The Cluetrain Manifesto

Both are forms of broadcast: the few dictating the behavior of the many. The broadcast mentality isn't dead by any means.

It's just become suicidal.

In contrast, the Internet invites participation.

It is genuinely empowering, well beyond the cliché that word has become. And corporate intranets invite participation in the same way.

There are strong reciprocal parallels between the open-ended curiosity of the new marketplace and the knowledge requirements of the new organization. The market-oriented Internet and workforce-focused intranet each relies on the other in fundamental and highly complementary ways.

Without strong market objectives and connections, there is no viable focus for a company's Internet presence; without a strong intranet, market objectives and connections remain wishful thinking.

The same technology that has opened up a new kind of conversation in the marketplace has done the same within the corporation, or has the potential to do so. But many businesses, especially large ones, still refuse to acknowledge these radical shifts affecting internal workforces and external markets.

They don't want to relinquish hierarchic control. They don't want to give up the tremendous economies of scale they enjoyed under the old-school broadcast-advertising alliance.

It's what they know. It's how they made their fortunes.

However, trying to keep things in the old familiar business-as-usual rut denies the ability of markets to respond to and interact with companies directly — and this is what the Internet has brought to the party.

Why the denial? Could it be that companies are afraid the Internet and intranets will make people smarter? While no company would ever admit to it publicly, this is precisely what many fear.

In the "good old days," consumers weren't expected to make suggestions or ask for new features. They were simply supposed to buy the product — any color they wanted as long as it was black.

In the same way, workers weren't expected to offer insights or suggestions, just to do what they were told.

Networks greatly facilitate the sharing of relevant knowledge within a community joined by like interests.

As a result, the lowest common denominator of informed awareness tends to be much higher online than it ever was in the context of broadcast media. Plus, this informed awareness tends to increase much faster.

This accelerated learning effect obviously applies to intranets as well — it's where their primary value lies. But a lot can get in the way of this value before it has a chance to evolve and mature.

In 1995, Business Week ran an excellent cover story on intranets, just around the time the buzzword was emerging into general parlance. Several CIOs were quoted as saying they had so-and-so many thousand Web pages behind their firewalls.

They were crowing about it. But my take was that this content didn't get created top-down by the organization.

Instead, these pages sprang up overnight like a crop of magic mushrooms on a rich mother lode of corporate horseshit.

What does that mean, you ask? Well, look, when all this got started you had thousands of workers with easy access to free Web browsers and a smaller set of folks who had figured out how to set up Web servers whose only cost was download and tinkering time.

These people soon figured out that HTML wasn't rocket science, and it was off to the races from there. Suddenly there was nothing to prevent the expression of their own ideas and creativity.

Skunkworks wanted to build broader support for their projects, individuals wanted to be noticed for their technical savvy or penetrating wit or business insight.

But then the big-O Organization discovered what was going on, and often as not, brought all this self-motivated fever-pitch development to a grinding halt.

Hey, way to go!

To be fair, there were a few high-level execs out there who truly understood the dynamics of how this stuff worked. And by dynamics, I mean more the cultural aspect of networking.

For the technology, you could buy a book. Aside from this handful, though, most corporate managers were clueless in the extreme.

And, sadly, most still are. Too many have never spent any serious time online.

Then, when they get charged with building a corporate intranet, the first thing they think about is reporting structures and where everybody will sit in some abstract org chart.

But dictatorial directives — "All Web pages must be formally approved by the Department of Business Prevention" — throw cold water onto all that magic-mushroom enthusiasm.

The fact is, people at the bottommost tiers of the organization often have far more valuable knowledge than managers and corporate control freaks. If you kill off this enthusiasm, you can easily end up with a large, professional-looking, and very expensive intranet that nobody gives a damn about.

The question companies should be asking themselves is: What if we built an intranet and nobody came?

Top management support needs to come in the form of funding, facilitation, and enough brains to get out of the way.

It's gotta be more like rock and roll than strait-laced traditional business — and that puts the Suits right over the edge. It's just not possible, they argue, to run a business by letting everybody improvise.

But companies function that way whether anybody wants them to or not. Nobody really runs them; no one writes the score.

Corporate management is still largely unaware of what's going on in the marketplace. But their workers know, because they're operating there already.

What's going on is the Internet.

Today, market expectations are solidly welded to Net-speed performance.

Your software product isn't available for downloading? You don't have secure transaction processing so I can buy it when I need it? Hey, I'm gone! And so is a big chunk of your market share.