Not hallway/classroom (necessarily) but salon/court: watching a Chinese historical TV drama out of the corner of my eye today, and was struck by the public and performative aspect of court discourse – you have information being presented to the ruler, various ministers reacting, debating solutions, etc., but the real decision is never made at court; a lot of work is being done via informal groups both before and after the court session to figure out 1) who the stakeholders *really* are 2) what the stuff that is said at court *really* means 3) what is not said at court and should be 4) what is not said at court and *shouldn’t* be and 5) what the decision arrived at in court ought to be. The ruler himself takes part in these informal groups. In biz school this is presented as a cross-cultural studies thing: North American companies view meetings as a space for debates and decision making, East Asian companies view them as a space where orderly consensus is enacted, the debates and decision making having taken place earlier and privately/informally. However my impression is that 18th-century France was, well, more like 18th-century China in this sense… I would guess, commonsensically, that the more prohibitions and articles of etiquette there are surrounding the “court” situ, the more the actual nexus of information exchange and decision making shifts elsewhere/underground.

…This is perhaps more organizational behaviour than marketing? But the one is just marketing within rather than without, if community building is seen as falling under the marketing function (or: erasing the business-employee split rather than the business-consumer split).

What the Cluetrainers are doing maybe is trying to *establish* such a split rather than break it down. So, replace the business-consumer split (which isn’t classroom-hallway because it involves different people) with business-human, and then privilege the human as being ‘more real’?

I’d thought of the hallway-classroom split as behavioral and psychological, the behavioral split being that in the classroom you talk about a subject matter and in the hallway you talk to and about each other; the psychological split being that, if you buy into the division, you buy into the idea that these are the behaviors that are expected and appropriate in actual classrooms and hallways. But I wasn’t saying that actual classrooms and hallways were always and only homes to the expected/appropriate behavior. (And of course I was saying that one could reject the split, which is mutually impoverishing to both hallway and classroom, and I was claiming that good rock critics did indeed reject the split.) By calling the split “psychological” I was implying that people take it with them wherever they go; that for people whose psyche is under the split’s sway, the whole world is a hallway (even if they call the hallway “real life” or “the street” or such), which is to say that for them the whole world outside of selected official venues is a response to the classroom, even if they’d like to pretend that “real life” is prior to and more real and basic than the classroom. But also, classrooms – real classrooms – are an attempt to put the hallway at bay. In the hallway, you’re working out who you are in relation to others (e.g., social differentiation, romance, gang warfare, etc.), whereas the classroom wants to at least go through the motions of setting that quest (or battle) aside for the length of the class period, instead making the main issue the study of a subject matter – though of course what you do in the classroom will have an impact on your social relations.

In any event, there’s not obviously a one-to-one parallel between hallway-classroom and “human speech”-”corporate speech,” or “salon”-”court,” etc. (Presumably the court has official and less official speech. And what would count as “subject matter” in corporate as opposed to noncorporate speech?) The reasons hallway-classroom jumped to mind, though, are that the salon is an entity that in some way may be rejecting the behavioral splits of its day (it’s not official but it’s about the official) and that the Cluetrainers themselves, while perhaps in a similar role, seem to be rather naively acting out the hallway’s claim to be more real than the classroom.

I gather that we do have this odd mixture for the time being of mass media (mob) and blogosphere (salon), which creates such oddities as the race between CNN and some actor to first reach 1 million followers on Twitter. We’re in some weird “in between” phase and nobody knows what’s going to happen. But something will happen, and it will go bad for some. And a lot of people will learn more in the process. This will go on until mass media run out of advertising funds. Who wants to advertise in mass media when you can’t be certain of the effects of advertising? Who wants to blow millions in traditional marketing campaigns, when you can be less and less certain about the outcome?

I just received a message from a recently approved “friend” on Facebook who wanted me to join the Mona Vie company. I once saw a critical news report about that company, but didn’t recognize it at first. But I did do a quick search on Google to refresh my memory. And it took me less than two minutes to find out I didn’t want anything to do with that company. I realized that the sellers associated with the company were very likely to become so desperate (after buying all those expensive bottles of soft drink), they’d resort to anything to get their investments back. Within 5 minutes I had de-friended the Facebook friend, as I don’t want to receive that kind of doubtful business proposals and decided I wouldn’t miss him anyway. If he was a closer friend, perhaps I’d have tried to get him some help to get out of that mess.

This goes for just any company in the world and eventually no company will be able to “hide” from the scrutiny of their potential customers, employees and business partners.

So I guess, to answer, you don’t converse with the mob. They will tear you down. If you don’t wake up and begin to do something different. If this is when you’re out of business, because you didn’t see what’s coming, it is too late. And that’s when it’ll hurt and be bad.

The blogging aristocrats may not like it very much either. They are no less safe than the Gorbachevs of this world are safe from the Yeltsins.

Once a DM…

One day someone will make a lot of noise and money thinking this sort of think in that sort of area. Maybe they already have, without my noticing.

“Arguably the most influential business book of the last decade” actually isn’t that huge a claim in that I can’t think of too many others! (“Who moved my cheese?” maybe :( ) But CTM was very influential in shaping the ideas around ’social media’, ‘web 2.0′ etc. It’s the Velvet Underground of business books – everyone who read it formed a dodgy start-up!

The marketing people I work with (and for) every day wouldn’t, I think, have any use for the 95 theses, they don’t seem to provide routes through the concerns I hear about clarity and consistency and suchlike. I wonder whether that is something to do with ours being a business-to-business environment? That market could only barely be called a conversation, I think.

A few of my former sales colleagues in my last job had read the book and thought it was cute, but they preferred to do the same old preferential dealings as before – since the short-term, tangible benefit was more obvious than a nice, fuzzy feeling (and loss of competitive advantage). Utopia, meet realism.

Ramble over… Nice post, I didn’t really know what a French salon was but like the analogies you’ve drawn.