patth@ccnysci.UUCP (Patt Haring) (06/11/89)
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ENA NETWEAVER Volume 4, Number 6, Article 5 (June 1988)
Keynote Address to the Electronic Networking Association
Part I
by Mike Greenly
Good afternoon.
I've given a fair number of speeches, especially in my former
corporate days. But this talk will include comments that are
far more personal than I've shared in public before.
Before I discuss how computer conferencing has affected my
life, though, let's talk about the larger picture, the
business environment in which this still-new medium can
transform possibilities much more significant than my own.
Conferencing, after all, is its own medium, a relatively new
way of communicating, which can have a great and positive
impact on both individual flexibility and business
productivity.
If I were trying to "sell" you computer conferencing, I would
mention the time it can save busy people ... the speed with
which decisions can be made among those who use it ... the
rapidity with which it can disseminate global information.
Or maybe the savings it offers in travel costs and hassle, or
its help in implementing projects among people with very
different locations and schedules.
All of those are important benefits, nice and practical: you
can measure speed; you might quantify days or hours saved, or
the hotel expense and airfare you didn't need to pay for.
But there is another, less obvious asset intrinsic to
"electronic meetings": the value placed directly on ideas
themselves ... not the surface style, physical appearance, or
cultural trappings of the person expressing them. In other
words, factors that can very much affect what we think and
what we conclude in a face-to-face setting are typically
absent in electronic communication. Electronic meeting
participants often concentrate much more clearly on an idea
itself, not on its human "packaging."
Have you ever watched television with the sound turned
completely off? If you haven't in a while, try it! Take
away the sound from your TV picture, and suddenly you notice
what was there all along -- revealing gestures and body
language, props that indicate character, visual details you
don't normally perceive. That's an analogy for what can
happen with electronic meetings ... when you read someone's
thoughts, you're not distracted by your own prejudice as you
can be face to face: I hate his necktie. I wish she'd lose
some weight. He's so Jewish with his gestures. He's black;
I wonder how he feels about Jesse Jackson. She's pretty, I
wonder if she fools around. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
The medium takes away -- it has no room for -- that little
voice in the back of your mind that is always making private
judgments on the side, judgments that can distract you from
the worth -- or lack of it -- of ideas being expressed.
Iconferencing, you might actually find
yourself paying attention more to substance than style.
Now, don't misunderstand. Learning to communicate
effectively is just as important online as face-to-face.
And in some ways, the skills are different. I'm not saying
style doesn't matter ... but I know that one of the values of
electronic dialogue is the freedom it gives us from "normal"
face-to-face ways of judging ... ways in which we screen out,
consciously or not, the available contributions of people who
are "different" than we are.
Different! Computer conferencing can help us leap over 13the
gaps that prejudice and judgments automatically create. It's
as close as we get today to direct, mind-to-mind
communication. And, frankly, more than ever before, we need
to be able to look past surface difference ... in a society,
a country, indeed a globe that is filled with more diversity
than ever before.
Consider with me, for a moment, a growing challenge for
today's corporations -- at least, here in America -- an issue
sometimes referred to as the "Management of Diversity."
Think: who were the original founders of most of today's
businesses?
Some of their names are virtual icons of history: Henry Ford,
Alexander Graham Bell, Andrew Carnegie, Walt Disney. IBM's
Thomas Watson. McDonald's Ray Croc. For every single such
celebrity, there are thousands of lesser known founders of
today's major businesses.
The vast majority of these American corporate founders have
these traits in common: most of them were Caucasian. Most of
them were Protestant. Most of them were male.
Now consider that the culture and personality of a company
often reflects, even after many years, the initial personal
values of its creator. The process is automatic. The
company says to the employee -- though not always overtly --
THIS is the way we behave here. THIS is our mode. If you
wish to succeed, then be like the rest of us.
It used to be, of course, much easier for companies to expect
similarities of style among employees wanting to succeed in
management. For starters, after all, it was understood that
to even BE a management candidate, you'd be well advised,
yourself, to be white, Protestant, and male. With those
basic givens, it was not such a leap to uphold a corporate
culture often fondly described as "tradition."
But it's much harder, today, for the original corporate
culture to remain as its founder conceived it.
The Civil Rights and Women's Lib movements, among others,
pressured corporations to accept people into management ranks
who -- in personal style and cultural background -- were
really quite different from their management peers. Companies
have been *forced* to change -- from social pressure,
political pressure, and the realities of the modern work
force.
The increasing internationalism of today's American
business,with German or French or Japanese ownership of the
company, is another new factor cracking the foundation and
changing the business culture that was originally envisioned
by many companies' founding fathers.
The changes in corporate culture are many:
Like the way of conducting a meeting. Some of today's
employees demand much more consensus than used to be
permissible when the "the boss was always right."
Or, the way of showing appreciation. Women in management
may be less inhibited than men, in what they expect to
receive as feedback on a job well done, or what they're
able to express, themselves, in thanking an employee.
They often give feedback differently than a macho
traditionalist.
Or, the increasing importance of day-care centers,
on company premises for the working parent's children ...
Or, the morning exercise class for workers in a company
newly purchased by a Japanese firm.
The flavor of day-to-day work experience, in many small but
pervasive ways, is inevitably under pressure to change ...
even as policy manuals and management mind-sets may still be
reflecting the OLD way, the way that always used to motivate,
the way that used to work for everyone.
Now consider projected changes in employees themselves. In
the 15-year span between 1985 and the year 2000, we'll see an
increase of only 15% in U.S.-born White Men in the work
force, while U.S.-born White WOMEN will increase almost three
times as much, up 42%. Every new American day, in fact,
brings more women, more minorities, and more handicapped
individuals into the mainstream of the work force than ever
before. By the year 2000, 80 percent of entry-level
employees will be women, or women and men who were immigrants
to this country. Homogeneous organizations are giving way to
a mix of races, a balance of genders, and a multitude of values.
What does it mean when management and labor change from
mostly white, male, Protestant, married, and suburban to a
fragmented patchwork of different ethics, expectations,
priorities, and lifestyles? What does it mean to coordinate
a group of employees who, only the night before, absorbed
entirely different messages, one from the other, via cable TV
or a satellite dish in the yard? One watched his favorite
show, broadcast in Spanish, Italian, or Japanese. One
followed a program on local black politics. One watched a
show on the Gay Cable Network. One watched music videos on
MTV.
As employees and as consumers, it's rare anymore that there's
just one "market" or group. We are now a mixture of market
segments. We follow different interests and different
beliefs. The so-called "nuclear family" -- Mama, Papa, and
Baby -- is already a minority lifestyle. By 1990, in fact,
only 15% of U.S. Households will fit that traditional
pattern.
So any manager who still perfectly reflects the hallowed
values of the company's founder must look up from his desk
and realize that "they" are different now than "we" used to
be ... both inside the company, and in the company's markets.
How does one manage diversity where there used to be
consistency? Difference where there used to be sameness?
Multiple, separate cultures where there used to be one?
At Avon Products, where I worked as an Officer less than five
years ago, the company has moved from virtually mandatory,
all-male management retreats for poker and fishing at a
hunting lodge ... to a much more diverse way of interaction
among employees. In that company there is now an active
Women's employee group, a Black employee Group, an Hispanic
employee group, and an Oriental employee group. Members
within each group help one another on business presentations
while they network informally on issues, people, and
opportunities for advancement.
From any company's point of view, as the population in this
country shifts, who can bring better insights into marketing
to Hispanics, Orientals, or working women than the Hispanics,
Orientals, or working women themselves? And surely an urban,
single professional would have valuable perspective on
expanding the company's sales into metro markets ...
perspective that most suburban husbands and fathers couldn't
themselves offer alone.
So we are talking about a need for managing a rapidly
changing mosaic of people and lifestyles within a corporation
and marketing to that diversity in the population as a whole.
To achieve such a task with optimum success will require an
intellectual flexibility, openness, and mental agility that
certainly wasn't needed when we were all, in America, much
more like each other than we will ever be again.
And that ... the need for openness to new ideas and
flexibility in the ways we think ... brings me back to
computer conferencing.
Now please don't misunderstand me. As much as I believe in
the value of this new way of communicating, and as much as I
believe in its importance and its power to change the planet,
I am NOT here to tell you that computing at your terminals
will bring harmony and success to all beings in the universe.
It is still not easy enough to use a computer in the first
place -- not for most people, anyway. It's not easy to get
people to change even their "xXjOAoothpaste, let alone
the way they communicate. And I'm certainly not here to say
that discovering computer conferencing will let managers
across the globe solve all the problems and seize the
opportunities of ever more diversity in the work force and
consumer base.
BUT ... I will say this: anything that encourages a
thinking person, whether an executive in a corporation or a
citizen of the world ... anything that encourages us to look
beyond our surface judgments and evaluate ideas for the worth
of the thinking itself ... that can only be a force for good.
For finding the best solutions to our problems. And for
getting the best contributions from people ... from all
people, in a world of increasing diversity.
Computer conferencing does do that ... does jump beyond some
surface ways of responding to thinking ... can give voice --
electronic voice, anyway -- to someone with an idea which
might otherwise be overlooked.
I know first-hand about the power of this medium to expose
one to new ideas, and to get one beyond one's self. Starting
even in my earliest days of discovering computer
conferencing, the dialogues I enjoyed with people I'd never
met -- some of whom I still haven't met in person -- were one
of the reasons I found the courage to start my own business.
I had never thought to do that. I'd expected to remain at
Avon for two more decades of hard work and success in
corporate life.
Not that computer conferencing turns corporate citizens into
entrepreneurs ... don't worry! But the easy contact with
other ways of thinking lets one evaluate more choices to see
what's really right for one's self.
I know this: if I had remained as an Officer at Avon, I
would have that corporation actively using computer
conferencing now. I would have, and I could have, because
I'd have been a relentless champion. And that, I believe, is
still what it takes: a champion, a sponsor, a believer to
nourish the seed of change. Planting alone doesn't guarantee
a harvest. I was lured away from Avon by my personal
opportunities before I had the chance to cajole, teach,
train, inspire, and prove the productivity that conferencing
could provide. As long as change is hard -- any change, even
a new telephone system in the company, or a new way of
scheduling products, let alone computer conferencing -- as
long as change is hard, a motivated leader is required to
help it happen.
But I didn't stay to cultivate the Avon garden. I quit, after
20 years in three corporations, not actually knowing what I would do.
I'd had the chance to be the company's VP of Latin America. Quiero
practicar mi espanol, pero ... (I'd like to practice my
Spanish, but...!) it was the right opportunity to quit before
getting started.
Instead, I took the chance to see -- a discovery that is
still going on for me -- how computer conferencing could
open choices for the entrepreneur ... could connect me to a
diversity of people, opportunities, and experiences I would
not otherwise have known.
During the past five years, for example, I've obtained a half
a dozen clients for my marketing consulting business that I
would never have achieved without an active presence on
computer conferencing networks. If I'm a successful
marketing consultant today, I owe a substantial amount of
credit to the medium that helped me be more than the limits
of my time or geography.
And ... I've had the pleasure and excitement of helping
create a new form of reportage -- interactive electronic
journalism -- covering computer shows, toy fairs, the
Hollywood Oscars, the political conventions, and, yes, AIDS.
That latter experience was remarkable. I found myself being
encouraged by readers on several different networks to
interview people on the subject of AIDS long before it became
the awful household word it is now. The responsiveness of
readers, their eagerness for more, their contributions to the
process -- readers in other countries, other lifestyles, with
other views -- that's what drove me to the quest that became
a book. They became my motivation to interview priests,
prostitutes, politicians, married bisexuals with double
lives, doctors and nurses caring for the desperate.
I've mentioned examples of what computer conferencing has
given to me -- financial opportunity for my business, growth
and satisfaction for my interest in being a writer.
What I haven't yet acknowledged is the transformational power
of this form of communication ... the change it has brought
to my life, and how that enhances my ability to be who I am.
You have to understand, to get the context of my change, that
I come from an island of only 5,000 people in the South.
Fitting in -- not being different -- was the essence of
living on the island. Being more true to the values around
you than your own, individual spirit.
But how can people be their most or give their best if they
cannot first, themselves, know who they are? Creativity and
new achievement spring more readily from freedom to think
than from conforming.
I left that tiny island for the country of New York City.
But many of us carry our own islands with us, not daring to
leave the shore, afraid of the waters beyond.
I do not exaggerate, in telling you what conferencing has
unlocked for me, that I was not only exposed to and
influenced by a diversity of thinking I would normally not
have known up close ... I also gained the strength to be able
to express my own difference ... making, I hope, my own
better contributions.
I grew up Jewish on an island heavily Southern Baptist ...
with swastikas on my locker at school, and "Jew Boy" called
at me in the halls.
And I grew up gay ... fearful of knowing know the truth of my
own identity, afraid to even *know* the difference of who I
am.
I would like to live in a world where that issue is NOT
important, where people are accepted for the goodness of
their hearts. But as long any of us maintain our pre-
conceived notions -- what Jews are like, what the Japanese
are like, what blacks are like, what WASPs are like, what
women are like, what gays are like -- as long as we limit our
thinking to the boundaries of our personal islands, and as
long as we fear our differences ... then such an issue does
matter.
And whatever small steps can move us beyond the limiting
judgments we've learned to harbor about one another (or about
ourselves), well, those are steps worth taking.
Finally, at last, in terms of my own "difference" from the
majority as a whole -- finally and at last, I no longer hold
myself back, am no longer too afraid to acknowledge my part
of the diversity. This speech, here at ENA, is in fact the
first public occasion in my life when I have acknowledged
that personal "detail" to the world: I am a homosexual.
Soon, these words will be transmitted online via "Mike
Magazine" on electronic networks.
Could I have taken this step if I had never discovered
computer conferencing? Would I? Not now, anyway. Not yet.
Maybe not ever. But my world has been expanded forever ...
and my sense of who, personally, I can be.
Some of my growth, as I've said, has come from interaction on
public conferencing systems ... sharing ideas with a
journalist in Japan, a software scientist in California, a
priest in Western Canada, a 15-year-old boy in Ohio, an
automobile dealer in France. Some of these people I might
not have given a chance, even if I'd met them in person. The
15-year-old boy wrote like a man in his 30's, and I was
taking him seriously *before* I discovered he was a teen.
Computer conferencing within a corporation, however, doesn't
have to offer such distant locations or such a range of
lifestyles to give us the value of gaining from diversity.
When a junior Manager can send an idea to the Department
Director just by saying "dot-S" at the end of a note ... when
inter-departmental managers, assigned to work together as a
team, can reflect on the written word BEFORE challenging a
new thought in haste ... when consideration of a proposal can
be freed from calendar hassle or face-to-face political
protocol ... those times have the makings of helping *any*
organization discover and compare the best ideas the fastest,
and of helping its people contribute their most.
Conferencing can help build bridges -- fast, easily travelled
spanners -- linking our separate islands, whether inside a
company or without. More than 350 years ago, John Dunne, the
English poet wrote about our interconnections:
No man is an island,
entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the Continent,
a part of the maine.
Computer conferencing -- he could never imagine it -- is
helping to make that more so. Expanding our thinking,
enhancing receptivity, strengthening our abilities to gain
the benefits of an increasingly diverse society. I am
experiencing it myself, on my own piece of mental geography.
And I've witnessed it in others, individuals and groups.
The exciting thing is: we've barely begun.
Today I strengthen a bit more the bridge that exists between
my personal island and yours ... a bridge so clearly enhanced
by what conferencing has helped it to be.
Do I have fears, still, on my island? Lingering doubts?
Of course.
But I am very glad to be expanding into new waters anyway.
And I am glad you are here.
Thank you very much.
--
Patt Haring | Vote * YES * for creation of
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