Title:   The Cluetrain Manifesto

Chapter 5: THE HYPERLINKED ORGANIZATION

 

Amazon Link:  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0738204315/thesearlsgroup

 

Quotation:

 

“Business is a conversation.”

 

LEARNING EXPECTATIONS:

§                     To know the meaning of hyperlink

§                      To relate Web hyperlink to organization

§                     To see possibilities of seeing a business as a hyperlinked organization

 

REVIEW:

 

The Web has led every wired person in your organization to expect direct connections not only to information but also to the truth spoken in human voices. And they expect to be able to find what they need and do what they need without any further help from people who dress better than they do. This happened not because of a management theory or a bestselling business book but because the Web reaches everyone with a computer and a telephone line on her desk.

 

 

Within this world, the Web looks like a medium that exists to allow Fort Business to publish online marketing materials and make credit card sales easier than ever. Officially, this point of view is known as denial. The Web isn’t primarily a medium for information, marketing, or sales. It’s a world in which people meet, talk, build, fight, love and play. In fact, the Web world is bigger than the business world and is swallowing the business world whole. However, the true opposite of a fort isn’t an unwilled city. It’s a conversation.

 

Fort Business’ assumptions are being challenged by a meek little thing: a hyperlink.

The Web isn’t predicated on individuals. It’s a web. It’s about connections. And on the World Wide Web, the connections are hyperlinks. It’s not just documents that get hyperlinked in the new world of Web. People do. Organizations do. The Web, in the form of a corporate intranet, puts everyone in touch with every piece of information and with everyone else inside the organization and beyond. Hyperlinks have no symmetry, no plan. They are messy. More can be added, old ones can disappear, and nothing else has to change. Compare to your latest reorganization where you sat down with the org chat and your straightedge and worried holes and imbalances and neatness.

Org charts are pyramids. The ancient pharaohs built their pyramids out of the fear of human mortality. Today’s business pharaohs build their pyramidal organization out of fear of human fallibility; they’re afraid of being exposed as frightened little boys, fallible and uncertain. So, here’s some news for today’s business pharaohs: your pyramid is being replaced by hyperlinks.

To have a conversation, you have to be comfortable being human—acknowledging that you don’t have all the answers, being eager to learn from someone else and to build new ideas together. You can only have conversation if you’re not afraid to be wrong. Otherwise, you’re not conversing; you’re just declaiming, speechifying, or reading what’s on the PowerPoint. To converse, you have to be willing to be wrong in front of another person. Conversation also occurs only between equals.

Conversations subvert hierarchy. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy. Being human among others subverts hierarchy.

 

The web is undoubtedly a part of your business plans. While you’ve been hiring consultants to create a slick corporate intranet, establishing policies about who gets to post what, and creating a chain of command to ensure that only appropriate and approves materials show up on your internal corporate home page, your engineers, scientists, researchers, even the marketing folks, have been creating little Web sites for their own use.

No one is controlling what’s posted on them except the people doing the posting. No one is making sure that the corporate logo is in the right place. No one is making sure that the writing is official, officious and as dull as the pencil drawer of a recently downsized middle manager.

The intranet revolution is bottom-up. There’s no going up. If a company doesn’t recognize this, the top-down intranet it outs in can breed the type of cynism that results in ugly bathroom graffiti and mysterious golfing cart accidents. These new Web conversations are actually being used to get some work done.

 

It turns out that Web is infecting organizations with the characteristics of its own architecture. So, if you want to know what a hyperlinked organization looks like, look at what the Web itself is like. The Web has a character sliced into seven themes: 1. Hyperlinked. 2. Decentralized. 3. Hyper time. 4. Open, direct access. 5. Rich data. 6. Broken. 7. Borderless.

From these characteristics of the technical architecture of the Web come the changes that are transforming your business.

 

Your organization is becoming hyperlinked. Hyperlinked organizations are closer to their markets, act faster, and acquire the valuable survival skill of learning to swerve.

The hyperlinked relationships are, like the Web of hyperlinked documents, a shifting context of link of varying importance and quality. They are self-asserting, not requiring anyone else’s authority to be put in place.

 

Traditionally, business is an indoor sport. A business is, after all, a bringing together of talented people who agree to work to achieve some common goals. We’ve assumed “togetherness” means we have to centralize power, control, and resources. But there are lots of ways to be together.

Org charts are written by the victors. But hyperlinks are created by people finding other people they trust, enjoy, and in some ways, love.

 

Self-reliance goes far beyond the technical realm. But, there’s a dark side to self-reliance. It can encourage a type of arrogant cynism that reacts to anything that the business tries to do for you. In this view of the world, there’s what I can do with my own hands and then there’s a red tape. To the Web cult of self-reliance, the business is not only an obstacle, it’s them, the other. Self-reliance breeds with disengagement with the business but more direct engagement with the real work of business.

 

Business likes to think that it operates on a master schedule that devotes into lots of supporting scheduled, just as the corporate strategy devolves into objectives and then into tasks and just as the org charts foliates into branches, twigs, and finally leaves. In a perfectly run business, all the schedules tick in sync.           

The Web decentralizes time by letting hyperlinked groups form that are driven by their do-it-ourselves zeal to get stuff done now.

 

But what happens to deadlines if time becomes decentralized? Let’s leave open the possibility that deadlines are basically slackers. In fact, hyperlinked teams—rules by the laws of connection—are motivated by a genuine desire to turn out a product or help a customer. They will work as hard as they can to do right by their customers and coworkers. They know better than anyone, in many instances, when work can realistically be finished. Managing them simply means asking them.

 

The decentralization of time creates other ripples. When you allow people to control their own schedules, they don’t always cut their day into clean work and nonwork time periods. Their personal lives begin to invade Fort Business.

 

The Web changes time from sequential to random. The Web is making us impatient with anything we can’t skim. The Web time isn’t just seven times faster than normal time. It’s also a thousand times more random— in a good sense.

 

There’s a price to assuming that secrecy is normal, that everything is to be kept secret unless otherwise noted. Not only do you have the expense of keeping the secret, but you lose the value of information. Information by its nature only has value insofar as it’s known. And, when combined with smart people with an impulse to solve problems and to exploit opportunities, information increases its value. Information wants to be free, sure. But it wants to be free because it wants to find other ideas, copulate, and sawn while broods of new ideas. Controlling information is like trying to control a conversation: it can be done and still be genuine. People wander around in information and learn where to find the stuff that count, the stuff that’s wrong in enlightening ways, the stuff that’s purposefully off-base, the stuff that’s fun, and ludicrous. Documents are one type of information that needs to be free.

 

 

People used to keep their drafts secret for fear of looking like idiots, but now they post them and acknowledge they may be completely wrong. Work has gone from an individual task to a group task. The old model of keeping drafts secret until the moment of publication has been broken; ideas are now public from their inception. Ideas are assumed to be given out freely rather than hoarded. People are brought in not because they are in a chain of command but because they have necessary skills, share interests, and are fun to work with. Sober-sided reports that were the mark of professionalism are often replaced by humor-filled interchanges. Fear of letting information out would cripple this project; the report would emerge would be far more inferior to what arises from a free interchange ideas. Besides, the Web lets everyone talk to everyone, in every department, across divisions, with a strategic customers and even competitors. There are no secrets.

 

You want people to make better decisions. But open access to information also means that you’ve undercut your normal decision-making process.

There are lots of reasons for governance through voting, including assuring that the people have a say in setting policies that affect them, but one is particularly relevant to business: wisdom is property of groups. In most instances, groups are collectively smarter than their individual members and often make more sensible decisions. The fact that typically the only group in a corporation that gets to vote is the board of directors is not an accident; decision-making is usually more an exercise of power than an act of wisdom. Of course, majority vote isn’t the only way to make decisions. There’s consensus, compromises, negotiations of every stripe. Yet, for all this richness, in business we default to autocratic rulings.

 

The business now consists of a shifting set of hyperlinked groups, self organizing, inviting in participants based on the quality of their voice, regardless of where they are on the org chart. Business is a conversation. The Web is hitting business with a force of a whirlwind because it is a whirlwind. The closely held, tightly packed, beautifully tooled prices are being pulled apart. They are rebinding themselves in patterns determined by the conversations that are occurring in every conceivable tone of voice. The character of business is becoming the same as the character of the Web—an explosion reconfigured by the intersection of hearts.

 

 

WHAT I HAVE LEARNED:

§                     Hyperlink is a connection between different networks. Anyone can connect its network to another network even without asking permission.

§                     A business can be a hyperlinked organization.

§                     The seven characteristics of the Web can be applied as well in an organization.

§                     Time is very important in business.

§                     Even if business can be decentralized, discipline must be practice in a way that working time is separate from personal time.

§                     It is more efficient to avoid keeping drafts secret. To have a conversation means to accept that we are prone to errors.

§                     Voting can be used as a means of decision-making in an organization.

§                     The Web is not about information. It is about conversation since it is a voice world.

§                      Stories are a big step sidewise and up from information.

§                     The Web is an economy of voice, where people gain a lot of things through conversations.