happy endings

Keith McArthur has kicked off the Cluetrainplus10 Project with the FAQ and the list of participants. This is my contribution.

36. Companies must ask themselves where their corporate cultures end.

The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. However "fell" is not really the right verb to use. The inhabitants of the two Germanys did not wake up one morning to find that this icon of the Cold War, this continual reminder of the divided state of their nation, had collapsed in the night. It was taken down. By people. Demolished. It didn't fall, it was pushed.

Organisations have a strange relationship to the outside world - and it doesn't matter if they are corporates, small businesses, government departments or not-for-profits. We talk about customers, suppliers, citizens, donors or service users. We may even have been one just a few weeks previously. We talk publically about serving them. We fantasize privately about killing them. We wonder why they are so alien and difficult. And that is a little odd because they didn't create the technological, legal & social firewalls that we are hiding behind.

Social software does not change the world. It simply makes our present patterns of behaviour less tenable. Other things matter too. We outsourced a whole bunch of stuff. We fired a bunch of people then hired them again and then fired them once more. We've had more cosmetic surgery than Mickey Rourke so it's no surprise that we look as good as he does.

Everyone's a little confused. Is "delighting the customer" really what drives your behaviour? Are your staff really "your greatest asset"? Do you really seek "integrity in all your actions"? The NewSpeak of our organisations is bastard, ugly pidgin of the nerves that is incapable of either poetic inspiration or the direction of a combat command.

If we write our words collectively, in public (and whether it's text or images or video or audio is only of minor importance) then may be we can rebuild our language and the relationships that it supports. But we cannot wait for these walls to fall of their own accord.

They must be pushed.