The End of Business as Usual

The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual

Pleiades Publishing Services clients and our Blog readers are primarily small and emerging business owners. A large number are home-based businesses enterprises. As a retired SBDC counselor and as a business blogger I often am asked to respond to variations of the following statement, “I’m just a small home-based start-up, how can studying a book like, Winning or Success Principles help me with my business issues.”

For over 20-years my answer has been the same— there is always some insight or business process that you can extrapolate and apply to your own enterprise.

There is no faster way to model successful business strategies and emulate good management practices than read business books that describe not only the successes, but those that offer a cautionary tale. I have a personal fondness for business and technical books that describe future trends and business and product cycles. One of the best in that gender is, The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual.

It is an oldie but goodie… a book that I browse often. Written by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls and David Weinberger, The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual, is a 190-page paperback that was first published by Perseus Books Group in January of 2001. Back then, some traditional business publication reviewers and captains of industry wrote off the book as more science fiction than business publication.

Today, The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual, is a frequently referenced source document for those who wish to understand and take advantage of the changing paradigms of business, social networking culture, web marketing and E-commerce.

The book begins with the salutation, “People of Earth…” and takes direct aim at the very heart of corporate America. The authors show how the Internet is turning business upside down. They proclaim that, thanks to conversations taking place on Web sites and message boards, and in e-mail and chat rooms, employees and customers alike have found voices that undermine the traditional command-and-control hierarchy that organizes most corporate marketing groups. “Markets are conversations,” the authors write, and those conversations are “getting smarter faster than most companies.” In their view, the lowly customer service rep wields far more power and influence in today’s marketplace than the well-oiled front office PR machine.

The Cluetrain Manifesto began as a Web site (www.cluetrain.com) in 1999 when the authors, who have worked variously at IBM, Sun Microsystems, the Linux Journal, and NPR, posted 95 theses that pronounced what they felt was the new reality of the networked marketplace. For example, thesis no. 2: “Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors”; thesis no. 20: “Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them”; thesis no. 62: “Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall”; thesis no. 74: “We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.”

The Cluetrain Manifesto book enlarges on these themes through seven essays filled with dozens of stories and observations about how business gets done in America and how the Internet will change it all. While Cluetrain will strike some as strident, the message itself remains quite relevant and unique.

Reading this book today is just as inspiring today as it was in 2001. In fact, based on the importance of social networking sites and viral marketing to small businesses it should be considered required reading. To put the information shared in the Cluetrain Manifesto in context, these are just some of the “start-ups” that became million and billion dollar market giants that changed how business is done, just as The Cluetrain Manifesto predicted: Wikipedia — launched Feb. 2001; PayPal — launched Oct. 2002; MySpace — launched Feb. 2004; Facebook — launched Feb. 2004; Digg — Launched Dec. 2004 and YouTube — launched Feb. 2005.

This book is for anyone interested in the Internet and e-commerce, and is especially important for those businesses struggling to navigate the topography of the wired marketplace.