This
morning I woke up mad. Not just mad – furious, livid, apoplectic. What could
disrupt a good night’s sleep and have me wake in such a foul state? Junior High
School. More to the point, I am mad that I made a conscious decision to go back
to Junior High School, a place I hated every single day I was there. After
yesterday, I really have to question my sanity.
Junior
High School is a place where everybody is just starting to understand right and
wrong, but they chose to do wrong anyway. Junior High Schoolers call people
names and get all bent out of shape when someone doesn’t like them. Nobody
takes kids from Junior High School seriously. You certainly don’t go the local
eighth grade classroom to find your next CEO.
And yet,
here I am again. What the hell is wrong with me? I came back to HR after
arguably successful stints in the business world because what we do matters. If
we can pull our act together we will be the next drivers of corporate competitiveness.
We will replace sales and marketing as the topic of conversation at the
corporate board table. We will, that is, if we can act like adults. But instead
we seem to be in a quandary, wandering around pinching each other and seeing
how much dope we can smoke in back of the school before we get suspended.
John
Sumser writes an article that is in bad taste and hurts people’s feelings. So
what? Bill Gates gets called a thousand time worse than a “spoiled child” in
print every day. Does he quit? No, he understands that’s the price of business
in an aggressive marketplace. “Bill’s a billionaire and should expect that” you
say? So is your point that you aren’t worthy of the attention or that you can’t
stand the heat so you will never be a billionaire? Sounds like a chicken and
egg problem to me.
If you
don’t like what John writes then here is a great idea: don’t point a lot of
people to his site. Don’t drive his traffic numbers up. I believe in a rational
market, and in a rational market people don’t buy what they don’t like. But in
our world if we don’t like what someone is doing we jump up-and-down and then
make sure that people do more of it.
Man, I
pray for the day when we are worthy of being called bad names in print. Fast
Company dignified our profession with their article. I couldn’t believe that people
got upset about that. A serious general news publication finally notices us and
we bitch about it. Unbelievable. I guess our vision of the ultimate hell is
Time magazine doing a cover article about how recruiters are scum and HR
generalists are dolts. We should be so lucky. Finally we would start to get
some capital to do the things we need to do.
Everybody
who has ever peeked at a tabloid raise your hand. Does it make you less likely
to go to the two-timing starlet’s movie or more likely? Lot’s
of data say’s it makes it more likely. So you know who was the real winner in Sumser’s
article? Heather. That’s right, Heather. The crowds that go to see her will be
bigger, more people will read her, and Microsoft will increase their return on
investment. Hey John, can you call me an asshole in print? Please? Oh, I know….
Tell everyone that I have some horrible disease that I got from shacking up
with a male prostitute during the filming of one of my many forays into the
world of gay porn. Thanks!
And to
Heather’s point: it’s a value for value world. If your employer determines that
they get value from your blog without any metrics then more power to them. To
all of you out there saying that blogs are about “buzziness”, I have another B
word for you: bullshit. To quote Bill Gates (who stole it from Steve Jobs) “Real
artists ship.” Period. No market, no art. If Heather’s investors don’t need
metrics to determine their return that’s their right. But to believe that
something of value can’t be measured is the biggest stretch of the business
imagination since the Pet Rock.
We have
serious business to do people. Blogs are fundamentally changing the very nature
of the capitalist system. Up to this point all corporate power was based on
information asymmetry. Blogs are taking that away. Businesses have to
increasingly provide real value to get customers, not just consumeristic,
jingoistic crap. This is a good thing. Let’s do what it takes to keep this
train rolling. Poking your finger in the eye of the corporate masters is the
best possible way to convince them that this is just a passing phase, and that
they can go back to their evil ways.
Yesterday
I got a call from someone who questioned how I could be friends with John
Sumser. “He is just so obnoxious and mean.” Junior High School, man. That’s what
it is. I was the kid who always liked the geeks and wore funny clothes to
school to dare the bullies to do something about it. So, in that spirit, let me
say “John, you are my friend, what you do is a credit to this industry, and how
about we start a business together?”
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