Business Goes Personal

By Liz Ryan, 8-17-07

I lead a bunch of Yahoo!groups and from time to time I check out the Moderator’s forum on that site. It’s one of those wild n’ wooly forums where people rant and flame and get out of hand, so I avoid it as much as I can. But this time when I browsed the recent posting, I was really astounded. Evidently some product manager at Yahoo!groups announced some changes to the site, and this guy was being burned at the stake on the moderator’s forum. “[Joe Schmoe] is a loser! He’s incompetent, a liar and a hack!” On and on went the ranting. It’s not enough to work til midnight in your cube at Yahoo!groups; if your job is one where people can find out your name, you can get personally slimed on the forums too. I wonder if the guy gets any combat pay for that public sliming? Not likely.

The internet, social networking and the mobility of people from one company to another are factors in making business very, very personal. If we ever feared that we were heading toward a monolithic future where faceless corporate leaders made decisions and handed them down to nameless minions to be carried out, we don’t need to worry about that any more. Plenty of other things, but not that - everyone has a name, and now that Forbes.com has started its Org Chart Wiki (using readers to help fill in the organizational charts of major employers) the transparency will increase. Now, transparency is great. I’m just wondering why a mid-level product manager at Yahoo!groups deserves to be pilloried by name, or why customer service folks, hard-working techies, and hapless others need to be dragged through the mud just for being employed at a company that someone is pissed off at.

Blogging, of course, helps the cause (or fans the flames, depending on your point of view). If you have an interaction with an insurance person at Aetna and you take a few notes, you can beat the insurance person’s brains out, figuratively speaking, on your blog ten minutes later. Maybe more employers will go to the system whereby credit-card representatives call you from India and tell you their names are “Spencer” and “Spike.” Right. Like my name is Jenna Jameson. Pronouncing tough names is one thing, but if we have to hide behind aliases just to do our jobs, that’s not so great.

It used to be that we dealt with businesspeople in our own communities, where the urge to slime might be tempered by the thought that we’d run into this person again - not just him or her but his or her parents, kids and friends. That’s pretty much gone. I closed a business and started a new one this Spring, and I got slimed for that on blogs written by people I’d sort of naively thought were friends of mine. Hey, content is content, and you have to strike while the iron is hot! So bashing a sort-of friend might be a small price to pay for having something pithy to say on an otherwise boring blog, one morning. Can’t fault a blogger for that. But since it’s personal, I don’t have to feel guilty about remembering those couple-three bloggers’ names and tucking those datapoints away in my very personal memory storage banks. That’s not keeping a grudge; it’s just being a human being, who remembers who her friends are and aren’t.

After I got through feeling sorry for the Yahoo!groups product manager, who could just as easily have taken a PM job in a shop where his name wouldn’t be bandied about and sullied, I remembered that making business more personal isn’t a bad thing, for the most part. It’s good to be reminded that human beings fill these jobs and write all that code and make those functionality decisions and even sometimes piss us off. The important part is remembering that they are human beings, not just names in boxes in org charts and handy handles when we want to bash someone in public. After all, I know when I write columns or do radio commentary that I’m putting my name and my views out there for praise or criticism. But not every working person makes that choice. If wholesale personality assassination of people in regular ol’ Product Manager jobs becomes the standard, then we’ll have only ourselves to blame when every public-facing employee we encounter suddenly starts introducing him- or herself as “Spencer” or “Spike.”