We all want to make money. Okay, there are a few exceptions. But, really, we all want money. Most of us want it for what it can buy us, a nice house perhaps, which also represents security.
Yet sometimes we get obsessed with counting it and as parts of a corporation we can fall even more easily into that mental mode. We can identify with “the business” and money becomes everything, justified as “shareholder value.”
For some businesses that was never enough. They, or their owners, made donations to charities or attempted to improve the lives of their workforce or had a larger mission.
Transparent Behavior Matters
And now, in the age of open conversations across the internet it is easier than ever to figure out which companies act as if they care about something other than money. And which don’t, even if they say they do.
And the people who buy from those companies, the market that they sell to, care about this.
This principle was one small part of The Cluetrain Manifesto, a set of 95 theses intended as a call to action for businesses in a connected and conversational marketplace.
#80 Don’t worry, you can still make money. That is, as long as it’s not the only thing on your mind.
The concept sounds familiar, like what is being said in the media today. Except the manifesto was published in 1999. #80 was embedded in a section about having a human conversation between the people in the company and the people outside of it.
The Cluetrain Manifesto
I’m writing this post as part of a ten-year anniversary celebration thought up by Keith McArthur. He put out a call for bloggers to write about the different theses and reflect on whether they were still valid and valuable ten years later.
I actually hadn’t read the manifesto before, nor the book that was written around it. In 1999 I was halfway through my thesis research for my Master’s in Materials Science and all that corporate America meant to me was a a place to work when I was done in a year. I didn’t care about business then.
Some of it I couldn’t relate to. The company I work for doesn’t really have an intranet, for example. On te other hand, some of it seemed so self-obvious to me, immersed in the evolution of thought as I’ve been by learning business on the blogosphere, that I had to mentally reach to understand how saying it must have been new then.
Thinking Beyond the Money Even More Valid
But this point spoke to me, partly because I’ve been reading The Necessary Revolution, by Peter Senge and company, which is subtitled “how individuals and organizations are working together to create a sustainable world.” The buzzword today is green and thinking about the well-being of the planet as well as the balance sheet is one of those other things that many consumers want to see on a business’s mind.
Another aspect of thinking beyond making money is to include the potential delayed and unintended effects of focusing on that money, like the employee who spends long hours at the office and never sees his or her kids as they grown, instead of choosing a somewhat lower paying job with less hours. What are the trade-offs and what will your kids, or your customers think of you? Are there ways you can change this in your current framework, or do you need to change the framework?
The point of the manifesto isn’t so much that these things are completely new. Employees and customers have always had voices. The point is that the internet makes them louder, more powerful, and the complexity of the network creates new strengths that businesses must pay attention to in order to survive.
Changes over Decades
In the last ten years the network has only become more complex, spurring the sites and resources we now call social media, for example, and the ball rolling down hill, the drive towards conversation, has only picked up steam. We all, businesses and individuals, continue to respond.
Perhaps in ten more years someone in school now won’t understand what all the fuss was about, because the result will make the manifesto self-evident.
Or perhaps new behavior will emerge and turn all that we have expected upside down. We’ll see.
For more responses to the Cluetrain Manifest visit the list of bloggers on the Cluetrain Plus 10 wiki.
