Be yourself. That’s essentially what the authors of Cluetrain Manifesto have been telling companies for ten years. Which begs the corporate question, “Who are we anyway?”
In its 95 theses and commentary, the manifesto never answers that question. In fact, it raises many more questions than it answers. But isn’t that the point? Writing in the late 1990s, its authors wanted to shake corporate America straight. Questions offer the most effective artillery for such a task.
A Brave New Market
The manifesto asserts that the dehumanizing Taylorism of the industrial era has not only outlasted its welcome, but has overextended itself:
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, business so dominates all other aspects of our existence that it”s hard to imagine it was ever otherwise. But it was. Imagine it.
Personal, authentic, human conversation formed the basis of business transactions for millennia. The marketplace of yore may have been messy, but at least it was real. Today’s companies issue press releases and style guides to reduce error and embarrassment. But what if these moves actually cost sales? Viewing unstandardized experiences as a liability is a recent, and perhaps fleeting, anomaly:
Most corporations … only know how to talk in soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal …
Is the company so jealous of its “image” that it has surgically implanted a lawyer where its sense of humor used to be?
Conversation and voice play a central role in the manifesto’s argument. After generations of censorship, the Internet is allowing human voices to crack through the corporate firewall. Jokes, sarcasm and just plain authenticity are sprouting up in the most unlikely of places. The long-term consequences of such a shift are probably lost on many. You can’t help but admire the authors who hammered ideas like this years before Web 2.0, social media and a fully flattened world:
The future business of businesses that have a future will be about subtle differences, not wholesale conformity; about diversity, not homogeneity; about breaking rules, not enforcing them; about pushing the envelope, not punching the clock; about invitation, not protection; about doing it first, not doing it “right”; about making it better, not making it perfect; about telling the truth, not spinning bigger lies; about turning people on, not “packaging” them; and perhaps above all, about building convivial communities and knowledge ecologies, not leveraging demographic sectors.
The Bottom Line
Judging by the pangs of regret I felt for not knowing about this book earlier, I recommend it to anyone blessed with a modicum of foresight and long-term vision. The complete contents are available here. Copy and paste it into a Kindle or iPad and you’ve got a better read than the authors could have imagined a decade ago.
While all of the ideas in the book are essential, I can’t help but feel that some pages were less essential than others. You can get 90 percent of the message in the first third of the book. If it’s just not sinking in, there’s plenty of reiteration and fun commentary in the following two thirds.
