SOBCOM8 - THE FIRST TIME SINCE....

I’ve just returned from my first Blogger Conference: SobCom8. It’s was billed as “Biz School for Bloggers”. It did offer lots of information about how bloggers might approach their work to earn a dollar or two. There where several very successful bloggers that pointed out views on how to approach the work – “journalism standards” – “build assets” – “describe your blog in about 10 words, or less” – “it’s about process” – “track it” – passion – “head, heart and meaning in the life of the reader” – “why not you!”: these where the messages I took away from a good set of presentations well delivered and sincere.

It was the first one of these events of this type I’ve attended in a long time – the last one of these type events was some 20 years ago and then the subject matter was Employee Stock Option Plans (ESOP). Then the audience was filled with Marxist, students, idealist and others that thought that by mixing ownership with labor only good things would happen. The second conference I attended on the same subject some 6 months later was different – this time the audience was filled with bankers, lawyers, and accounting company consultants with a sprinkling of students. In some ways the two ESOP events were very similar – enthusiast creating a “language game” with the intent on changing the world – very different, one from the other - nonetheless. When ESOPs first came into use they where supposed to offer a way for employees to participate in substantive ways in the ownership of the firms where they worked. By the second conference – the bankers and lawyers had invented senior debt instruments that were great for fee generation, without any of the nonsense of giving the worker what was promised in the first conference: control over their own work product.

What does what happen 20 or years ago have to with business blogging. Not to be a skeptic but blogs – social media and such is being touted as having grandiose possibilities. Ten years or so ago there was all the predictions of Cluetrain Manifesto that made claims in its 95 thesis of how the customer would led the way for a revolution in the world business. Not that I intend in this post offer a full critique – accept to point to an observation of John Cass. His prime issue, to which I agree, that control needs to be housed in the hands of organizational leadership – enlighten and authentic, but firm.

The reason I see such a need – nihilism. As Cornel West, my professor from my days at Yale, describes “what is most terrifying – including the perennial threat of cowardly terrorists – is the insidious growth of deadening nihilisms across political lines, nihilisms that has been suffocating the deep democratic energies in America.” He sees it as a psychic depression, personal worthlessness, and social despair saturated by the market forces that form a market morality that undermines a sense of meaning and larger purpose. In the ironic twist of the case of ESOPs I see that if the market forces are left to their own means the same decayed could easily form.

So am I suggesting any specific constraints – not yet! What I am simply doing is noticing confluences of events that remind me of other times and other conferences. Maybe the next blogging conference I attend my provided me with other insights that brighten the picture – maybe not.