David Weinberger's Intranet Buzz:
Web and Class

By David Weinberger
Editor, Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization

Last week I was in a discussion group after a presentation I made. In the room were senior managers and owners of hotels around the world. My presentation had been the usual Cluetrain twaddle about the Web returning our sense of individuality and voice, and about it enabling workers to route around the org chart. I could not have been more delighted, then, when no more than ten minutes into the open discussion, two guys were on the verge of taking their pinstriped jackets off and saying, "You wanna piece of me?" The issue: How much do workers hate their jobs?

We got there because one participant suggested, not unreasonably, that having his employees surf the web would hurt their productivity. "I don' want to have someone at the front desk telling customers to wait because he's off surfing somewhere. It's bad enough that if they have a computer available to them, they spend half their time playing solitaire."

"So why are your workers so unengaged that they're playing solitaire? They must hate what they're doing," chimed in another participant. The background for this remark was a set of corporate presentations in the previous session touting the ideal of "engagement." I actually found this heartening. To this group, hiring for engagement means -- as it should -- hiring people who are enthusiastic about their work and who get past the professional smile and the professional chipper attitude. I.e., they're going to try to hire truly hospitable people, no FriendBots(tm).

The conversation quickly turned to why people work in the first place. When one guy said that people don't work primarily for money, another owner said that was "Bull crap" (I'm just reporting), and that was when the coats almost came off. What would I have paid to see two middle-aged hotel owners waling on each other over the issue of why their employees work!

So where did our executive come up with the idea that his front desk people are going to be browsing instead of listening to customers complain that the sheets are scratching their dainty behinds and the masturbatory TV channel went fuzzy during the peak viewing moments? Easy. He sees two worlds: work (that we hate) and the Web (that we love). And there's truth to that view, unfortunately. In fact, in the Cluetrain book I say, sort-of meaning it, however much you long for the Web is how much you hate your job. The Web feels so much better than where most of us work. The Web has hit our culture with all of the power of poetry, making a promise we can't articulate but that is all the more potent for that. And it's going to encourage us all to remake work in the Web's image.

The Author

David Weinberger writes JOHO and is one of the Ringleaders of cluetrain.com, a manifesto of web ethics. He also provides strategic marketing consulting to high-tech companies, writes for several magazines (including Wired) and is a commentator on NPR's "All Things Considered." He was, as VP of Strategic Marketing, one of the shapers of Open Text's intranet strategy. David sits on several conference boards and is a member of AIIM's Emerging Technology Advisory Group. Reach him at self@evident.com.