by Francine Schwartz and Kathy Sherrill

Conversations are great things. When they're real-and those are the only kinds worth having-you can actually feel the energy and ideas that evolve with life of their own. In this series, we're going to talk. We're going to have a series of conversations about what makes the workplace tick, that intricate thing we call our work, and how it affects our lives. The catalyst for this series is The Cluetrain Manifesto, a book that talks about the impact of the Internet on the way we communicate and explores what constitutes "professionalism." We got excited by the authors' unwillingness to tolerate corporate banality and their affirmation that it is only through authenticity that people can step out of the mire of 'business as usual" and reach a new level of excellence We begin our series of conversations with David Weinberger, one of the four authors of Cluetrain

"HUMOR IS ONE OF THE FASTEST WAYS THAT HUMANS HAVE OF MAKING A CONNECTION."

KATHY: Your book has generated a lot of conversation. Who's coming to you for help?

DAVID: It's coming from all over, including Fortune 500 companies. They're not stupid-far from it. They know that the Web is changing what their customers expect; they're not sure what to do. Some companies are more willing to make changes than others. It's a good guess that all of them are aware of the need. Also, all of them are frightened.

FRANCINE: But what about taking it to a personal level-not business at large?

DAVID: In the book, we use business as an example of how authenticity can transform communication and relationships. Fundamentally the book says that the Web has taught us that the old notion that in order to create something big, you have to create big control is no longer true. It was true for the Hoover Dam and World War II. But it's completely false for the Web, the largest network and collection of information in human history. So the correlation between the size of the project and the amount of the management and control it needs has been demonstrated to be false. False not only for business, but everything else, for every other institution. KATHY: We work with hiring managers and recruiters who want to know what people at Fortune 500 companies are thinking. What's their response to Cluetrain?

DAVID: One of the most frequent and gratifying responses to the book is, "You've written what we've been thinking for years."

FRANCINE: Then what makes it so difficult for people to be real? Why aren't people just doing it? Let's use voice as an example. Your book made it clear that it's only natural to speak like human beings and yet in the corporate environment, there's the issue of being "professional." What can you say to people in human resources, hiring managers, and recruiters who might feel a conflict between what they consider professional and what they consider authentic when it comes to speaking?

DAVID: How do you speak like a human a being? The answer is: "Just go ahead." We have had people approach us and ask us how to talk like humans and we say we can't help them with that. You don't talk like a businessperson to your friends and families; you wouldn't do it leaving the movies or at the dinner table. There aren't rules for this. Just talk like yourself. At work as well as at home. We've even had people ask us how to fake sounding like humans. Jeez!

FRANCINE: And that's where the idea of professionalism comes in, right?

DAVID: The hardest part of this is with regard to professionalism, and it's a darn good question. It's sometimes hard to talk like yourself. People may at times take it as disrespect. That matters. It's good to take account of how a person takes your voice; it's part of living in a complex society. You can help by making the context clear. On Web pages the look of the page helps make clear what your tone of voice is.

KATHY: A large percentage of the population equates professionalism with a lack of personality.

DAVID: Yes, but there's a price to adopting the professional voice. You'll lose some people who think you're not competent. But more insidiously, the professional voice, while it has the stylistic advantage of having lingua franca, also mitigates against diversity. So you also run the risk of only attracting segments of the population that have been trained in the straight back posture of professionalism. Part of the professional voice is a certain seriousness. But humor is one of the fastest ways that humans have of making a connection. Humor is all about perspective, and it's almost always a meta comment about the discussion. That's why humor often reveals a huge amount about the person or a company behind the discussion. That makes it a very humanizing form of communication. Cutting humor off from the conversation in an effort to appear professional may deprive you of what may be crucial context for the other person to understand what you're saying.

FRANCINE: But people love what Cluetrain has to say. They say they want to be authentic and break the walls and get back to what's real. But in the end it seems somehow that they're paying lip-service to the ideas expressed, because it ends up being "business as usual." It's like a psychological barrier somehow.

DAVID: You're right. It's a psychological question and that's yet another reason that there's not a set of rules that you can easily follow. You're dealing with what's most personal here.

KATHY: But what if people want to change, but can't. Aren't there some kind of guidelines to help make the change?

DAVID: All four of us [Cluetrain authors] strongly believe that this is a time of genuine change and that any attempt to come up with a set of steps would actually be a case of denial. Nobody knows what to do and an attempt to come up with a 12-step program would be a false attempt to say everything's under control and is going to be all right. But in fact, everything's changing so rapidly that confusion and fear are appropriate reactions. As Doc Searles, one of our co-authors says, "The tracks end at the edge of the jungle."

lCplanet / October 25, 2000