Mastering the Tao of Personal Computing

Beware, this post has only questions and no answers but just a few suggestions coming out of my no-experience-at-all-in-creating-and-running-businesses. But guess what? It’s open, so feel free to come in and take part in the discussion.

Where to start from? A month or so somebody had twitted a book about the revolutionary changes happening over the Internet - The Cluetrain Manifesto - I took a look at it, read the manifesto, take it to my heart and bookmarked it. I really can’t remember who suggested me that book, but anyway I want to thank him. It was two days ago when I got back to that bookmark and started reading it and after I read the first chapter it was really difficult for me to get asleep - the voice of the book was amplifying with my brain waves, resulting in a resonance that kept me awake for hours after the time I usually go to bed.

The thing is that me and my partner are forming a company which is focused on building human-centered Rich Internet Applications, but we don’t want to limit the human centrism only to the applications itself, but to also focus on the humans as the foundation of the whole company. And by humans we don’t mean consumers, demographics and statistics, but the conscious, valuable beings that are aware of themselves, the environment and the people around them.

A bit of history

The conveyor line best characterized the most of the successful businesses of the last century - increasingly detailed division of labour, mindless execution of single repetitive tasks and higher and higher deskilling. We refer to this period of time as to the Industrial Era, and to this management approach as to Command & Control. While it is great for producing more with less, it’s simply not humane.

If you ask me the industrial era of Command & Control management have died with the fall of the Berlin Wall (this event is not directly related to technology, but adds a dramatic effect) or even a decade before that, but I guess it will take another 20-30 years (hopefully far less than that) to change peoples perception of business as just a shiny polished logo, strong brand with some brainwashing slogans and infinitely repeating advertisements that dumb down the man into a robot (which eventually is substituted by actual robots) on the conveyer line for the purpose of producing and consuming more and more, in order to sustain the company’s infinite expansion.

I’m a software guy, so I have a natural disgust for Command & Control - it’s just not the way software is getting done. But no matter how I hate Command & Control, I still can’t believe how distorted was my perception of business. I thought I need to implement the “genius” idea - the idea that will bring the fortune to my company, but an idea that is not necessarily improving people’s lives. And then… then what? Just keep a nice company image, good financial records, advertise in order not to fossilize and leave everything else to the financiers - they are so good at buying and selling and blowing phony balloons. You may think I write this, because I’m one of those that hate brokers and bankers and all financiers, but probably I wouldn’t even thought of them if I haven’t recently stumbled upon this article - I think Guy Kawasaki twitted about it three or four or five weeks ago and this is how I got to it.

Intuitively I knew my perception of business is full of shit, but it took some things to happen before I got my intuition wide awake.

Sustainability

I’ve been thinking for quite some time about the impact my lifestyle has on the environment, but not until a year ago I began to understand what sustainability really means and why it is important. Since then I try to live with the realization that everything I do should somehow fit into the natural environment and not just fit, but also to sustain in it without damaging or destroying it… or at least I just try to minimize my impact. If you still don’t know what sustainability is really about, you got to watch the William McDonough’s TED talk to get acquainted with the notions of cradle-to-cradle design.

Speaking of design…

I’m in the business of making things, so it’s kind of essential for me to have an accurate understanding of what design is. The cool thing is that if you watch the William McDonough TED lecture you’re not going to learn only about sustainability, but you can also get enlightened on what design is… and it’s pretty much everything. By saying that it’s pretty much everything it’s my way to emphasize on the importance of the concept of having an intention and to signify this intention with your designs. People think about their desires and needs, but rarely take a minute and try connecting all the dots into a picture that clearly shows their intentions. I was no different…

It’s just scope and scale

Everything I do or have done had a meaning in the context of my actions - graduating a nice university, picking a profession, practice that profession. Sure, professionalism is expected, getting the job done is expected, but nobody expects or requires from you to have intentions out of the scope and the scale of your jobs. It’s just so Command & Control… but besides that Command & Control is so inhumane it is also terribly bad for the environment. If you think about your actions, you’ll see that many of them are justified enough in a particular scope and scale, but in a broader scope and in a bigger scale those same actions are devastating - their signal of intention sounds pretty strange for a reasonable being. It goes something like: “Let’s have miserable lives full of stress in a polluted environment where our kids are dying from mercury intoxication.” Allan Chochinov have put it all together very beautifully in his 1000 words Manifesto for Sustainability in Design.

Designer of a business

As a beginner entrepreneur I’m also a designer of a business. It’s my responsibility to decide what’s going to be my company’s signal of intent. It’s my job to develop a sense of scope and scale for the company, instead of just finding ways to expand. It’s me who’s task is to define the company’s mission, instead of just searching for sources that will fill my pockets. It’s me and my partners… and as every other designer, we have specific problems to solve.

The problem

Simply put, we need to design a very humane conversation environment for our company. And by humane I mean an environment that responds to the natural human needs and our inclinations to speak freely, show off with the stuff we’re creating, share our knowledge, learn new things and satisfy our curiosity, but above all to connect and relate with other human beings.

The common closed model

The established model among successful companies is to have an intranet hidden behind a firewall and a centralized censorship. The intranet is used for internal discussions, research and development, enterprise management, etc. The firewall takes care of the company’s discoveries, issues, ideas and dirty underwear not to be released by chance to the public and to keep curious strangers, but mostly to keep potential clients and competition out of the companies internal issues and affairs. The central censorship is disguised under a Public Relations department. The PR guys are concerned only with the company’s image and this concern has nothing to do with utility or contribution to the greater good, not to mention ethics. It’s easy and maybe fair to start demonizing the Big Brother and to add a flavor of paranoia, but you should put aside conspiracy theories and start thinking about the reasons that have triggered the emergence of such a model. And the reasons are pretty obvious… It’s a matter of basic survival instincts. It looks like living in the constant conditions of competition and rivalry gives power to our most destructive forces. It’s utopian to expect fair play and ethics out of a dog-eat-dog situation. So, forget about greater good, forget about ethics, forget about basic human needs, forget about the environment and lets focus on screwing each other… But does it has to be necessarily like this?

Are there any better alternatives?

Remember the crazy mathematician from the Beautiful Mind movie? Do you remember his name? If you’ve attended a Game Theory course there is no way you’ve missed or haven’t remembered his name - John Forbes Nash Jr. He had mathematically proven that in competitive environments, conflict situations or games, where every player is interested in raising a higher score, the optimal strategy is to reduce competitiveness in favor of cooperation. If all parties agree to such strategy, they’ll increase their score in the most optimal (least riskier) way and they’ll reach a point of equilibrium where everyone’s behavior should remain unchanged in order to gain a sure profit for all parties from such a conflict situation. Businesses apply this theory with their competition, but the sole goal of increasing profit no matter of the social and environmental costs, is pushing people away from businesses and is turning people into their biggest opponent. What used to be statistics, demographics and a gray dumb mass of consumers and employees is now a massive symbiotic system of pervasively interconnected individuals. In our hyper-linked world, we can know anything, anytime.

My starting business must acknowledge this eruption of mass awareness and must forge a mutually beneficial strategy that has the potential for large scale collaboration. And to my opinion the first step is to create an entirely open company.

What’s an open company?

I haven’t done any research on whether there are such companies and I haven’t even made the effort to search whether an ‘open company’ exists as a term. I don’t know what an open company is, so don’t expect from me to give you an exact definition. What I can do, is to list some of the characteristics of an open company and also to write down what an open company is not.

an open company should encourage the emerging Conversation and should not limit discussions only inside the corporate intranet - one way or another the information leakage is inevitable - either an unsatisfied client will expose you as a fraud if you pretend to be something that you’re not and if your services suck and your products are crap, or either one of your employees will start blogging under a legal disclaimer that will prevent affiliating his writings with the actual company’s issues

an open company should make use of all emerging information channels in addition to the company’s established channels - useful feedback can come from virtually everyone and everywhere

an open company should avoid standing in what I call a protective posture - covering its problems, masking company’s proportions into something completely different or being willing to do anything for a buck - this protective mode prevents companies from actually facing and solving their issues and eventually creating a healthy, worthy, sustainable businesses

an open company should share its knowledge - simple as that

And here are some words on what an open company is not:

an open company is not a reality 24/7 pimp show - company’s openness is not a desperate attempt for being original - company’s openness is a tool for discovering and solving issues, sharing knowledge and learning from each other - it is conceptually pure, potentially ethical, but most importantly it looks like a more humane way of making business

The current status

Right know my venture is wearing the suit of an outsourcing company. Should I be ashamed of that? Strange question you may think, but I wonder is it going to look that strange to you when you come to the realization that it is my company’s availability, my company’s competitive prices and it’s my company’s higher quality of service that makes possible and it’s partially responsible for the huge lay offs of programmers and software engineers in the world leading countries. Companies that pretend to be socially responsible may put this legal note on their services:

USE OUR OUTSOURCING SERVICES RESPONSIBLY. ABUSE MAY RESULT IN PEOPLE LOOSING THEIR JOBS, DESTROYING LOCAL ECONOMIES AND EVENTUALLY DESTROYING YOUR WHOLE COMMUNITY.

But on the other side, it’s me and my partners and our employees who maintain a cheaper lifestyle and restrain our consumer abilities to a level much lower than the level of our american colleagues for instance. This is the nature of the free enterprise system. All of us helped and contributed in establishing this system on a global scale, and now like it or not we’re in position to constantly compete with each other. I don’t like it this way. I would rather collaborate than compete with my colleagues, so I’m in a search of ways to create an open company. I don’t know if this makes any sense to anyone, but every suggestion and opinion would be appreciated.

This post is tagged Design, entrepreneurship, obecto, open, sustainability, The Cluetrain Manifesto