.0) Permalink
Monday March 21, 2005 Fingerprints Left Behind by Danese
A big thank you to Danese Cooper for all of the heavy lifting she's done in the open source arena for Sun and for the open source community. It's been a privilege and a pleasure to work with Danese from the day we met back in the fall of 2003. She's smart, articulate, funny, knowledgeable and yes, a bit, ahem, unusual. I will miss her (although her cell phone number is imprinted on my mind, just as concretely as the number 8675309, and I suspect we'll be talking more rather than less.) I'm not the only one who will miss Danese - Jim said it well here over the weekend. It's so very true about the cell phone, and the knitting, and the bag. And don't forget the hats! (hand-knit, of course.)
I'm fond of lists - writing lists and crossing things off of lists, both lists to-do and lists of things already done. Thanks to Erik Kastner and his Spell-with-Flikr tool, here's a colorful list of a few of the areas Danese has left her tellltale fingerprints. Take care, Danese!
(2005-03-21 12:20:08.0) Permalink
Wednesday March 16, 2005 ETech 05, George Dyson and Von Neumann's Universe
I doubt George Dyson will post slides from his Von Neumann's Universe talk at ETech yesterday, since hopefully he's working on a book along the same vein, but if he did post the slides, they would both fascinate you and make you laugh. The audience was in stitches as George took us through a real and comical history of the creation of modern computers.
My grandfather was a huge history buff and knew a lot about the history of New Hampshire. He acquired old artifacts as well - maps, books, state supreme court benches, all things historical. I didn't get it and always wondered what intrigued him so much. And yet somehow, even to a non-historian like me, George, armed with an extensive collection of historical notebooks and maps and pictures, made the history of computing come alive yesterday.
Others have already blogged on the Dyson talk here and also on BoingBoing. Danese got it right in her New DivaBlog when she encouraged folks to GO hear George Dyson talk if they get the chance. It's well worth it.
My favorite part were the many photos of the research notebooks, with the all caps and emphatic hand-written notes saying things like:
"I CAN BE AS STUBBORN AS THIS THING!"
and:
"I have now duplicated both results. How will I know which is right? ...Assuming one is in fact correct?"
Also amusing was the correspondence complaining about how much sugar and tea the engineers/scientists consumed (sugar was rationed during the war) complete with suggestion that they should take their tea in a different building so they could be properly supervised at tea-time!
Technorati Tag: etech
(2005-03-16 15:45:02.0) Permalink
Tuesday March 15, 2005 Buzz about Solaris in a Buzz Prediction Market
At the O'Reilly ETech conference in San Diego this week. One intriguing research project that Gary William Flake of Yahoo Research Labs pitched appeals to my on-the-record fascination with the The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki (who incidentally will be speaking at ETech tomorrow.)
The joint Yahoo/O'Reilly research project is called the "Tech Buzz Game". From the Yahoo website:
"The Tech Buzz Game is a fantasy prediction market for high-tech products, concepts, and trends. As a player, your goal is to predict how popular various technologies will be in the future. Popularity or buzz is measured by Yahoo! Search frequency over time. Predictions are made by buying virtual stock in the products or technologies you believe will succeed, and selling stock in the technologies you think will flop. In other words, you "put your play money where your mouth is.""
Before Gary even had a chance to finish his 15 minute pitch, many of us in the audience already had logins and were already investing our imaginary $10,000.
Due in good part to my significant investment in Solaris, I have been ranked twice today as one of the leaders in this buzz prediction market (the first time I was ranked #13, currently #21.) How cool is that?
I also applaud how attentive to open source issues the Yahoo and O'Reilly folks are. They are hip to the market changing OpenSolaris effort - on their "Markets" page they have a "Sun vs. Red Hat" choice between Red Hat and Solaris with the description: "Sun intends to put the heat on Red Hat with the release of Open Solaris."
Of course, as Jonathan has said to IDG News and Jim Grisanzio has blogged, we in OpenSolaris do not have Linux centered in our sights. Our #1 competitor for Solaris is, quite simply, Windows. (I personally think Linux has changed the competitive landscape in the operating systems world in some hugely positive ways.)
And, more importantly, we are simply trying to making the pretty-darn-amazing Solaris technology available to more and more people, to provide choice for customers and to stimulate innovation through the benefits of competition. All good things, to me at least.
Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris
Technorati Tag: Solaris
Technorati Tag: etech
(2005-03-15 16:32:30.0) Permalink
Sunday March 06, 2005 Top 10 Reasons It's Better to Be a Bartender Than An Engineer
Before OpenSolaris, after we had shipped Solaris 9, I had a chat with a senior engineer, who was trying to figure out his next steps and was a bit frustrated. The engineer is tremendously talented and sees around corners to find problems that other people consistently miss - and is unlike everyone else in the team. Classic example of a brilliant square peg in a round world. Anyway, somewhere along the way, in frustration he quipped, "Maybe I'll just become a bartender..." Well, I couldn't take it. After all, in my mind (apologies to all the marvelous bartenders of the world) it was way better to be a Solaris engineer than a bartender. Wasn't it? Isn't it? I had to do something. But what?
I turned to Letterman for inspiration. Growing up, I had moved around every 2-3 years (perhaps that's why I've been in California, and at Sun, for so long - a form of rebellion against constant change.) As a result, I had to learn how to make friends easily. But being smart got in the way. So I started trying to make people laugh as a way to break the ice. At age 11, it seemed obvious that laughter is a great connector. The sad thing is, try as I might, I'm just not funny. Well, that's not strictly true. I do make people laugh. Only they don't laugh at my jokes - they just laugh at what comes before, or after. Or when I say, in denial, with full-on earnestness, "No, I didn't break my leg, I only fractured my tibia". Oh well. Anyway, this explains why I turned to Letterman for inspiration. End of disgression.
I decided to create a "Top 10 Reasons It's Better to Be a Solaris Engineer than A Bartender" list as a gift to the square-peg engineer. Easy to write, after all, since it is better to be a Solaris engineer than a bartender. But, sigh, so not funny. When I ran a draft by Bryan Cantrill, he suggested we turn the list on its head. And here's the result, my gift to the brilliant engineer, to make him feel appreciated in a backwards sort of way, with help from Adam and Karyn.
Top 10 Reasons It's Better to be a Bartender than an Engineer:
10. You get to throw out annoying customers
9. The tips are bigger than the sunshare bonus.
8. You don't have to go to a steering committee to mix someone a drink.
7. Drunks are not nearly as long winded as Tony.
6. It doesn't take 6 signatures to hire a new bartender.
5. It's in a growth industry.
4. It's a lot more fun to work from home.
3. You don't need ARC approval for a new Cosmo recipe.
2. You never look at one of your fellow bartenders and think "what the heck does that guy do all day?"
1. Being a bartender helps you get action.
There were some much funnier and racier line items, but I didn't have the chutzpah to mail them out back in 2002, and I'm certainly not going to blog them now. LOL funny, though...
(2005-03-06 15:23:04.0) Permalink Comments [2]
Friday March 04, 2005 Moneyball, Statistics and Talent
Late one evening last October I went out to dinner with Hal Stern in Colorado, and, given the time of year, the subject of baseball came up. We were supposed to talk about OpenSolaris and the ramifications for Services, since Hal is the CTO for Sun's Services organization, but I knew that something was up when Hal asked to sit near the bar, so that he could look over my shoulder (not at me, mind you, but over my shoulder) to see the television coverage of Game 5 of the postseason Yankees Red Sox competition. I was happy to oblige, but couldn't help but ask why baseball mattered so much to him?
Well, we did talk about OpenSolaris and also about Providence and eating clubs and family and Fenway and about a
million other
things
that you talk about when you're having a good time. And along the
way, Hal had a book suggestion for me: Moneyball
by Michael
Lewis.The next morning, Hal sent me a follow-up email, not just to say thanks but to make sure I heeded his advice to read Moneyball. (This is one of the valuable lessons I've learned from Hal - even though he's incredibly busy, he always makes the time to follow-up and leave you with an idea or a question. Wonderful manners. Must be that east coast education at work.)
So, finally, long overdue, I read Moneyball. Wow. Of course, it's old news. It was published in 2003. It's been reviewed before. But as I asked around, I found a whole bunch of people who haven't read it yet. So, here is my emphatic recommendation. READ IT. The opening lines of Moneyball's Preface draw you right in:
"I wrote this book because I fell in love with a story. The story concerned a small group of undervalued professional baseball players and executives, many of whom had been rejected as unfit for the big leagues, who had turned themselves into one of the most successful franchises in Major League Baseball. But the idea for the book came well before I had good reason to write it—before I had a story to fall in love with. It began, really, with an innocent question: how did one of the poorest teams in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, win so many games?"
For any of you who have wished that we used more statistical analysis in business - and asked better questions - you'll love this book. It's actually a woven collection of stories - about Billy Beane, Bill James, Paul DePodesta, Scott Hatteberg, Jeremy Brown, Chad Bradford and my favorite, the Greek god of walks. But mostly it's about a vision and a commitment to think about an old problem differently, to challenge conventional wisdom, to be willing to be laughed at, and to use science (statistics, in this case) to make decisions about staffing and talent. It's also a potent reminder that one should never use someone else's yardstick to measure talent. The A's found tremendous contributors where other teams saw only outcasts. From the chapter on "The Jeremy Brown Blue Plate Special" in Moneyball:
"They will make fun of what the A's are about to do; and there will be a lesson in that. The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you've never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice. It's a luxury. What begins as a failure of imagination ends as a market inefficiency: when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the best person for the job."
Michael Lewis has taken a sport that I had always considered Boring (the B intentionally capitalized) and made it absolutely, utterly fascinating. For any of you that know me really well, there's a line in the Scott Hatteberg chapter that resonates. Gold star to whoever finds it.
Finally, I loved the underlying commentary about community, and sharing of ideas, and internet as a town square for conversation and problem-solving. What Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta did with the Oakland A's would not have been possible without standing on the shoulders of giants, nor without the collaboration of different people spread across the country: From the "Anatomy of An Undervalued Pitcher" chapter in Moneyball:
"The Internet of course had consequences for the search for new baseball knowledge. One of the things the Internet was good for was gathering together people in different places who shared a common interest. Internet discussion groups, and Web sites like baseballprimer and baseballprospectus, spring up, created by young men who, as boys, had been seduced by the writings of Bill James."
I think the brilliant story told in Moneyball may just be a drop in the bucket, an early view of the kinds of "big steps forward" people will be able to take because of the internet and better access to information. In the meantime, it's a great read for a rainy, or a sunny, day. Rainy, here.
(2005-03-04 14:02:09.0) Permalink Comments [4]
