dive into mark

I think some people are misunderstanding an important point about my experiences with knowledge management and weblogs because one of the examples I gave was of my own boss attacking my personal weblog. The point of that example was not that employee-maintained corporate weblogs would contain personal information (although they probably would — I think it would be very difficult for even the most loyal corporate lapdogs to resist slipping in a few personal items here and there, but that’s not the point I’d like to make here). The point was the reaction I got from my boss when he read something on my weblog that he found objectionable: he immediately called me up and told me that the weblog had become a liability to the company, and that it should come down entirely.

Notice all the things he did not say. He did not say that a single link should be removed. He did not say that a single story should be deleted. He did not say that I should be more careful in the future. He said that the entire weblog was suddenly a liability and should be removed entirely.

The fact that it was a personal weblog, and the story in question was of a personal nature, is really beside the point here. If I were maintaining a private, corporate weblog, the objectionable story in question could very well have been an opinion piece disagreeing with the company’s choice of business partners. In fact, since I am prohibited from discussing the company’s business partners on my personal weblog (for non-disclosure and other obvious reasons), you can bet I’d be itching to discuss them on my corporate weblog where non-disclosure was not an issue. Lots of people would. For any choice a company makes, especially a big choice like announcing a new business partner, some people will have strong opinions about it. Right now, they bitch about it over the water cooler or in the lunch room. If everybody were wired into a weblog, they would discuss it in that medium instead.

And how do you think this particular boss would react to that? “Oh, well it’s company business on a company weblog, so it’s OK?” Hell, no. He would have shut me down faster than you can blink. The only reason he couldn’t do that when he read my personal weblog was because it was, well, personal… written outside company time and hosted on servers outside company control. But since the company would own the hardware that hosts the company weblogs, our conversation would have been much different. Less of “you should really shut this down or suffer the consequences” and more along the lines of “Mark, I’ve shut down your weblog, and [if I were lucky] we can discuss terms under which you’ll be allowed to publish again.”

In an environment like that, what would we be left with? A few watered-down weblogs from executives, full of fluff that nobody wants to read. Maybe a technical weblog or two from the developers with code snippets that make no sense to anyone outside the development team, and that the rest of the development team is too busy to read. Official position papers from HR detailing the rules and regulations of what you’re allowed to write in your weblog. And no actual knowledge.

I’m working up to a point here, and it’s this: technology is not the problem here. People are the problem. Weblogs give everyone in the company a voice, but in every sufficiently large company there will be people in positions of authority who are afraid of those voices. Maybe they favor stability over free expression. Maybe they are control freaks. Maybe they are just jerks. But it doesn’t take very many of them to spoil it for everyone else.

When I initially tried to make this point, John Robb dismissed it by saying good knowledge organizations can handle controversy. This is a hand-wave, like the joke about the economist trapped on a desert island with a box of canned goods he can’t open who solves the problem by saying, “Assume we have a can opener.” We don’t have a can opener. Most organizations can’t handle controversy. Since giving every employee a weblog would inevitably stir up controversy, you’re not solving the right problem here. you’re only giving the deserted economist more cans. you’re only making existing problems worse.

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