Day: 6 April 2006

Why would you want to turn [customers] away? Alan Rusbridger on walled gardens

Another example of how the web works. I have to be on vacation in India and reading Steven Johnson’s blog to find out about something Alan Rusbridger said recently………

I quote from the Rusbridger speech, via Steven:

The more of a wall that you put around, whether it’s a wall of payment or a wall of registration, the more you’re repelling people rather than building an audience for the day when we hope that advertising will come in like the cavalry and rescue us. So I think at the moment, the smarter thing to do is to make your content available everywhere and to have it aggregated and linked to like mad by everybody in the world, because that way you will reach a gigantic audience. And that matters journalistically. If you’re in the business of journalism for influence, and because of the Guardian worldview that you believe in, it’s terrific to have an audience of 14 million instead of 400,000. That’s wonderful. So why would you want to turn them away?

I have often felt that there is no such thing as a bad customer, just a customer who does not fit your business model. And in the past, businesses have spent time discarding customers as “not relevant to the business model”. And one firm’s rejects became some other firm’s Most Valuable Customers, as many airline and credit-card “bottom-feeder” businesses have shown.

This does not make sense. If you want a sustainable business, then adapt the business model to suit your customers, not the other way around. It is the relationship that matters. And you will work out a way for all parties in a relationship to gain as a result. Otherwise it is not a relationship.
You can find the Steven Johnson post here, with links to the original speech audio as well as some very useful comments. [And yes, Steven, I am looking forward to reading Ghost Map!]

Contract versus covenant

A few days ago, Doc Searls wrote another of his trade-mark thought-provoking posts, this time on business as morality. And the Lakoff-Searls snowball took off in style after that, with a number of conversations and posts taking the ideas and making it their own.

Doc also told me about the relationship-before-conversation-before-transaction model he learned from an African pastor, something he refers to in his post and something I have always believed in. Following on from that original post, Doc pointed those that were interested to a post from AKMA, which  “affirmed the priority of grace (generosity, gratuity and giving) over other modes of interaction”.

This reminded me of something I have often discussed with my pastor, and something that in my mind brings together what Doc said and what AKMA posted.

For mode of interaction read type of relationship.

Contract versus covenant.

Both types of relationship use conversation as a basis to extend the relationship and to discover potential transactions. But there the similarity ends.

In a contract relationship, at the first sign of breach you look for recourse: What am I going to be get as a result of his error, how can I make money from his failure?

In a covenant relationship, at the first sign of breach you look for ways to fix it: What are we going to do together to solve this problem?

Covenant relationships exist between parents and children. They exist between family members, between people who have known each other for many years (such as schoolmates or past neighbours) between people who have shared life’s pleasures as well as pains.

When you work with a  start-up, having a contract relationship makes no sense at all. So when I experimented with young companies, it was always about “how to fix it” rather than “how to kill them”.

I used the same terms to think about relationships at work. Contract versus covenant. And I realised that some of my relationships were contract and some were covenant.

Now, as the years have passed, I wonder. I wonder why people have contract relationships at all.

If you can’t commit then don’t call it a relationship. For a relationship to exist there must be commitment on both sides.
And if you can commit and do commit, then live by grace.