See-Eye-ee-yi-YO: Our very own Dr. David Weinberger is the subject of a five-page interview in the latest CIO magazine. A sample:
Customers want to talk with the crazy woman in your back room who actually comes up with all the good ideas as well as tons of bad ideas. They want to talk with the designers of the interface or of the controls. They want to talk with everybody who's involved with the product. After all, your customers and employees share a common passion: the product.
That's the way it was before the industrial revolution when there were real, literal markets where the customers engaged with the craftspeople who cared about the pot they were shaping or the flute they were carving or the apple they were growing. The industrial revolution introduced a separation between the producers and the consumers.
But in the world of the web, once again there's a direct connection between the customers who care about the products and the people in the company who care about the products. It can't be stopped. The firewall can't stop it because people go home. They're on e-mail or they're going to a customer's webpage that talks about the product because they love it or they hate it. And it shouldn't be stopped. These conversations are where the passion of your business occurs. It is your business's greatest asset.
You can also read (and hear!) David interviewed by O'Reilly's Steven Pizzo at "Cluetrain Manifesto: Why Companies Must Stop Hiding." This is a two-part piece. The second is an interview with yours truly, which will happen this coming Friday and appear on the Web sometime after that.
Futurize Your Schedule: David Siegel, author of Futurize Your Enterprise and enthusiastic endorser of Cluetrain, has organized Futurize West in Napa Valley, California, on April 19-22. Speakers include: the Zagat people, Napster creator Sean Fanning, Brainmeister Harlan Hugh and myself.
The Original Conversationalist: When I first met Bernie DeKoven, back in the darkest Eighties, he said he was always five years ahead of his time. I asked him why I could still see him, like, today?
I've been having fun with Bernie ever since. He was, and remains (among too many other things to name) the world's leading authority on two subjects that rarely keep company: meetings and fun. Too few people know that fact, even though Bernie's been at both games for a helluva long time. But Larry Magid knows, and he wrote about it yesterday in The Los Angeles Times. The piece is about Technography, a meeting facilitation role that Bernie invented and improved over the years, and which now takes advantage of the Web's hyper-connectedness.
The piece is nice, but too dry. It does insufficient service to levity and ease of Bernie's methods and personality, not to mention his fine humor. For more of all that, plus a sense of where we should all be in the next five years, check out CoWorking.com.
— Doc Searls