What do start-ups and coffee beans have in common?

For both, the place they grow shapes who they become.

We don’t talk much about the role of place in shaping organizational identity, but the physical circumstance of where we are located as we do our work together helps to determine who we become as a company. Place shapes our character.

Terroir = Distinctiveness

For both coffee and companies, distinctive features of who they are come from the specific, physical place where they are grown. Coffee snobs, oenophiles and the French call this place terroir.  

Terroir is literally the dirt in which coffee plants are grown. The soil, the minerals, the decomposing leaves, the orientation of the sun, the slope, and the wind influence how the plants grow, which of their features mature and which do not, and ultimately how the plants perform to create a product. Two beans may be the “same” variety, but when they are grown in different dirt, in different places, how do they taste? Different. Why?

Because place matters.

Terroir matters to companies, too. Whether it’s the location of the founders’ parents’ garage or the co-working space where the team meets, the place where your company is planted influences how you feel about yourselves as a group and influences who you become.

We tend to forget the role of place, of physicality, of geographic circumstance, because so much of our work is digitized, and in that way removed from dirt, from damp, from light, and from elevation. We work internationally, across timelines, and even across language barriers, to the point where it all feels like the same black words in the same white box on the same grey-blue screen, no matter where you are.

And, when we do think about the effect of “place” on an organization’s identity or character, we think about the ways that the organization arranges their offices, or designs their new headquarters. These deliberate decisions telegraph and reinforce the ways that organizations want to shape their sense of self.

When I talk about ‘place’ though, I’m thinking not only about the ‘built environment’ – the physical locations that we rent, furnish, and decorate deliberately – but also the physical environment that is simply there. I’m thinking about the subway stations, the pavement, the streetscape, the falafel truck on the far corner, the wind, the shadows, the noise, the smell, and their effects on each other.

The other people in the place matter too — not so much as personalities, but as co-presence. 

You’re not the only entrepreneur, not the only team, walking in these shadows, feeling that dampness, stepping into this building that was a shirt factory before you planted your computers there. People in other companies near you also lose their breath climbing the stairs out of the subway, inhale the aromas of the falafel truck, and even on the hottest summer day feel braced by the cool dampness under the overpass.

Each person experiences this place in his or her own way, but nonetheless you all are responding to the physicality of that shared place.

The place tells us where we are, and our responses to it tell us who we are.

On Washington Street on a rainy day, you’re battered by the wind off the East River. Standing up to it, you feel resistant, oddly stronger, able to handle the against-the-current trajectory a start-up requires. The unevenness of the cobblestone pavement of the side street, the dips and edges in the pine planks on the workspace floor, require that you rebalance with every step. Each tiny re-positioning reminds you to adjust in real time, to be flexible, to stay steady while in motion.

Place is, quite literally, a way that we and our companies can stay grounded.

• Place gives us somewhere to feel centered, somewhere to start from, somewhere to return to.
• Physical places hold us, they are containers for our together-ness.
• Places help us mark who is ‘us’ and who is ‘not us’.
• Places each have a resonance, a unique energy that we can feel. We can tap into that energy to reinforce our own, we can tap into this energy to release ourselves from psychic constraints.
• Places have rhythms, cycles, and seasons that can help set a tempo to coordinate our work.
• Places connect us to the people who were there before us and help join us to the timeline of progress.

Of course, there are other forces shaping an organization’s character more powerfully than place. From the founders’ personality to the talents of the group to the type of business itself, there is much we can use, easily, to explain why we are who we are.

With place, though, the influence is usually sub-liminal, under our consciousness and far from our words.

Instead of being something we know, place is usually something we feel.

The ways that we stand and move in physical space and the ways we collectively respond to the physical texture around us work to connect our cognitions and our emotions. Even for people and companies that don’t want to pay attention to their place, their thoughts and feelings in the space anchor their experience of who they are.

Every organization has a certain ‘je ne sai quoi’, a uniqueness and difference that can’t be put into words.

The Etsy grown in Brooklyn’s Dumbo is different from the Etsy that would have grown in Austin’s SoCo, or that could have grown in Vancouver’s Gaslight. The difference between the three possibilities– with the same founder, the same talents, and the same business model —  finds its source in the unique place. Why? Because it is that place, with all its specific feelings, thoughts, and actions,  where the core members of the organization experience being together.

A few weeks ago I went to visit a company just blocks away from where I lived just out of college. A few decades later, the neighborhood has more upscale shops, more business activity, fewer homeless people, and no broken windows. But the place is largely the same — still damp, still metallic, still punctuated by the constant rumble of the trucks on the BQE.

Still lifted by the arch of the bridge.

Still raw, still elevating, still inspiring.

And the companies growing there? 

Rooted there, to be shaped by that very place. 

Images from Flickr:

Hit the Road  Some rights reserved by Pensiero
Dumbo Manhattan Bridge Some rights reserved by wallyg
Water under the Bridge, Some rights reservedby moriza

Technology has a way of sucking the humanity right out of us.

Consider how we describe, design and deploy ‘enterprise 2.0′ and work system technologies in our organizations:

– When we talk about technology systems, we talk about machines, platforms, inputs and outputs.  We forget about values, emotion, flourishing, meaning and purpose.

– When we design technology systems, we think about control, architecture, scripts, modularity, and proxies. We forget about comfort, warmth, touch, and beauty.

– When we use technology, we automate, codify, record and retrieve. We forget about expressing, feeling, creating, and giving.

Too many work technologies are systems of extraction.

We keep upgrading to technology systems that extract more work from us, while giving back less and less to us.

So who can blame us if we’re not all enthusiastic about Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business initiatives? Once the shine wears off the new tools, we’re left wondering — What’s in this for me? What’s in this for you? What’s in this for us?

You’ve heard me say before that the Enterprise 2.0- digital- social- business- system- industry-complex seems to be running on the wrong rails. Too many technology products are designed, positioned, and ‘sold’ to us as ways to streamline and enhance collective tasks so that we improve bottom line business results.

There’s nothing wrong with that goal, except that it’s so narrow, so limiting, and so shareholder-centered. It’s just not about being human.

We need to talk about how digital social media enterprise business systems can help us, the users, be more of who we are individually and together.

We need to figure out how to transform these systems of extraction these digital-social-media-enterprise-business systems into systems of engagement. We need to build technology systems that help us to be more fully social human as we work together.

5 Needs for Full, Social, Human-ness

When we human people work with other human people, there are five human needs that have to be met in order for us to be our full social selves.

These are our needs for:

1. Identity
2. Voice
3. Agency
4. Community
5. Purpose

Currently, in too many organizations, we are controlled, constrained, muted, forbidden, or discouraged from being fully human, because the work systems  make it hard for us to meet these 5 needs.

However, as work systems for enterprise coordination, knowledge management, work process flow, and customer relationship management become more social, they are also creating new opportunities for us to be more human while we work together.

5 Ways That Systems of Engagement Bring Out Our Full Social Selves

1. Systems of Engagement Enable Identity

We humans want to be who we are. We want to bring our full selves to work and into our interactions with colleagues, while we are are making and doing things. When we are able to be who we are in specific, descriptive, textured, multiple ways, we can be ‘more fully there’ at work.

Systems of engagement let us define who we are, help us be seen for who we are, and help us be known for who we are allow us to contribute our full selves. They help us connect who we are, what we have to offer, and what needs to be done, helping us find and create personal meaning.

2. Systems of Engagement Foster Voice

Voice is our ability to say in our own way what we think needs to be said and to be heard when we say it. Voice is the full expression of who we are, what we think, and how we feel. When we have voice, we are able to offer ideas, share insights, and offer feedback.

Systems of engagement create ways for us to speak, to spread our words, to be heard by others, and to be listened to by others. They allow us to use our voice to collaborate and to contribute.

3. Systems of Engagement Activate Agency

Agency is our ability to act, to get things done, and to cause things to happen. Agency is our ability to make choices and to enact those choices. When we have agency we are makers, doers, creators, innovators. We get stuff done.

Systems of engagement create opportunities for agency because they give us more places in which we can act. Systems of engagement also give us the autonomy, responsibility and accountability that agency requires. We are able to decide, to engage, and to act.

4. Systems of Engagement Cohere Communities

Communities are our connections with other people — not just dyadic connections, but also networked connections. We yearn to be connected with people who know us, who like us, and who need us. When we have  a community, we have a slew of direct and indirect relationships in which we can be supportive, helpful, and influential. We matter to others.

Systems of engagement help us find the people we need and who need us. These systems help us create and sustain connections through which we and others form collectives, collectives that have capability beyond the sum of members’ individual ability.

5. Systems of Engagement Catalyze Purpose

Purpose is our reason for being. Purpose is the cause outside ourselves that focuses our contributions to our community. When we have a purpose we can have commitment, vision, motivation, collaboration, and accomplishment. Our (work) lives have meaning.

Systems of engagement help us channel our attention and our efforts towards our purpose. They link us and our work to important tasks, and link our individual work to the work of others. They accumulate, organize, synthesize, and amplify our individual and collective efforts to help us achieve our purpose.

Identity, Voice, Agency, Community, and Purpose are not focus of social media technologies in organizations, but they should be.

Systems of engagement can certainly help us meet business needs. And they can do so much more. Systems of engagement can help us transform how we work together, by enabling identity, fostering voice, activating agency, cohering communities and catalyzing purpose so that we meet our human needs as much if not more than business needs.

We don’t need “social business” technology to suck less of the humanity out of us.

We need technology-enabled social systems that invite us to engage our full selves in our work together.

We need systems of engagement.

How do we create systems of engagement that bring out our full selves?
See my related post: How to Design Social Business Systems For Engaged, Social Organizations

See also:

Social Organizations Care About Personal Development by Jamie Notter, SocialFish

How Social Media Create Organizational Meaning
Your Authentic Social Network: The Identity Graph
Make Distinctiveness Matter by Linking It To Organizational Purpose
Images from Flickr:
Blue from bartb_pt
Machine à répandre la chimie… from ‘ m x b c h r
Blue Network from ringwell

It’s easy to see how Employer Branding is useful to HR departments and potential job applicants.

Employer Branding, the practice of marketing images of your organization as a desirable place to work towards potential job applicants, is a sensible strategy for attracting the right people onto your bus (-iness).

Employer Branding works to draw to an organization the kind of people the organization wants to hire, by making the organization look like it has specific, compelling, desirable characteristics.

Promoting an idealized or crystallized view of “what it’s like to work here”, organizations and their HR departments hope to increase applicants, reduce recruiting inefficiencies, improve yield, and keep employees longer, all because these new employees experience improved person-organization /employee-employer fit.

Sounds good for HR, sounds good for potential employees.

And, although it is designed to attract future employees, Employee Branding also has a few benefits for current employees.

3 Ways Employer Branding Can Benefit Current Employees

l. The Employer Brand may bring new insight to key managers.

An Employer Branding campaign requires someone in the organization to spend time thinking about “what it’s like to work here” from the employees’ point of view.

Taking the employees’ perspective (however briefly and instrumentally) may give managers and HR departments new insights about the everyday experiences of organization members. These new insights might inspire managers to systematize, reinforce or change the environment at work to make the environment more attractive.

2. The Employer Brand may trigger sense-making and action by current employees.

The messages of an Employee Branding campaign are seen not only by outside, potential employees but also by inside, current employees.

An Employer Branding campaign can create an opportunity for people in the organization to talk with each other about what their organization is like as an employer. Conversations about the Employer Brand might address questions like ” Is this what its like to work here?” and “How can we work together to make this environment more like that idealized picture?”

An uptick in awareness, the invitation to consider the Employer Brand, and the opportunity to talk about it together might lead employees to reinforce and/or improve the organizational environment themselves.

3. The Employer Brand can improve the contributions of new employees to the experience of current employees.

The Employer Brand can help draw the ‘right kind’ of coworkers into the organization, reinforcing the desirable elements of the work environment and helping to fulfill the promise of ‘the brand’ for current and new employees alike.

Of course, the Employer Brand can only have these positive effects if it is somewhat true and reasonably credible. An Employer Brand made up of unreal claims, however desirable these claims may be, would only create disappointment and resentment among current employees.

An Employer Branding campaign can help a current employee these three ways, as long as the current employee has a good personal fit with the desired, projected Employer Brand.

Bonus Benefit if you don’t fit

And for the employee who doesn’t fit the work context of this projected Employer Brand?

There’s still a positive influence. The Employer Branding campaign may help that current employee realize that this organization really *isn’t* a good fit, and inspire the employee to look for a different employer, an organization that has a better fit with his or her own values and needs.

See also:

Images:
GoodFitting When Fastened, and CloseUp Some rights reserved by Lee Turner on Flickr

You’ve heard about the Social Graph and the Interest Graph. Now meet the Identity Graph– the online network of the authentic, social, interpersonal you.

Different kinds of relationships create different graphs.

Each of us has our own social network that’s comprised of a hodgepodge of different kinds of connections. We have social connections between neighbors, college friends, and second cousins, which we capture online on sites like Facebook. This portion of our digital network is our social graph¹.

We have connections among coworkers from other jobs, folks we’ve met at conferences, and ‘business friends of business friends’ organized on LinkedIn, collected inside our organization’s enterprise communication platform, and managed by our professional work communities. This portion of our digital network we call our professional network or career graph.²

And, out there on Twitter, Tumblr, Quora, IfWeRanTheWorld, and so on, we’ve got our connections among folks who care about LOLcats, The Weepies, #SHEtalkTED, and an array of personal causes and individual interests. This is our interest graph.

Our Identity Graph

The Identity Graph is a shimmering vibrant web of online relationships and shared energies that exists on top of and is embedded within other graphs. Composing this graph are the people and the connections across which we act in ways that express “what it means” to be who we are.

The Identity Graph shows us the online relationships where we enact, demonstrate and experience who we really are. We share valued parts of our selves and continually create personal meaning, in interactions where we bring our authentic selves to the fore.

Different Graphs <= Different Use

We create these different graphs because we use online tools for different purposes. Our social graphs come from sharing real-world social connections with people we know, our professional graphs are created as we get work done, and our interest graphs come from pursuing ideas, situations, places, and activities that interest us. These  graphs are not independent… you probably have ‘real life’ friends who share your interests and folks you know from work who have become Facebook friends.

Different Graph => Different “Us”

Over the course of any given online day, we skip from one digital platform to another, listening, sharing and responding to communications with people across our network. Some of these interactions occur in our social graph, some in our professional graph, and some in our interest graph. In an ideal world, many of these interactions would overlap with your identity graph, indicating that across your online social world, you felt authentic some of the time.

We feel different, we are different, across these interactions.

As we interact across these graphs, our “selves” shift. We adjust how we present ourselves, and the ways that others receive and respond to our selves also shifts.

In some interactions, ‘who we are’ is completely visible and apparent. In other interactions, our individual personhood is shrouded or subsumed by a persona relevant to that situation but not necessarily expressive of our authentic selves. We are recognized or ignored, understood or misheard, and ‘there’ or ‘not quite fully there’. Some interactions move a task ahead, while others bring out the best in us and challenge us to grow. Still other interactions do both.

You’d think that ‘who you are’ and what it feels like in each of these interactions would depend on which graph you’re working in– you might assume you’d be more ‘real’ in your social graph than in your professional graph, or more real in your interest graph than in your social graph.

But that’s not necessarily so – you’re more ‘real’ in your ‘identity graph’ — when you are engaging in relationships where the person/ality you are called upon to be is the person most like how you actually see yourself. Your identity graph is the relationships where, online, you get to be “you”.

What it’s like in the Identity Graph

Interacting within your identity graph is personally engaging, rewarding, and growth-challenging. At the most basic level, when we are able to interact authentically, we are able to be more resilient, more flexible, more creative, and more growth-oriented. We are operating from our core identities, so our actions are rooted in our indigenous personal characteristics. Our actions flow smoothly, because we don’t have to filter them or crimp them to fit.

You can feel that you’re in your identity graph when a tweet pings your heart, a subject line makes you drool, and the very name on the email makes you look forward to reading it. I bet I’m not the only person who, when my energy flags, turns to scan her feeds and timelines looking for connection opportunities that, once engaged, will help me get my authentic mojo back.

(This is one of the reasons we’re so hooked on email and Twitter– we keep hoping, just hoping, that we can have an authentic interaction or two to keep our days meaningful.)

But you also love working within your identity graph because it’s meaningful to you. The people you are interacting with, whatever it is you are communicating, and the “who that you” all matter. You are contributing the authentic you to the other person(s) in the relationship, to the project you’re working on, or to the interest that you share. The more you are able to be who you are in an interaction, the more you are able to create meaning for yourself as well as for others.

Try this little experiment:

Over the next few days, take note of the online interactions where you feel particularly alive and authentic.

1. Find 4 or 5 people from your work, interest or social graphs who, when you interact with them, call forth your authentic self.
2. Put these people in their own special (secret) Facebook group, Twitter list or column.
3. Then, invite yourself to step up your interaction with these people.
4. Take note of how it feels when you make just a small adjustment to engage in your identity graph more often.

My bet is that you’ll find yourself being drawn to that set of people. And, you’ll find yourself shifting how you present yourself in other interactions too, adding a bit more ‘you’ to these, too. You might also notice that you can expand your identity graph by developing new relationships through and around the people in your identity graph (for example, by interacting directly with friends of friends on Twitter).

When you have a sense of your identity graph, you can use this new awareness to

– Be more you, more often, by spending more time in your identity graph

– Grow the spaces where you get to be authentic. Take advantage of serendipity (like when new people follow you on Twitter). And, apply the same techniques recommended for ‘networking’ to extend your identity graph more deliberately.

– Diagnose your online life –by looking to see where you should or could be more authentic, and developing your identity graph there.

Right now, the social networks and interactions you inhabit may or may not call out the most authentic versions of who you are. But, you can change that by changing your identity graph, to invite your authentic self to flourish.

See also:
Tweet Yourself Like The Person You Want To Be
Is your organization flourishing or withering?

Why the Interest Graph Will Reshape Social Networks (and the Next Generation of Internet Business) by Nathaniel Wittemore on Assetmap

The Future is a graph, by Chris Dixon on MEDIAite
Explaining what the “Social Graph” is to your Executives, by Jeremiah Owyang

Notes:
¹Technically speaking, your ‘social graph’ is all of your social relationships that are captured online. Above, I’m using the term more metaphorically, and more generally, as its use has evolved outside the Technical & empirical community.
² That I know of, no one has defined the professional network as a career graph (or similar) but it makes sense to distinguish this from other graphs.

Images:  The web outside, Advanced Topics in Scrum, Network Weaving Blog

Social media tools can transform an organization.

One of the things I enjoy so much about social media is the chance to be (more often) the person I am, with my specific sets of talents, interests, and goals. Every time I extend myself out on social media, I get to choose what I’ll say, how I’ll represent an idea, and how I’ll demonstrate what that idea means to me.

The same is true for organizations. Each time an organization reaches out to share a message, it is aiming to create an impression on its audience(s) that conveys a sense of who that organization is and what it cares about. Each message creates meaning.

Historically, this reaching out, this extension of the organizational ‘self by creating meaning,’ happened in one of three ways:

1. formal corporate communication,
2. advertising (either for products or for corporate), and
3. CEO presentations (e.g., interviews, speeches).

All of these efforts involve managing the corporate, collective self into a single, intentional voice– keeping the meaning as tight and limited as possible. The message was (and is still) almost always massaged, shaped, intentional, deliberate, goal-oriented.

What makes social media so interesting as a tool for creating meaning about an organization and within an organization is that:

1.) Social Media messages often bypasses the ‘professional massage’ step, and
2.) Social Media messages come from many places, many individual and many interactions instead of one central source.

When communication bypasses the sausage machine, it can create meaning that evades centralized, controlled boundaries. It can be ‘off message’ and offer a very different meaning, it can be ‘on message’ and be more complex than the typical extruded meaning, and it can be somewhere in between, fleshing out and filling in our understanding of what that organization is all about.

Because social media communications come not only from ‘corporate’ or ‘marcomms’ efforts but also from online representatives, brandividuals, and a motley assortment of folks connected to the organization, all these additional, little bits of communication offer an alternative form of data for understanding the organization.

Instead of a massaged, managed, deliberate stream, social media give us many local, specific, situational, personalized messages about the organization.

While it’s true that sometimes the meaning conveyed in these messages just reinforces the centrally-managed meaning, a lot of these messages create new meaning.

New meaning gets created when individuals speak about something specific, on behalf of the organization.

When individuals are speaking on behalf of their organization to some interested person, that individual faces a unique challenge. S/he has to take the general, global, abstract, big picture message of the organization and translate it into the specific context. S/he has to understand the organization and s/he has to put that understanding into her or his own words. Her own words convey new meaning.

The organization member her or himself has to craft specific meaning out of a general understanding. In that moment of crafting, at that point of articulating, the individual has to put new words together in new ways to represent the organization’s point of view.

At that moment, in this unique communication, the individual creates new meaning about and for the organization.

One source of new meaning is how the individual translates an abstract organizational position into a specific statement. Another critical source of new meaning is that the individual contributes her or his own knowledge — local knowledge, from her or his direct engagement in the organization — into that message. That local, personal knowledge is almost always new information, and in this way the real experience of that individual member creates new meaning for the organization.

In the process of creating new meaning, the new meaning also accrues some additional heft. Not only does the new meaning get created, but also it gets ‘owned’. The person who said it owns it, and now has to stand behind it. S/he may called upon to repeat this message, to elaborate on its meaning or even to demonstrate it in her next interaction with that audience. Thus, the new meaning has legitimacy, some authority, and more than a little bit of authenticity.

Here on this blog, writing about the dynamics of social media, new meaning creation, and how it engages organizational identity and reputation challenges me the same way that writing ‘about’ Zappos culture on Twitter challenges the average Zappos employee.

We both have to take a big picture message, and convey a big picture intent, in specific communication acts. We have to understand, translate, embellish, exemplify, recreate, rewrite, from general to specific. We have to create new meaning each time, in each blog post and each tweet.

And so it is with each of us who, through social media, puts into words and into interactions the values, the attributes, the goals, the meaning of what we are part of, who we are speaking for, and what we are speaking about.

We’re not just making it up as we go along; we’re making new meaning as we talk together.

See also:

Be Your Own Hashtag
Tweet Yourself Like the Person You Want to Be
The Best PR that $1.6 Million Can’t Buy: Authenticity in Action at Zappos
Why We Want Brandividuals on Social Media

Image: Solidarity….. misconceptions by Super is Sunny

As much as I love academic writing, conducting studies and developing theories, all of this work shares one acute problem – it takes forever to get from first draft to print.

My just-published journal article with Adelaide King took about 8 years from idea to print, while the germinal paper on Organizational Identity & Identification with Jane Dutton and Janet Dukerich took a bit longer than 5 years.

When you’re working on ideas to contribute to ‘the literature’, that cycle time of 3, 4, or 8 years is awful, but still somehow bearable. In part, it’s bearable because in the interim you are sharing working paper versions with colleagues, influencing their thinking and developing your own. And, it is made bearable by knowing that not so much is changing (except the theory & knowledge itself) that makes you worry that the ideas are becoming obsolete.

Not so, though, with writing directed towards practitioners. The passage of time really matters. The time lag between idea and print is even worse when you are writing about a fast-moving phenomenon… like social media, for example. Practitioners could actually put to use the ideas that are shared in academic research, if only they have access to them (which they don’t until the ideas are in print).

This is all a big wind-up to say: Here’s a draft of a chapter I wrote 14 months ago, that won’t be published in hard copy until this spring. (That would be a total cycle time of 18-20 months– fast in the world of academics, but glacial for practitioners.) A better, more perfect version will appear in print, but in the meantime here are some ideas to enjoy– if they are not already obsolete!

Send me back your comments, suggestions, etc.

Re-creating Reputation Through Authentic Interaction: Using Social Media to Connect with Individual Stakeholders

Abstract

Organizations have a new opportunity for creating dialogues with individual stakeholders in which organizations can demonstrate their authenticity and earn a positive reputation. Social media tools, with their interactivity, constant stream of data, and easy sharing, make two-way symmetrical communication between individuals and organizations technically possible. And, strategies for making the organization socially present (i.e., more human) (Biocca, Harms, & Burgoon, 2003) online put the ultimate goal of authentic communication within reach of organizations.

To take advantage of these opportunities, organizations and reputation management practitioners will need to reconsider the roles of distinct, distributed interactions and individual stakeholders on creating reputation. Organization scholars will want to reconsider the relational approach to stakeholder management, and develop cross-disciplinary research to combine investigations of computer-mediated interaction with our evolving understanding of reputation management.

December 2009.
Forthcoming as a chapter in an edited book on Corporate Reputation, in Spring 2011.

ReCreating Reputation Harquail

(it does eventually download)

I’m taking part in the virtual book tour and are doing to explore concepts from . Maddie and Lindy, along with their colleague Jamie Notter, have long been some of my favorite bloggers.

“Even though” they write about communications strategies, and focus on a very specific type of organization (associations), their ideas are big, broadly applicable, and eminently practical. I appreciate their deep sensitivity to the organizational and leadership challenges of communications, especially when applied to social media tools. So when Maddie and Lindy put their ideas together in a book, and set up a virtual book tour to promote their ideas, I was only too happy to sign on.

Knowing that this post would be one of the last in a long line of reviews (all of them positive, it turns out) I wanted to ask them questions that not only pertained directly to authenticity and organizations of all kinds, but also to ask them questions that they might not have already answered.  Below, Maddie graciously answered my questions … even the completely softball opening question of:

“Why “Open Community“?”

Maddie Grant: We come from the association industry and for many of us “membership” people, community is old hat. It’s what we do. It’s central to our work.

And yet, for some reason (actually a lot of reasons) what we know about community isn’t always translating well to building community online. Lindy and I have talked to thousands of association executives who have voiced their frustrations about the social web–from the overabundance of tools and the disorderly experimentation of staff and members, to the lack of organizational support and the unwieldy processes for monitoring and managing social media, and that’s just the beginning. It’s easy to get bogged down in the newness and the detail, and miss the bigger picture–not the 10,000-foot bigger picture, but the “just high enough to make practical sense” bigger picture.

So we started writing the book, and the idea that kept popping up is the concept of Open Community. Here’s the gist: Your Open Community is your people who are bonded by what your organization represents and care enough to talk to each other (hopefully about you!) online.

Surprising Reactions and New insights

cv: All of the reviews of the book have been enthusiastic and positive. Certainly, you knew your book would address a ‘pain point’ or fill a need for association staffers and/or members, and the positive response to the book confirms that you’re offering associations something they feel they need. As you’ve read the reviews yourselves and talked to people who’ve read the book, which reactions have surprised you? Where there any points you took for granted (or thought were kind of banal) that resonated very strongly with readers? What new insights did you have about Open Community as you listened to readers?

Maddie Grant:  Actually, we wrote (and promoted) the book very consciously as a “conversation starter” and every “big idea” in the book is meant to be something people can riff off of and build a bigger conversation around. So while we were more excited than surprised that i t has actually worked that way and sparked some great conversations, we were also amazed at the creativity of some readers in sharing their thoughts. Here’s an example – and filmed a little video spot talking about what resonated with them.

On the downside, we’re looking for case studies from associations “living” the concepts in the book–and we’re sure they are out there–but everyone feels that they are behind the curve right now. So it looks like our industry may need this book even more than we thought, to help push things forward and help these organizations become more “social” and more open.

Aligning Actions and Purpose, and Conveying Meaning

cv: When I talk with organizations and their members, I focus on two issues–one is aligning actions with purpose, and the other is finding what’s most meaningful about the organization/business for members/employees and the organization’s external stakeholders. When you think about the insights and recommendations in Open Community, which single bit of advice do you think is most relevant to aligning actions and purpose? How about for helping associations and organizations communicate what’s most meaningful?

Maddie Grant:  Great question. In a wide sense, the entire book is about conveying the meaning of the organization. You can’t successfully connect with your community online without being able to identify why that matters purpose and what you are trying to achieve. Maybe you’re trying to advance an industry or profession–every association mentions that in their mission. Or maybe you’re trying to achieve something more tactical, like reaching out to younger stakeholders or reinforcing an advocacy campaign.

And as for our single bit of advice: choose clarity over control. We define clarity over control as “a leadership concept in which the clear articulation of an organization’s most important priorities, universally understood by all stakeholders at all levels of the organization, de-emphasizes the need for centralized control over every detail of the organization’s activities.” We call it “the key to leading the way and sharing control.” In it’s simplest form, it means being able to define for everyone in an organization (staff and members) how online activity advances the mission of the organization. If you can do that, then you’re allowing not only your staff, but also your members and other stakeholders to share and collaborate in the work of the organization in
a strategic way.

cv: In the last several months, there have been several books trying to explain and help us anticipate how social media will push organizations to change, and how organizations might embrace social media to transform themselves and their relationships with their stakeholders. I’m thinking of books like Charlene Li’s , Tony Bingham & Marcia Conner’s , by Beth Kanter, Allison Fine, & Randi Zuckerberg, and The Dragonfly Effect by Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith. Each of these books is focused on its own niche (leadership, learning, nonprofits, and social change, respectively) but all of them address the link between social media and serving a community.

Recognizing that you’re focused on associations, what insights from Open Community do you think apply to any organization and to every organization that wants an online presence?

Maddie Grant:  There are many lessons in the book for any kind of business. We actually feel that many associations have a huge advantage that they have yet to leverage–they have a built-in community within their membership. Association communities are people who gather in real life and talk about industry issues and spread the word or volunteer their time for the good of the order. The book is about helping associations translate that to building community online as well as offline. Many other kinds of companies and businesses are actually looking at membership-type models to build customer loyalty. And even for those that haven’t defined their business model in that way, similar lessons apply because successful use of social media tools has everything to do with building relationships between people. For-profit companies may not have built-in communities, but the smart ones are aware that the power of social media lies in the growth of networks around brands and organizations.

So specifically, there are lessons in the book that are absolutely relevant to any organization: lessons about building internal capacity (process and structures) for successful social media management; about how to manage the relationship between public outposts (like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter) and your homebase website; about recognizing and rewarding champions; about new skill sets for becoming a social organization; and more. The ultimate lesson in the book is that building community online is about people, not about technology or tools.

Read this book!

CV: My own view of Open Community is that it hits the issues square in the center, and offers actionable advice for managers who want to use social media to cohere their stakeholders around a sense of shared purpose.

I’d recommend this book to practicing managers, but I also think it would be worth a read by academics. Although Open Community isn’t an academic book about organizational theory per se, the insights and suggestions are well-informed. I can imagine management professors reading this and getting a double whammy– actionable advice to offer students, and an orientation to what’s really going on in actual organizations run by real managers who care about what they do and the people they do it for. I’d also assign this book to BBA, MBA and ExecEd students, because Maddie & Lindy reinforce all the messages we want students to hear about communicating and leading– in a very real-wold way. While Open Community will orient any manager to the key issues of social media, it really is a primer on the leadership challenge of creating community- online and offline.

More on SocialFish:
Mobile apps are a waste of time for associations, by Lindy Dreyer
Do you have a philosophical commitment to becoming social?, by Maddie Grant
Social Organizations Are Inclusive, by Jamie Notter

[Disclaimer: I liked this book enough to buy my own copy; I didn't get a free book in exchange for a post. I'd have read Open Community anyway, and appreciated it just as much. ]

“Building on TED and the TEDWomen Conference: How Can We Make Conferences More Inclusive?”

We made a big start towards answering this question at our roundtable conversation after the TEDx636 NYC/ TEDWomen simulcast event. Our panel, organized by Natalia Oberti Noguera and sponsored by NYWSE, included  Brittany McCandless (moderator), Adaora Udoji, Liza Sabater, Ritu Yadav, and me.

This post offers my personal, subjective summary of the conversation and the actions steps that were recommended. As my fellow participants, organizers, and allies share their perceptions of the event and ‘next steps’, I’ll share these ideas and resources too.

Although our panel was diverse in terms of age, expertise, professional domain, culture, and racioethnicity, we shared the same over-arching goal: inclusivity and diversity not only at conferences, but also in the larger ‘world of ideas’.

Liza Sabater led off by describing a history of her efforts with others to get more women onto panels at tech events. Liza noted that very early on, people created a wiki where women in tech with interesting things to say were recommended as speakers and panelists.  Adaora Udoji described a similar effort that she’s been involved in to create a directory of women and men of color for corporate board membership.  Activists in the tech community  and beyond continue to point conference organizers to these lists of available speakers, and generate new and up-to-date resources. Most recent is Sara Holoubek’s initiative, the Field Guild to Female Founders, Influencers and Deal Makers.

The sheer number of directories like these, and the sizes of the database of nominees they contain, puts the lie to the claim that “there aren’t ‘enough’ women”. If conference planners were to use these resources, they could find many qualified speakers from diverse groups. And, using these resources, conference planners could help to alleviate the tokenizing experience that both Liza and Adaora mentioned, where the same one or two women, or people of color, are being asked to represent over and over again.

Despite having an abundance of women available to speak, conferences still lack gender parity. So, there is still work to do to get these women into panels and onto speaker lineups so they can bring their big ideas into the conversation.

Four Strategies

We came up with four different, complementary strategies:

1. Advocate for Gender Parity at TED and TEDx
2. Advocate for Gender Parity at every conference, with a more general campaign
3. Create alternative conference spaces built on inclusion and diversity as a foundational principle
4. Create ad hoc, smaller scale opportunities for women (and men) to share their ideas publicly

1. Gender Parity at TED and TEDx

Taking ideas and comments from my own blog posts and from insights by Michelle Tripp, we’ve started a few microactions directed at influencing TED itself. Some tactics are loosely organized in the SHE Should Talk At TED campaign, (#SHEtalksTED), initiated by Debra Condren, Gloria Feldt and me, and anchored on Facebook. We are working on a button that can be shared to nominated women as potential speakers for TEDs and TEDxs. And, we will soon send a formal invitation to TED organizers to invite them to a conversation about inclusion.

There is also the Dubai-based campaign sponsored by Susan Macaulay at Amazing Women Rock. Susan has been advocating for more women speakers at TED events for the past two years.

She has also posted more than 200 TED and TEDx talks by amazing TED women (http://www.amazingwomenrock.com/ted-talks/awr-ted-talks-list.html) on her site. She updates the list regularly, and tweets several TED women talk links daily on Twitter from @AmazingWomen (http://twitter.com/AmazingWomen).

2. Advocate for Gender Partity at Every Conference, with a more general campaign

Natalia Oberti Noguera has started a broad campaign for inclusion: #MoreVoices. #Morevoices includes a Tumblr, a hashtagging campaign, and an action on IfWeRanTheWorld: “add #morevoices to conferences”.

Rachel Sklar’s #ChangeTheRatio effort, begun last year, is one we should continue to embrace. #ChangeTheRatio includes a Tumblr and a speaker series, as well as a @ChangeTheRatio Twitter account and hashtaging. Rachel’s efforts are targeted more at tech events, but the awareness of a need to #ChangeTheRatio of men and women, to achieve #GenderParity, is something that helps not only the tech community but also the larger public community involved in discussing ideas.

Sara Holoubek’s initiative, the Field Guild to Female Founders, Influencers and Deal Makers, has a web page where people can nominate interesting women and keep track of the growth of the Field Guide.

3. Create alternative conference spaces built on inclusion and diversity as a foundational principle

If you were designing, from the ground up, a scalable conference about ideas that embraced inclusion of women and men, and people of different cultures, races, abilities, and orientations, it would probably not look like TED.

Sure, it might have strong branding, a great reputation, a significant online distribution, and weighty influence in the tech, entertainment, and design world conversations, but it might not be organized around a ‘singular, great, individual giving a speech’.

An inclusive conference might include team presentations, interactive conversations, tummeling, unconferencing, and a whole range of learning and discussion strategies that are implicitly less hierarchical than having everyone watch the ‘sage on the stage’. It would not depend on the transmittal model of learning (where wisdom flows from the speaker to the passive, receptive audience) and involve more co-learning, facilitated discussions.

Conference spaces themselves would be designed to facilitate interaction, many modalities of learning, opportunities for reflection, and even opportunities for practicing new skills. Liza Sabater continues to look for funding for a conference along a more inclusive model, focused on tech. There are surely others with a similar interest– and you should follow Liza on Twitter @blogdiva.

TED is a terrific event but it is not the only way great ideas can be shared, be spread, and become influential. There are other models, and new conferences can and should be created along these additional models.

4. Create ad hoc, smaller scale, frequent, local opportunities for women to share their ‘Big Ideas’

One argument that is offered to explain the under-representation of women at TED and other conferences is the belief that women are scared or otherwise ill-equipped to speak in large events like these. I grant that there may be some truth to these claims of reticence, despite the presence of truly outstanding women presenters like the women who graced the TEDx636 stage last week.

Certainly, the kind of ‘sage on the stage’ presentational style expected at TED is something that is learned. And, other modes of public idea facilitation are also learned– one may be born with the inclination, but the skills themselves can be taught, learned, and developed.

To develop their presentation skills, women could participate in ongoing public events like IGNITEnyc, FRED Talks, CreativeMornings (events and videos sponsored by Emily Cohen), NerdNite, and more. (Send me links and I’ll add them here).

This strategy also helps directly with the main goal, getting women’s ideas into the larger conversation.  At these ad hoc events, we can present ideas to each other, talk about them together, and then share them more broadly with our own networks.

There is an abundance of terrific women, with great ideas worth sharing. And, there is an abundance of tactics and strategies for working towards the overarching goal: gender parity, diversity, and inclusion in all conferences and in influential conversations about ideas.

Whether you gravitate towards a TED-specific effort, a broader inclusion effort, a ‘we can build it’ effort, or joining ongoing programs to add you own and others’ voices, there is a way for you to join in.

Hit those links, above, and get on Twitter, Facebook, and the blogosphere. Let’s hear you — add to the #morevoices for #genderparity in the world of Big Ideas.

See Also:
Speak Up, Speak Out, Take The Stage: The World Needs More TED Women at AmazingWomenRock.com

Images:
Red horizon from Photofinish 2009
Untitled from Dré Batista Please respect …

Personal branding is inescapable.¹

A person simply cannot participate in online forums, much less in their full career, without deliberately or unintentionally crafting and framing the way that they are seen by others.

However, while personal branding is inescapable, it isn’t easy to make it work in our favor.

Personal branding is fraught with choices and tensions, and these challenges are different for girls.

For women of every race, ethnicity, and orientation, each personal branding decision requires us to navigate the crosscurrents of societal pressures and personal authenticity. Each woman needs to negotiate which social expectations she’ll meet, and which ones she will resist, as she strives to create and defend a personal brand that expresses her unique identity.

Every social media platform constrains the ways that you can represent ‘who you are’.

Personal Branding starts with presenting yourself online, in public spaces, on public platforms, for other people to see you. Most professional social media platforms–those internal to the organization, those connected to particular communities, and even those where you might participate as your own “self” – select and constrain the information you are able to display.

Software platforms are built to reflect value-laden decisions about what sorts of information matters, how much information is important, how that information with be displayed, and to what degree the presentation of this information can be personalized. These choices reflect what’s best for the software platform, not what’s best for your personal brand.

On these social platforms, we craft our personal brands though a series of decisions about – naming, - claiming, – displaying, and - disclosing ‘who we are’.

For women, each of these decisions requires us to navigate that gray space between buying into or resisting social expectations for what she is allowed to be and how she is allowed to claim her unique identity.

Naming

Let’s start with a really easy personal branding decision: What name are you going to use?

• Will you use a formal name, a nickname or a handle? Will you choose a name that reflects your life-partnership status, or one that is independent of your relationship status?

• If you are married, are you going to use your birth name or your married name? Are you going to hold on to your pre-marital online history by retaining your name? Will you try to keep your professional and personal lives separate online by using different surnames?

• If you are in a relationship that is not recognized by the laws in your state, will you try to signal with your name that you have a life partner? Or, will you use a name that helps you keep this part of your life?  Are you going to try to hyphenate your last name, and then hope that the software platforms you need to use will actually accommodate a name with more than 16 characters, that includes a hyphen?

Along with the decision itself, are you ready to negotiate the expectations about your career commitment and your priorities that people infer from the decision you make around your name choice?

Claiming

Online, we need to claim what we know, how we know it, and what we can do so that people know how to categorize us. We need to describe ourselves with terms that represent our defining characteristics, our experience, our accomplishments, and our abilities. For women, claiming presents three challenges– claiming our expertise, finding labels  that fit that expertise, and finding labels that don’t invite the ‘wrong’ interpretation.

When you label your attributes, your skills, and your accomplishments, your goal is to establish credibility. Taking credit may or may not be harder for women, but certainly appearing credible by striking an acceptable tone as you describe your achievements and accomplishments is harder for women.

• What terms feel accurate and comfortable for you to use to describe yourself and your expertise? How do you choose terms that strike the right note without seeming presumptuous? What words and phrases are appropriate for women?

• Are you ready to deal with the ways that some people will respond if you emphasize a particular credential, or when you take credit for an accomplishment in a way that they think is inappropriate for women?

Formal titles and credentials can often be received differently when they are offered by a woman and not a man.

Here’s an example from my own experience. I’ve noticed that a few times when I’ve commented on other blogs and mentioned my PhD, or referred to my scholarship (as in, research published in peer-reviewed scientific journals), men who disagree with me have challenged my academic bona fides by making snarky references to my PhD or putting the work “scholarship” in ironic quotation marks. I haven’t seen men dismiss other men in the same way.

The credential ‘bounces’ differently when offered by a woman than when offered by a man. Just ask Senator Boxer, or Dr. Jill Biden.

Displaying

Peole consume online information visually, so “optics” matter a lot. What kind of visual design and images will you offer to establish people’s first impressions?

Head shots, profile pictures, and twitter avatars capture one particular visual image of who you are. The picture you choose not only (usually) reveals your gender, but also reveals your age, ‘attractiveness‘, and gender performance. So, choosing your headshot is a big deal.

• Will you wear makeup or not? Will you have your hair natural or will you get your hair processed? Will you retouch your photo or leave the wrinkles blemishes visible? Will you try to look older or younger? What will you wear?

• Will you have a professional take your head shots or will you just crop an informal snapshot? What gaze will you choose? Will you smile or look serious?

• (Note: Regardless of your sex, unless your screen name or handle includes the word ‘diva’, I don’t think your avatar should project a ‘come hither’ vibe. Just sayin’.)

Are you trying to look competent or warm? Personable or professional? Claim or avoid the ‘feminine’? These choices matter.

You also create your brand through the visual appearance of your online space, with fonts, themes and colors.

• Will you chose fonts, colors and themes that communicate that you are female? Will you present a conventional expression of femininity with a pink or purple website with curvy fonts? Or, will your site be red & black, blue & grey, sans serif and androgynous?

All Cover, Not Much Book

The first three steps of personal branding — naming, claiming, and displaying– focus on creating a first impression. These steps of personal branding emphasize the simple surface more that the complex depth of a person.

Coincidentally, these steps heighten two ongoing tensions that many women struggle with:
1) being subject to the scrutiny of the male gaze, and
2) being valued for how she looks rather than who she really is.
Consider that simply being told that men are observing her can prompt a woman to “narrow her social presence” and to say less about herself.

Just as women experience pressure to meet external, often unrealistic (and usually performance-irrelevant) appearance standards in physical work spaces, they also experience that pressure online. This pressure is not imaginary or all in their heads; women actually get unsolicited feedback on their pictures and self-descriptions based on whether and how their appearance conforms to some people’s standards. All you have to do is read the comments on blog post by an outspoken woman, and without even scrolling a third of the way down, you’ll see some reference to her appearance. It won’t be complimentary.

Personal disclosure

To craft an appealing brand, we’re told to share more personal information about ourselves– to tell personal stories, to share emotions, to be honest about our opinions. Personal disclosure helps people “get to know who we really are”.

However, personal disclosure can also make us vulnerable.

Online, personal disclosures are interpreted differently and are often less safe for women than for men. For example, when a man mentions on Twitter or Facebook that he’s home for the day with a sick child, people send him pats on the back. In contrast, many women won’t even mention if this is happening for them, since the very bit of disclosure that gets a man applause for being a good dad garners for a woman the concern that she’s less professional or less committed to her work.

Some people take the opportunity to offer unsolicited feedback on whether, why and how a person’s disclosure is valuable, and to pass judgment on that person publicly, through blog comments, “likes”, and responses.

Personal disclosure opens us up to other people’s scrutiny, where they can evaluate us on dimensions that are unrelated to our professional ability.

For many of us women who’ve been working in the professional world for while, much of our effort to develop our reputations and to build our “personal brands” has meant breaking free of the templates created by stereotypes. Most of us have been creating our reputations over time, through multimodal interactions, histories of action & reaction, long-standing professional relationships, and more. These are overstuffed with information about us and offering people experiences of us from which they can infer and construe who we are, and get a fuller sense of our authentic selves.

But even so, seemingly superficial choices about how we present ourselves online still seem to matter. We women have to create a place for ourselves and each other in a professional world that is not excited about having us participate as professionals – especially not in our most authentic, anti-stereotypical, self- expressions.

All this is not to dismiss the ways that personal branding is a challenge for boys, but rather to help us appreciate that:

Given the demands of presenting oneself in a socially-approved way versus as our most authentic selves, it’s different for girls.

See also:
Don’t Let Personal Branding Stifle your Authentic Voice
Defend Your Personal Brand. Barbara Boxer shows how.
Authentic Twitter: Are exclamation points unprofessional?
¹ Note, I’m not a wholehearted fan of personal branding.

Mystery and the Modern Woman,
Confessions of a 36 year-old woman, by Tara Hunt on horsepigcow

Images:
Hello My Name Is silver pendant, by pollysimon on Etsy
Princess Silhouette Cameo Vinyl Decal tweetheartwallart on Etsy
Girl Name Definition Adjectives PlanetWallArt on Etsy
Handmade paper flower by danamazing on Etsy
Stamp of Approval, by Circa Ceramics on Etsy

If you were building an organization from the ground up, how would you “build authenticity in” from the very start?

I had the chance to ask this question of Cindy Gallop, an entrepreneur and marketing/advertising/branding guru, who is the CEO of a start-up called IfWeRanTheWorld. IfWeRanTheWorld and Cindy have both been recommended to me by several readers who are active in the cause marketing, technology, women who tech, and geek feminism conversations.   IfWeRanTheWorld offers a real-time example of 3 important trends: feminist design principles, designing for authenticity, and designing to create a better world.

When I wrote about a feminist approach to social network software, and mentioned IfWeRanTheWorld as one live site that is perceived to be built on feminist design principles, Cindy tweeted me and offered to talk about her venture and the software design in more detail.

Our conversation was rich and wide ranging, with enough provocative ideas and wise advice to fuel many blog posts. In this post, I want to focus on one small piece, the kind of business organization Cindy and her colleagues have created to organize how they work together.

Innovating From the Very Start

I asked Cindy what it was about IfWeRanTheWorld (IWRTW) that people should notice, that would demonstrate her group’s design philosophy as applied to the business itself and the business operation and structure. She started with the most basic, and most profound, business design principle:

I wanted to innovate in every aspect of how we operated as a business, not just the actual platform itself.

To create the organization that would build this business, make it profitable, and make a difference in the world, Cindy and her team focused on four principles for working together.

1. Design the organization around the kinds of lives the individual members want to live.

Consider the relationship between your members’ work lives and the rest of their lives, and start with a balanced equation.

The IWRTW team has made several critical decisions about the design of their business venture together so that they can live the lives they want. When Gallop put a premium on hiring ‘the absolute best’, she also explicitly agreed to find ways that they could work together without asking everyone to choose between moving to NYC or to passing up the opportunity to join IWRTW. They manage offset time zones and physical distances with all of the tools you might imagine, and they spend money to fly everyone in for important sessions when they need to work together in the same physical space.

This arrangement allows each member to work on IWRTW as a start-up while maintaining the personal lives (and the professional connections) that support them in continuing to be their own “absolute best”.

2. Allow, expect and create “the organization” to reflect the authentic voices of the individual members.

Cindy described how, although “IWRTW is built on my own (Cindy’s) DNA”, IWRTW as an organization is intended to be experienced by the members and others as a composite of the authentic voices of all the the members.

IWRTW is as much a creation of Cindy, her values, and her self-expressions as it is the co-creation of the authentic voices of the other members.

For example, the occasional off-color tweet or party-boy blog post is absolutely fine when it is a genuine reflection of the member who posted it. There’s little concern that these communications will drive away customers or users– in fact, this kind of authentic communication helps them attract the kinds of users, companies and brands they want to work with, since people who don’t feel comfortable with the identity IWRTW expresses will select themselves out.

This is an attitude about the voice of the organization that I describe as “We are all of us being each of us.”

3. Create the kind of organization you want to work in, not something that will make you unhappy, stressed, or depleted.

Inside the organization, find the roles, titles and activities that create the link between who your members are and what they are doing/creating in the organization. Draw on members’ unique (business-relevant) skills and personalities, and support these skills and personalities.

A few very basic organizing decisions demonstrate this principle. First, consider the titles that various members of IWRTW hold. Some examples: Joe Unruh is the Love Agent, Corey Innis is a Code Supervillian,  and Rachel Heaton and Julia West are Code Whisperers.

Second, consider the world-changing projects that are unfolding on the beta of their social platform. (I’ll give details about the business itself in another post).

As part of demonstrating and developing their product, the members of IWRTW are pursuing their own world-changing goals using their company’s tool. They are putting their software to the test of their own action commitments. They are making sure that their product really can support world-changing initiatives. (See Joe Unruh’s profile for an example.)

4. Design the venture to have a business model that you want, that supports the kind of organization and the kinds of relationships you want.

This is a bit more complex to tease out, but the idea here is that IWRTW is creating a business — a product and a way of interacting with clients and users — that is literally being the change that they want to see in business itself.

Cindy explained how something as straightforward as their pricing model demonstrated their values.

Our product is designed to be affordable to the kinds of businesses we want to support. Running an ad agency (Cindy’s previous business), we had complicated compensations agreements that were different with each different client. At IWRTW, our pricing policy is transparent and simple. It makes it easy for us to do business, and to do business fairly.

Is this model of a tech start-up “competitive”?

As Cindy and I talked about the model of the authentic organization that they are creating in the start-up of IWRTW, I noted the many ways that their organization and their business model are ‘different’ from what we expect to see at the typical tech start-up (e.g., folks sleeping under their desks, a 24 hour work day, founders desperate to look serious and to impress investors.)

I had to ask Cindy whether she was ever concerned that their venture might not seem dedicated or competitive enough to potential funders or to potential clients.

Cindy replied:

That’s fabulous, actually, not to look like other start-ups, because you make your client base very self-selecting.

When you define yourselves very clearly in terms of what you stand for, that makes everything in your business life so much easier. You attract to your business the people you want to work with, and the people you want to work for. You engage the ways you want to, and with whom you want to. It ends up being a fabulous business discriminator.

… If you only ever behave, act and communicate in ways that are true to you and the venture, the more ways you can demonstrate who you are with everything you do. You never have to worry about how you come across to people, because you never act in ways that you would feel ashamed of. This is liberating, in every piece of the business.

You can see this liberation, and the alignment between their purpose, their identity and their everyday actions, just in this self-description of IfWeRanTheWorld:

IfWeRanTheWorld is a real-world experiment in tapping good intentions and turning them into tangible, do-able microactions that anyone and everyone can help you to do. All of us can achieve more than one of us, and everything starts with a microaction.

Being authentic as an organization starts with deliberate choices — some big, some small, and some micro. From the very start-up, designing your organization to demonstrate the power of your product, and to demonstrate the power of your business purpose, builds a foundation for ongoing authenticity with clients, with each other, and together.

See also:
Yes, We Plan: How Altruism and Advertising Could Change the World, in Wired, by Elliot Van Buskirk
Facebook for Women vs. Facebook Designed by Feminists: Different vs. Revolutionary
If Women Had Designed Facebook
Authentic Student Entrepreneurs: Embedding Personal, Product and Organizational Brand

Image from TED Blog