The Cluetrain Manifesto

On the forty-second page of “The Clue Train Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual” authors Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger collaboratively wrote (emphasis added):

Most of us don't mid doing this. In fact, we actually sort of enjoy doing it. It's like playing grownup. And having extremist political banners hung in cubicles or having to listen to someone talk about his spiritual commitments or sex life would simply be distracting. Disturbingly, actually.

And yet...we feel resentment. Find someone who likes being managed, who feels fully at home in his or her professional self. Our longing for the Web is rooted in the deep resentment we feel towards being managed.

However much we long for the Web is how much we hate our job.

Our Voice

Just about all the concessions we make to work in a well-run, non-disturbing, secure, predictably successful, managed environment have to do with giving up our voice.

Nothing is more intimately a part of who we are than our voice. It expresses what we think and feel. It is an amalgam of the voluntary and involuntary. It gives style and shape to content. It subtends the most public and the most private. It is what we withhold at the moments of greatest significance.

Our voice is our strongest, most direct expression of who we are. Our voice is expressed in our words, our tone, our body language, our visible enthusiasms.

Our business voice—in a managed environment—is virtually the same as everyone else's. For example, we learn to write memos in The Standard Style and to participate in committee meetings in The Appropriate Fashion. (Of course, we are also finely attuned to minute differences in expression and can often tell memos apart the way birdwatchers spot the differences between a lark sparrow and a song sparrow.)

In fifty years, our corporate lives will seem no different than those of the 1950s. Whether we are Ward Cleavers or Dilberts, we all reported to work in look-alike rooms, wearing uniforms, speaking civilly, playing our parts at committee meetings. The fact that earth tones and Rockports have replaced gray flannel and wingtips isn't going to separate us from our crewcut fathers.

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[new jordans]

A friend is, as it were, a second self.