Symposium Blast From the Past: Alan Webber Keynote, 2004

As we’re patiently waiting for all the video from the April 28th Symposium to be digitized and put up on Baruch’s Digital Media Library and since we’ve got keynotes on the brain, we figured we’d give you a small taste of the 4th Annual Symposium from way back in 2004. Below is the text from the keynote address by Alan Webber, Founding Editior of Fast Company magazine and an all around fascinating guy. Enjoy. Once we find the video, we’ll put that up too.

I want to talk a little bit about what you all wrestled with this morning and what for the past 20 years or so, I’ve tried to do as a job, and that is to figure out how to put work and business and ideas in a common space. Briefly, my background: About 20 years ago, I went to work at the Harvard Business Review and ran it for about eight years and then left to start Fast Company magazine, which, when we launched it, we thought of it as a cross between the Harvard Business Review and Rolling Stone. And that worked pretty well. For those of you that laughed, you got it. It was an interesting hybrid and hybrids, when they work, are great. When they don’t work, they disappear rapidly.

The last thing I wrote before I left the Harvard Business Review as the editorial director in about 1993 was an essay called, “What’s So New About The New Economy?” It was actually a book review disguised as an essay. There were three or so really interesting new books by Tom Peters, of In Search of Excellence fame, and several other people who were beginning to nibble at the edges of a revolution that was just beginning to be visible in the world of business. I read these books and tried to synthesize what they all had in common; and the punch line of the essay was, “What’s new about the new economy is that work is conversation.” In the old economy, if your boss saw you hanging out at the water cooler, he or she would come up to you and say, “Stop talking. Get back to work.” And in the new economy, if your boss saw you hanging out at the water cooler, he or she would come up to you and say, “That’s great. I’m glad to see you folks are talking with each other. I’ll be you’re going to come up with some really new and exciting ideas.”

And, in fact, one of the hallmarks of the period between 1993 till about 2000 when we went through the Dot Com bust and then a bunch of CEOs got busted, and we sort of forgot about the new economy, was a transformation of the world of work along these lines. For about seven or eight years we shifted gears from an industrial model to knowledge-based model where knowledge really was power, where work really was personal, where you were expected to bring all of yourself to the work place as opposed to checking your emotions, your creativity, your individuality at the door. I remember, vividly, walking through the offices of Steelcase, one of the great, creative furniture companies in the world, and seeing how, as an investment in design creativity, they had built coffee bars all over the perimeter of the office building so that people would stop, get up from their desk, go to the coffee bar, encounter their colleagues, have a chance conversation, a serendipitous discussion, and, in the process, generate new ideas, spark new possibilities, and share knowledge across boundaries.

This change was a defining element of what really did change in the worlds of work and business. We shifted from a world of “Sit down, shut up, and take out a book,” which is what I was told in school, to “Get together, talk amongst one another, create new ideas, share your knowledge, bring your own interests, imagination, creativity, your own best self to the world of work”; and, in the process of crossing functional boundaries, hierarchical boundaries, industry boundaries, geographic boundaries, you begin to develop new ideas, new possibilities and bring more to the world of work than was possible previously in the day of the man in the gray flannel suit.

That was 1993. From about ’93 until last year, Bill Taylor and I had the enormous privilege of watching this revolution take place and chronicling it in the pages of Fast Company. This was a revolution of ideas, of possibility, in which creativity became the foremost attribute that companies wanted in their organizations, as they now had to compete on the basis of new ideas and on translating those ideas into actual products and services. And that was essentially the mission of Fast Company: to find the smartest people taking the most interesting risks, producing the most interesting and innovative offerings and then to present those for our readers as some real, tangible lessons and strong, useful principles of business.

Last night at dinner, I sat with a group of people — the folks who facilitated today’s discussions — who are experts in the fields of education and business and communication. And I kept saying to myself, “I really don’t know anything about this stuff. They are experts. What could I possibly bring to the party?” And it dawned on me that what I could bring to the party was some of the lessons that we learned at the Harvard Business Review and at Fast Company about working the border between academia and ideas, and business and best practices. So, I very quickly want to make about five points and if you take at least one home with you, I think that’s a definition of victory.

I would say one other thing as a preamble about this new economy: one of the key lessons that I learned from the days of the Harvard Business Review, compared to Fast Company, is a shift in what is considered standard operating procedure. Years ago, I wrote a book on the auto industry, and with some of my colleagues at the Business School went to Japan and had the privilege of meeting one of the high family members in the Toyota family. We’re sitting across him in Toyota City where this great machine operates, the most successful auto maker in the world today. And he reached down under his desk, and he took out this dog-eared book, and it was just yellow stickies all over it and underlining, and he said, “I hope you teach this book at the Harvard Business School.” We looked at it, and it was Alfred Sloan’s My Years With General Motors.

He said, “Everything we need to know in Toyota about how to run an automobile company is in this book.” And you think about it. He wasn’t lying: all of their practices and principles and structure of the organization had been taken from Sloan and General Motors as if it were that tape that we saw. You know, you put the DVD in. You hit play, and boom! You got a great, giant corporation. And that was the model for along time until this revolution of ideas and creativity and innovation struck.

The biggest change, I think, in the world today is there is no one right way to do anything. For those of you who looked at the paper this morning and read about the Google IPO, there was a great quote at the end of the article where an analyst said, “Google has always been the company that didn’t play by the rules that didn’t do it the way that you’re supposed to. They continue to do it with their IPO. This is their identity. They’re doing it their way. And that’s their strength.” So, that is sort of an over-arching proposition that while we’re looking for principles and ideas that will work to make communication function across the boundaries, there really isn’t one right way to do it.

So, what are some of the things I learned in my days at Fast Company and at the Harvard Business Review? Well, the first thing I learned was that everything communicates. One of the most successful pieces we did in the history of Fast Company was an essay by Tom Peters called “The Brand Called You” in about 1995. Tom made the point, which, I guess, is obvious now but was really an insight back then, that not only are companies brands but each one of us is a brand.

When you present yourself, you are presenting the brand called you. And as a consequence, Tom asked in this article, “If you’re a young person, you’re trying to get started in the world of work, what does your brand stay for? What are your brand values?” I have a 25-year-old son. I keep saying to him, “Adam, you have to decide. What is it when you go into the world of work you’re going to stand for? Are you the guy who can always be depended on? Are you the guy who will stay late, no matter what? That could be a brand. You’re the guy who is the most creative? You’re the person who was the courage to stand up for what is right? What is your brand?” And everything you do communicates that brand, as Tom pointed out in this article.

So, if you are a young student trying to make your way in the world, one of the first questions you ought to ask is, “What does your brand stand for?” And, “How do you communicate it?” Do you communicate it by the way you present your papers, by the way you answer the phone, by the way you dress when you come to class, by the way you interact with your colleagues or your fellow students? Everything communicates. When you launch a magazine, as we did with Fast Company, every choice we made was a communication choice from the name of the magazine to the font to the type of design we had on the page to the authors to the people who were our backers in trying to produce the money.

That’s all branding, and it’s personal and it’s corporate. And I think a principle of communication, when you talk about getting students who can play the game with confidence and go out into the world, knowing who they are, to begin with, which I think is the first proposition of good communication, they need to ask themselves, “What is my brand? And how do I communicate it? And am I consistent in every possible way that I could be consistent?” I was talking to Kate last night, Kate Garretson, and she said, “I had this problem at school today, or the other day.

There was a bright young kid, African-American kid wearing a do-rag on his head. And we had this big debate over whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. And he said it was a good thing. The student said it was a good thing, because, ‘I’m true to who I am.’ And the professor said, ‘Well, yeah, but, you know, it’s not going to be a great job, you know, winning thing.’” And the answer probably is, it depends. Right? If you’re going for street cred, if your brand is, “I am street-wise. I know what’s going on in the world,” and you’re looking for a job with, you know, the Cool Hunters, wearing a do-rag is a pretty good thing.

It shows you know what’s going on, and you’re not afraid of putting it out there. If you do want a job at General Motors in the Executive Suite, it’s probably not going to work. Maybe, someday but not yet. You know, we got to wait a little while. But the point is, maybe that is a brand for this young man, and, you know, in that sense, again, Rule One, there are no rules that apply to everybody. It all depends. Second thing. I know this is a theme of your gathering today. If you go back, five, six, seven years in the world of the Web, the waying that was predominant was, “Content is king.” You know. Everything’s a channel. Content is king. What we said at Fast Company was, “Context is king.” By that we meant: Information is not neutral. What you pay people to do is to interpret information and you evaluate them on how well they do it. Is what they say clearly situated within a given context? Do they offer the reader a set of lenses that makes visible a convincing argument for the way in which they see the world? If you’re good at that kind of thing, then you’re a hell of a good magazine editor or writer, because you’re producing material that is convincing, compelling, communicates a clear vision of the world. That’s valuable. Even if you disagree with it, that’s valuable, because it synthesizes the issues that people need to be thinking about.

If I told you that there was a breaking story today that the United States had decided that to bring peace back to Iraq, we needed to put Saddam back in power. And I said, “I read it. So, it has to be true.” And then I told you, “By the way, I read it on Matt Drudge’s Web site,” that would be different than if I told you I read it in Tom Friedman’s column in the New York Times: a slight, slight variance. Information is not neutral. It all depends on who’s bringing you the news.

I recently thought I had a great moment, a little epiphany of my own. I was watching President Bush’s news conference a couple weeks ago, and he was outraged that the FBI had printed a report years and years ago about how many terrorists they were tracking. And at the 9/11 Commission, the new FBI Director had said the number was wrong. Somebody asked the President about it and he said, “I was outraged. They presented me these facts. And I had to believe the facts.” Years ago, I did an interview with Walter Wriston, when he was still running Citicorp/Citibank. And Wriston said, “You know, as the head of this giant bank,” largest bank at that time in the world, “I’m presented with facts every day and I sort them into three categories. There are facts. There are wrong facts. And there are damn lies.” And that’s the truth. Right? That’s communication. And if you believe every fact that you’re presented, you get what you pay for folks. So, I would say that we what we were paying at Fast Company, what we were paying for, for our writers, and what our readers were paying us to give them, weren’t just facts, because there is no such thing. They were paying for a point of view. They were paying for our ability to stand up on our own hind legs and say, “We have a strong opinion about how the world really works, and we can marshal an argument that is compelling and useful to you as a reader. And if we do that regularly, you will give us your subscription dollars.”

Now, I think that’s the second thing you want out of your students or out of your employees. I don’t think you want a bunch of people who are clueless or bland. I think you want people who have convictions and the ability to marshal a strong point of view. And I think the challenge is to get them not only to know that they have a point of view but to own it and to have the confidence to express it.

Third thing we learned is – and this is something I learned at the Harvard Business Review – “If you’re going into the world of business, you need to learn the language of business but you should never become a captive of it. Language is important. Words matter. It’s how you show you know your stuff. It’s how you show you’re a member of the tribe. You’re initiated. You’re a part of the team. The problem is, people think that they have to keep talking that way once they learn the language. And then they are, generally speaking, fairly useless.

When I was at the Harvard Business Review, we hired this great guy, still a dear friend of mine, named Bernie Avishai. Bernie was a Middle East scholar and had worked at M.I.T. in the writing program. He had written a book about Zionism and what was going on in Israel; a very smart guy. He did not get tenure at M.I.T. and so we hired him at the Harvard Business Review as an editor. Early in his work for me, we sent him out to Motorola to meet with George Fisher, who was then the CEO. Bernie went, sat down and conducted an interview. He came back and was really puzzled. He said, “I really don’t understand it. George kept talking about an IPO this and an IPO that, Motorola IPO, and I didn’t want to ask him. But why was he so interested I the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra?” Now, to his credit, Bernie is a smart guy, and one of the principles that used to apply in the new economy was: Hire for attitude, train for skill. And we hired Bernie for his attitude. Bright, good writer, terrifically inquisitive mind, fearless in the pursuit of a great story. He didn’t really have his business chops though. But he could learn. And by the time he left the Harvard Business Review, he not only knew what an IPO was, he knew what CADCAM was, and JIT, and every other lousy acronym that business people think you’ve got to talk in. And he could do it – he could talk it. He understood manufacturing. At the Business School, then, they had a department called Production Operation Management, POM. Bernie was the guru of POM. He could do just-in-time management and supply-chain management, everything! But the neat thing was, because he was a good writer and a generalist, he could translate it into English, and that made him valuable. That made him more than just another manufacturing geek.

Now, I think, again, the challenge for people who are trying to produce the next generation of great business people is, “Can your students speak the language?” It’s like learning a foreign language. And then, “Can they act as translators for the rest of us?” I really can’t speak MEMS. I don’t even know what MEMS is. I just know that in the not-too-distant future, MEMS is going to replace every semiconductor in the world so it’s probably a big thing. But I don’t know what it is, and your students probably will. They need to understand it and then they need to translate it. The thing we learned at Fast Company was that in the new economy, the action is in the boundaries.

Everybody wants to be in the belly of the beast but the good stuff happens on the edge between things, between functions where sales and marketing have a hand-off, where production and distribution has a hand-off, where America does business with India at the boundary or at the boundaries going up in an hierarchical organization. If you can play that role as the bridge between the two sides, you’re incredibly valuable, because they can’t talk to each other. Communication and the future belongs to the people who can work both sides.

Fourth proposition we learned at Fast Company was that listening beats talking. Here’s how most Fast Company articles came into existence. We would go to a company that we thought was doing really interesting work, and we’d sit down with the CEO or one of the executives and the head of corporate communications and they would start telling us all the stuff they were doing, and it was just the same old stuff. It wasn’t all that interesting or all that different. And then they would let slip a phrase and our editor or our writer would go, “Now, that’s interesting. Let’s talk about that.” And all of a sudden, we’d have a story.

It happened when Bill Taylor and I were in Germany, meeting with the people from Siemens. And they were telling us all about their great new products and how they were rolling out these laptops and, you know, if you go to Silicon Valley, you see that stuff every day. It wasn’t that interesting. And then, the fellow who was the recently-arrived CEO said, “We’re doing one other thing that we think is kind of interesting. We’ve launched a reverse mentoring program.”

Now, that’s interesting. I don’t even know what it means. But it’s interesting. Right? Reverse mentoring? Everybody’s heard of mentoring. What’s reverse mentoring? They then started telling us how they’ve hired a group of young, smart kids as a class, and they’re bringing them in to teach the old fogies at the top of the company how the computer industry really runs. And all of a sudden, just on that one phrase, we understood the problem of being a German computer company.

Because, if you’re a German computer company, by the time you get to be an executive, you’re not just an executive, you’re Herr Doctor Professor So & So. Right? And you’re so exalted, nobody talks to you. And the world is changing so fast in computing, if nobody talks to you, you’re clueless. They don’t know anything about what’s going on in the world of gaming or what’s going on in the on-line world or Web sites. Nothing. So, you got the Japanese over here who have great quality. They’re not too innovative. You got the Americans over here who are incredibly innovative. And the Germans are stuck in the middle. They’re not innovative. They don’t have great quality. And they don’t know what the hell’s going on in the world. How do you fix that problem? Reverse mentoring.

So, “reverse mentoring,” a phrase, becomes an entire window into a company, in an industry, in a country that is stuck in the middle. So, I would say, the question is not, you know, “Do you teach communications?” It’s, “Do you help people understand the value of active listening?” Of listening into the conversation so that they extract the nugget that the person doesn’t even know they know. If you’re doing that, you’re a really valuable communicator. Years ago, Regis McKenna, who was the one who gave Steve Jobs the Apple logo and was and still is a really important PR guy in Silicon Valley, wrote a piece in the Harvard Business Review called, “Everything is Marketing” whose basic point was this: marketing moves from monologue to dialogue. It isn’t talking at your customer but, again, an active conversation with a feedback loop so you’re constantly adapting to what the customer says back to you. That’s active listening. It’s not just marketing. It’s all innovation.

The last little item is an old principle. I’ve always believed that, working with a lot of people in the world magazining, you don’t know what you think until you write it down. The dirty little secret of the Harvard Business Review is that most of the great articles that we published there when I was the editor weren’t written exactly by the people whose names were on the byline. And that’s not to say they weren’t the author. But they didn’t write them. If you go talk to the Business School professors at the Harvard Business School, and you ask them to write an article, you very quickly discover that they can’t write a lick. I mean, they have been taught how not to write. In order to get a very advanced degree, you have to be taught how not to write very, very well. So, Michael Porter and some of the most brilliant people in the world of business academia, are brilliant; they just can’t write. Now, what they can do is talk. And, so, what we would do would be to sit down with these really smart professors and put a tape recorder in front of them. And they would talk. And we would transcribe the tape. And then we’d clean it up and we’d give it back to them. And they’d say, “But of course, that’s what I said. That’s what I wrote.” That’s the key: once they could see it, they could understand what their point was.

We finally boiled this down into a very simple, three-point program for prospective authors. Question number one was: “What’s your theory?” A good article has a theory, as does a good strategy, as does a good campaign of advertising. Second question was: “All right. You got a theory. What’s your argument?” What are you marshaling as the evidence? Is it anecdotal evidence? Is it data-driven? How do I know your theory is supported by something more than just, “That’s an interesting theory.” And then, the third question was: “So what?” Why should anybody care? You want our readers to stop their busy days and read this article. What are they going to get out of it that makes it important to them, not to you, but to them? And when you apply those three questions, you instantly give shape to a conversation about what the other person is bringing to the table. They have to know what matters, what their evidence is, and what their argument is trying to summarize. So make them write it down. Ask them, “What’s the point? Why do I care? If you can drive to that kind of a conversation, I think you’re really teaching something useful.

The last thing I’d call to your attention is that the conversation that you’re having today about how to help people communicate more effectively in the world of business and learn it earlier, is exactly the right conversation. That’s the good news. The even better news – there actually is some even better news – and that is that it’s not a new conversation. We’ve been at this for a while.

Again, predating Fast Company was a terrific book by Peter Sege called The Fifth Discipline. Peter has taught at M.I.T., and has been around for about 25 years, writing about how companies learn. He’s the guy who coined the term “the learning organization.” The basic argument that Peter advanced 15 years ago was that for companies to be competitive, they have to keep learning. They have to keep growing. The people inside them have to master some real skills. Now, he didn’t call them communication skills. But if you look at the inventory of his disciplines that he itemized, systems thinking was the first one. You have to be able to see holistically, understand how the pieces fit together, recognize patterns. Sounds like a communications skill. “Personal mastery,” the ability to be good at the things you’re working on, the ability to know what your own set of aptitudes really is. “Recognize mental models.” Mental models is the map we carry in our heads of how we think the world works.

Well, in order to communicate effectively, you have to understand your own mental model: What am I assuming? What am I presuming? And also recognize there are other mental models that if you adopted them could help you be more effective in your work. “Shared visions.” Shared visions is a very fancy way of saying: constructive conversation. Talk to your colleagues about what you think needs to happen, and be good at it so that you share your vision, they share their own, you learn from each other.

And last is: “team learning.” Well, it turns out, when you strip the label ”team learning” back and read Peter’s book, he’s talking about the art of dialogue, dialogue as the most important learning tool in the world of business. Now, this book enjoyed an incredible popularity about 15 years ago. Peter became enormously successful as a professor and as a speaker. And it seems to me that in an interesting way, we’ve kind of come around again where we’ve gone through the excitement and the energy of the Dot Com revolution and the early phase of knowledge work and the new economy. It got washed away when the bubble burst and when the economy went into recession.
I think, as things pick up, and as we see the re-energizing of business and of possibility, we very quickly get back to the first principle which is: companies are basically people. It’s all about the people. It’s all about how well they work together, how well they work with their customers, how quickly they learn and how well they express the fundamental advantages that the company has to offer. That sounds a lot like education to me.

Thank you for letting me come in and talk with you about it. I think I was reasonably funny. I was marginally useful. But I was very short (laughter). Thank you (applause).