“To be clear and right off the bat, I am not in favor of 100% transparency as what defines an open company… or 100% of people seeing 100% of a companies information 100% of the time. That is a bad idea. Anyone advocating for that type of transparency is simply not working in reality.”

However, I personally DO advocate for that type of transparency. I just propose that thee should be two levels of exposure – one internal and one external. Imagine the impact that such brutal internal openness would create. If we are all honest we really know who is playing solitaire and who is doing what – at least we think we do. I think it at least bears value to entertain the consideration of total openness.

Would it be too Orwellian? Or would it really be to the ultimate betterment of the Enterprise? I know a lot of open concepts are initially hard to swallow, but once you look at things from a truly “open” mind only then can the value be fully realized!
Matt

While I do, most definitely, LOVE the new site (well I guess it’s 3 months old at this point) I think it would be REALLY wonderful if there were TRUE transparency in most businesses I’ve seen.

I think the stream would look something like this:

Tom – just sent a tweet to his girlfriend.

Joan – just ordered flowers for her mom’s birthday.

Crystal – is playing solitaire (again).

Bryan – just placed an illegal bet against the Dallas Cowboys on NFLbet.net.

Joe – has his door closed and is looking at porn.

Chris – is actually working and just closed another major account.

Obviously this is meant to be a bit humorous; however, it IS the sad reality at many companies. Wouldn’t it be great to have TOTAL disclosure and transparency?

On a serious note though, I very much respect the continued “pushing the envelope” vision you continue to bring to your ventures! I tend to agree in the “open” model.

In our own business we are increasing our participation in an open-source community where we essentially donate our work for the betterment of the overall community. And I have even initiated a short-term policy driving all of our local business channels to Guru.com in order to build a top presence there despite many naysayers even from within my own team.

Despite the fact that we are exposing these clients (who are actually already sold on utilizing our services) to a competitive pool of over 45,000 developers worldwide, we have not lost a single client to the competition while growing our ranking from over 1000 just 90 days ago to our current #1 ranking today.

If you push the envelope you WILL reap rewards, and ultimately your clients recognize the value of such thinking.

Thanks for your companies efforts in broadening the minds of companies worldwide!

Matt

That’s ok. That makes sense. For a normal business.

But your business doesn’t appear to be normal, at least that doesn’t appear to be how you are positioning yourselves.

There is something odd about a change of tone isn’t there? Especially from a group of people that do have (or at least proclaim to enjoy) or certain “digital footprint” (not my term that). The foot print is there. One can look back at it and see what the person had to say and how they said it.

The question is this – is there room within the Dachis way of doing things that allows people to shine and be authentic? Presumably the business brought this people in because of what they had to say and how they went about saying it so surely it is in your interest (as a business) that they continue to do this, is it not?

If you were to employ me, for example, I would assume that my approach is the approach you’re looking for (this wouldn’t happen. Trust me) and it would therefore be a nonsense for me to change my tone of voice. It would also be a nonsense for you to ask me to change it.

With warm regards from Munich
Marcus

I have been attracted by your style of open communication, modeling the integration of social media into your business communication. I am in the process of coalescing a partnership of peers within the coaching industry and looking for/at innovative business models from the world of consulting. Your business is attracting me as a model.

It seems to me that the space where web 2.0 meets business – what you call “social business” is also a place for integration of the basic drivers of the two worlds. To oversimplify we might say that the basic driver in the web 2.0 world is “contribution” (e.g. Wikipedia, open source software, FB), while the basic driver in business is “profit”. I am curious about how these two drivers come together within the Dachis Group – specifically within the internal agreements which give structure to your culture.

What are you willing to share about your internal business model? I am particularly interested in what agreements you might have crafted about shared ownership/decision making, and revenue/profit sharing etc.

With interest,
Clive

I think that’s a shame.

For more on potential insights, be sure to check out what IBMer Luis Suarez is doing with email.

When I walked into Google’s offices and they had a large screen up capturing and displaying the top searches I, like everyone else passing by, was galvanized by the real time view into the core of the business: search.

In a similar vein, you are onto something really interesting by displaying your internal and outbound messaging. Passersby, be they Dachis staff, partners, or simply interested parties, can get a glimpse into your world.

What would be an interesting crank up of this approach would be to include inbound messaging from your broader ecosystem as well. This may go beyond normative transparency comfort levels, especially for those who have yet to embrace the concept of the open enterprise, but as a means of extending, or iterating, the experiment – it would prove to be an interesting exercise.

A final comment: I totally agree that an open enterprise will achieve an order of magnitude greater success than the closed corporation, I also note that there are gradations of optimal transparency.

The determining factors contributing to how transparent an organization should be include the sector they operate in (a scientific research institute may play its smarts closer to its chest than a social network operator, for example), the state of development of their market/industry (a maturing industry in which product is commodotising versus a totally new and disruptive market).

It will be interesting to see how the concept of “company websites” will transform in the future when designing multiple touchpoints that support different behaviours will be more common.

I think that’s a great question and it’s come up before. Let’s take a look at how you’ve put this forward:

“How interesting is it really for your clients to read that you guys post something to Basecamp or send an email? How will that help them?”

It’s important to remember that this space thrives on an iterative approach meaning you put something out there, see how it performs, tweak it and revise. All along, you process the feedback loops. So for now the stream is providing value philosophically by illustrating that you can do things like this (display certain business communications) and business won’t break down. That said, the experience on this site is designed to evolve and we are planning future iterations.

Also, what I think is being overlooked is value of aggregating all of our Twitter feeds in a dynamic fashion. Most corporate Websites are static in nature and prove to be challenging to update and keep fresh. Our “homepage” updates effortlessly in a way that can scale, and with each of us having a significant following on Twitter, we know that there is an audience for the content we provide such as links. Same goes for how the stream presents our featured Collaboratory comment. E-mails and
when we upload to Basecamp is one part of it.

“How will showing that you’re working (just like everyone else) strengthen your brand?”

Our brand is not for us to decide but will be formed in the minds, hearts and guts of the people we do business with. But as active as many of us are, with speaking etc. we also hunker down and work very hard. I think displaying this doesn’t hurt the brand and actually provides insights as to when we work. We’ve stated that work doesn’t happen in shifts anymore (people work on weekends, evenings and from different locations) and the stream shows that in real time.

Thanks for these questions Jonas, as I think they are legitimate. Hope my thoughts are helpful.

On the surface, I don’t expect that clients, competitors, or other constituents will find much value. Below the surface, it’s the content of the activities that count, not to mention how the activities come together.

I could share more, but there’s really no reason to – as stated above, being “social” doesn’t mean sharing all information all the time.

It might be fun for you internally, but in that case the intranet wright be a more suitable place for your stream.

There’s many interesting aspects of “going public” as well, but I’ll take the role as the bad guy here