16
Personal Freedom
Choice. This is about choice.
—Neo, in The Matrix Reloaded1
Sweet are the uses of adversity.
—William Shakespeare2
A lot of what humans do is crazy. Some crazy things we can’t seem to stop. Making war and despoiling the planet are two examples.3 But other crazy things come and go, even if they last for generations. They’re popular for fifty or a hundred years, and then the culture wakes up and says, “Gee, that was nuts.”
Back in the 1950s, smoking and drunk driving were both standard. There were ashtrays on flat surfaces everywhere. Homes, offices, cars, buses, trains, planes, and restaurants were always thick with smoke. Driving drunk was illegal, but common. In The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe described Florida in the early Space Age as “a paradise of Flying and Drinking and Drinking and Driving.” And hey, how else were you going to get home from the bar?
Today, smoking and drunk driving are both marginalized. It matters how that happened, but not for the point of this book. What matters here is that the culture as a whole woke up and realized that smoking and drunk driving had always been crazy things to do.
In Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky gives two more examples. First is the Gin Craze of the early 1700s in urban England: “Gin pushcarts plied the streets of London; if you couldn’t afford a whole glass, you could buy a gin-soaked rag, and flop-houses did brisk business renting straw pallets by the hour if you needed to sleep off the effects.”4 Second is our own culture’s half-century-long slouch in front of the TV. The Gin Craze Clay credits to industrialization; the TV habit, to a surfeit of free time. But, while the Gin Craze was normative only for unfortunates at the bottom of London’s social ladder, nearly all of us became couch potatoes. Writes Clay, “We had so much free time to burn and so few other appealing ways to burn it that every citizen in the developed world took to watching television as if it were a duty … The sitcom has been our gin, an infinitely expandable response to the crisis of social transformation.”5
Now it’s hangover time, though less for liberated couch potatoes than for their baffled farmers. Adds Clay, “The television industry has been shocked to see alternative uses of free time, especially among young people, because the idea that watching TV was the best use of free time, as ratified by the viewers, has been such a stable feature of society for so long.”6
It should be no surprise that people would dump TV once there were better things to do. We dropped cable TV in our own house once it was clear that we didn’t even watch the movies we recorded and that it was easier to watch them on Netflix than over cable’s control-freakish distribution system. Then we dumped Netflix too, because we have better things to do with our time. And we’re far from alone. “Pure consumption of media was never a sacred tradition,” Clay adds. “It was just a set of accumulated accidents, accidents that are being undone as people start hiring new communications tools to do jobs older media simply can’t do.”7
When a norm is crazy, we become sympathetic captives of it, exhibiting a kind of Stockholm syndrome—the paradoxical tendency of hostages to sympathize with their captors after being held for a long time. (It was named after captives of bank robbers in Stockholm who did exactly that.) We were captives of smoking and drunk driving. We were captives of television. And we’re still captives of a belief system I’ll call adhesionism, after Friedrich Kessler’s contracts of adhesion (see chapter 4), by which submissive parties yield to dominant ones, without a peep or a fight. Here is how adhesionism’s canon manifests today:
- Belief by lawyers that lopsided contracts of adhesion are the only ones to write when dealing with large numbers of unknown customers and users.
- Belief by corporate executives that limiting customer contact and choice is required for dealing with large customer populations (or even small ones), “at scale,” and that having “users” by the billions is better than having customers by the hundreds, thousands, or millions.
- Belief by “content” producers and distributors that “consumers” in their natural state are thieves and not to be trusted to value or pay fairly for the goods they can also get at no cost.
- Belief by do-gooders that customers are so naturally weak that they always need government protection.
- Belief by economists that a free market is one where customers choose captors and the best captors win.
- Belief, in sum, that captive customers are more valuable than free ones.
Adhesionism has been with us since industry won the industrial revolution, and it isn’t going away easily. Nor is it without justification. As Chris Locke wrote in The Cluetrain Manifesto, “Mass production, mass marketing, and mass media have constituted the Holy Trinity of American business for at least a hundred years. The payoffs were so huge that the mindset became an addiction, a drug blinding its users to changes that began to erode the old axioms attaching to economies of scale.”8
Management
Those changes Chris cites were made by the Internet, which Cluetrain heralded with the subtitle, “The end of business as usual.” The “old axioms” he mentions were first studied, described, and evangelized by Frederick W. Taylor, primarily through his 1911 monograph, Principles of Scientific Management. Wrote Taylor, “It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone.”9 The italics are his.
Taylor established management as a professional category, and his pedagogy came to instruct every large institution in civilization, including education and government. James O. McKinsey’s management consultancy, H. L. Gantt’s charts, Hugo Münsterberg’s industrial psychology, Karl G. Barth’s speed-and-feed calculating slide rules, and degrees in management offered by Harvard, Tufts, and countless other schools all trace back to Taylor. World Wars I and II were fueled and guided by Taylorist obsessions with efficiency and productivity.
Peter Drucker was a one-man counterweight to Taylorism and devoted his seven-decade career to recognizing human concerns in business that Taylor’s “scientific management” dismissed: personal knowledge, learning, teamwork, human dignity, and innovations arising from the interests and ideas of employees and customers. Drucker also cared about the common good. In Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, he wrote, “If the managers of our major institutions, and especially of business, do not take responsibility for the common good, no one else can or will.”10
Yet management is not for institutions alone. We all manage ourselves, and we manage our relationships with others. Our ability to manage depends on our agency: that is, to express intent, with effects. Our ability to manage also relies on our ability to delegate some of our agency to others. Yet in there is an oxymoronic sound to “personal management.” It’s like saying “personal high-rise.” That sound is an adhesionist echo of Taylor’s teachings and of compromises our parents and ancestors made when subordinating personal agency was a requirement of civilized life.
We no longer need to do that.
Marching Toward Sanity
The road out of Stockholm is a long one, and we’ve been on it for a long time. Here are a few landmarks along the way.
1943
At the end of the otherwise depressing “Contracts of Adhesion,” Friedrich Kessler offered a glimmer of hope for freedom of contract: “Its meaning must change with the social importance of the type of contract and with the degree of monopoly enjoyed by the author of the standardized contract.”11 In other words, freedom of contract varies inversely with degree of monopoly. Reduce monopoly and freedom of contract has a chance.
1954
In The Practice of Management, Peter Drucker introduced the concept of “knowledge-work” and the importance of what he (and most of business) came to call “knowledge workers,” contrasting those from Frederick W. Taylor’s human cogs.12 Drucker’s entire oeuvre, which accumulated through hundreds of books and essays between 1942 and his death in 2005, was one long harangue against Taylorism and on the ability of workers, managers, and customers to learn things together. In 1999, he wrote, “What gives life to and sustains the corporation resides on the ‘outside,’ not within its direct control, and the customer is the primary mover of those external realities and forces. It is the prospect of providing a customer with value that gives the corporation purpose, and it is the satisfaction of the customer’s requirements that gives it results.”13 Drucker is my greatest business hero.
1956
In The Organization Man, William H. Whyte Jr. devoted 446 pages to explaining how white-collar workers in the 1950s traded their souls for membership in “The Organization.” Then, in closing, he adds,
I have been speaking of measures organizations can take. But ultimately any real change will be up to the individual himself …
He must fight The Organization. Not stupidly, or selfishly, for the defects of individual self-regard are no more to be venerated than the defects of co-operation. But fight he must, for the demands for his surrender are constant and powerful, and the more he has come to like the life of organization the more difficult does he find it to resist these demands, or even to recognize them.14
1973
In The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, Daniel Bell predicted a shift from manufacturing to service-based economies, a rise of dependence on science, and with that, a rise of technical elites. For the rest of us, he at least gave hope that the industrial age might end.15
1980
In The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler described
a genuinely new way of life based on diversified, renewable energy sources; on methods of production that make most factory assembly lines obsolete … and on radically changed schools and corporations of the future. The emergent civilization writes a new code of behavior for us and carries us beyond standardization, synchronization, and centralization, beyond the concentration of energy, money, and power … Above all, as we shall see, Third Wave civilization begins to heal the historic breach between producer and consumer, giving rise to the “prosumer” economics of tomorrow.”16
1982
In Megatrends, John Naisbitt laid out ten shifts in ten chapters that have proved remarkably prophetic. Here are the chapter titles:
- Industrial Society → Information Society
- Forced Technology → High Tech/High Touch
- National Economy → World Economy
- Short Term → Long Term
- Centralization → Decentralization
- Institutional Help → Self-Help
- Representative Democracy → Participatory Democracy
- Hierarchies → Networking
- North → South
- Either/Or → Multiple Option17
Wrote Naisbitt, “Networks restructure the power and communication flow within an organization from the vertical to the horizontal … A network management style is already in place in several young, successful computer firms.”18 At this point, Apple was five years old and the IBM PC was being born.
1990
In Powershift, Alvin Toffler wrote of “the autonomous employee” and the “non-interchangeable person.” One sample: “As work grows more differentiated, the bargaining position of individuals with crucial skills is enhanced. Individuals, not only organized groups, can exert clout.”19
In Megatrends 2000, John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene devoted their final chapter to “Triumph of the Individual.” Speaking of the next decade in the present tense, they wrote, “The 1990’s are characterized by a new respect for the individual as the foundation of society and the basic unit of change. ‘Mass’ movements are a misnomer. The environmental movement, the women’s movement, the antinuclear movement were built one consciousness at a time by an individual persuaded of the possibility of a new reality.”20 Under the subhead, “The primacy of the consumer,” they added, “When the focus was on the institution, individuals got what suited the institution; everyone got the same thing. No more. With the rise of the individual has come the primacy of the consumer. It has been said for many years: The customer is king. Now it is true.”21 Later, they added, “The new responsibility of society is to reward the initiative of the individual.”22
1991
In Relationship Marketing: Successful Strategies for the Age of the Customer, Regis McKenna says “it all starts with the customer,” describes positioning as a “dynamic” process that revolves around the customer, and advises marketing to shift “from monologue to dialogue.”23 McKenna’s next book, in 1997, was Real Time: Preparing for the Age of the Never Satisfied Customer.
1993
In The One to One Future, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers wrote,
Today we are passing through a technological discontinuity of epic proportions, and most of us are not even remotely prepared. The old paradigm, a system of mass production, mass media and mass marketing, is being replaced by a totally new paradigm, a one-to-one economic system … The 1:1 future will be characterized by customized production, individually addressable media, and 1:1 marketing, totally changing the rules of business competition and growth. Instead of market share, the goal of most business competition will be share of customer—one customer at a time.24
In chapter 7, “Engage Your Customers in Dialogue,” they added,
On the whole, marketers are much more prepared to talk to customers than to hear from them. This is mostly because there just aren’t any convenient, inexpensive media that allow customers to send messages to marketers, while there are all sorts of mass media available to facilitate one-way, non-addressable communication from marketers to customers … Stop thinking in terms of audiences and faceless masses of eyes and ears. Think, instead, of human beings—individual human beings. Instead of reaching your target audience, think of having a conversation with these individuals.25
The Internet we know (with browsers and e-mail) came two years after Peppers and Rogers’ book hit the shelves. Texting would take another decade. “Friending” and tweeting would take a decade and a half. Still, none of those, even today, are adequate to supply the 1:1 future Don and Martha so clearly saw. We are still in the same long, slow moment, and no less in the grip of the industrial age. There remains a concentration of agency on the side of industry. Even so simple a matter as relationship, between customers and vendors, has been in the full control of vendors.
1999
In Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers, Seth Godin challenged the “noninteractive world” of interruptive, attention-grabbing marketing and suggests a new model of manners: actually talking to customers the old fashioned way and building genuine relationships with them.
The Cluetrain Manifesto appeared on the Web in April 1999, at about the same time as Permission Marketing came out. The book version of Cluetrain was written in the summer of that year, and published in January 2000. Here’s one quote from it that points toward the Intention Economy: “Corporate firewalls have kept smart employees in and smart markets out. It’s going to cause real pain to tear those walls down. But the result will be a new kind of conversation. And it will be the most exciting conversation business has ever engaged in.”26
In Net Worth: Shaping Markets When Customers Make the Rules, John Hagel III and Marc Singer wrote about the shift of economic power to individuals, the “death of conventional brands,” “a virtuous circle between customers and vendors,” and other coming changes. Today John adds, “Where we really plowed new ground was with the notion that for the first time technology was making it feasible for customers to capture information about themselves (including transaction histories and relationships with others) and selectively make it available to vendors in return for more relevant value and the related notion that this created a business opportunity for a new form of customer agent (infomediaries) that would help customers to manage these data profiles and become trusted advisers to help customers connect with more relevant resources and vendors.”
2001
In Free Agent Nation, Daniel H. Pink recalled “The Whyte stuff” of 1956 in a chapter titled, “Bye Bye, Organization Guy,” and writes about “this broad shift of power from the organization to the individual,” and “the turn from Taylorism to Tailorism.”27
2006
In Wikinomics, Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams devoted a chapter to “prosumers” and wrote about “customers as co-innovators” and “embracing customer power.”28
2009
In “A Customer Liberation Manifesto,” Raymond Fisk, who chairs the Department of Marketing at Texas State University–San Marcos, wrote,
In my nearly thirty years as a services marketing scholar, I have seen the practice of serving customers advance from benign neglect to active engagement. Customer co-creation of value has rapidly become a popular business logic … and a major force for new service thinking. I think customer co-creation leads to customer liberation! If service organizations truly adopt the logic of co-creation, they will no longer be able to treat their customers as powerlessly subservient.29
In The Power of Pull, John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison wrote, “Going forward, individuals will increasingly reshape institutions rather than vice versa.”30
In Pull, David Siegel wrote, “In the world of pull, you don’t own the customer; the customer owns you … your company’s economics are aligned with your customer’s … Companies that focus on results for their customers set the pace. Their systems are tied to their customers’ systems, so they can work in real time.”31
Pull is also the first book to visit VRM in depth:
With VRM … you control the data that would normally be in a CRM system, so you can give it to the vendor in the same way vendors pass customer data from one sales rep to another. Using the principle of least privilege, you can give out your data as necessary and terminate the relationship at any time. When a product goes into the “haves” section of your data locker, the warranty record follows automatically. Without knowing your name and address, the company can contact you if there’s a problem, and you can contact the company. You can signal that you are planning to switch vendors, and all vendors will come to you with their offers knowing what you have and what kind of customer you are … [and] eventually most companies and even the government will agree to account portability, because consumers will demand it … Once you have your information under your control, you will become an institution of one.32
And, in the 10th Anniversary Edition of The Cluetrain Manifesto, I wrote, “a better system will come along in which demand drives supply at least as well as supply drives demand. In other words, when the ‘intention economy’ outperforms the attention economy.”33
Yet, even after seventy years of optimism toward the end of adhesionism, most of us in business remain believers, and most customers are still stuck in Stockholm. We are still batteries in The Matrix. We still await liberation. What’s it going to take?
Means to Ends
“Invention is the mother of necessity,” Thorstein Veblen said.34 And he’s right. We didn’t need a car, a copier, a radio, or a smartphone until we saw one and said to ourselves, “I need that.” Without necessity-mothering inventions, we wouldn’t have had any form of progress since we first learned to chip rocks into axes and arrowheads.