intertwingly

Am slow...took me a minute but i got it :)

— dims

Sam. Nice catch. Was it intentional? I think so.

Sam Ruby: The New Public Relations Tim Bray: The new PR pipeline is a lot shorter, simpler, and wider: Senior management works out a company’s goals and messages. Management works hard to make sure that the employees understand them. The people who...

Nope, Preston didn’t figure it out.  And his comments are closed.  Perhaps he will check back here.

Thought experiment: suppose, for a moment, that in some alternate universe I became a part of “senior management” for some firm.  Would the third bullet still apply to me?

I don’t know. I get this image of a dog with thousand tails attempting to walk straight while the tails wag every which way.

I have to say I thought the same as Preston.

Taking a stab — you mean that senior management are the ones working out the goals, so they should be the ones to tell that part of the story?

Aristotle: you certainly don’t want to be in a position where you are trying to reverse engineer the goals of my employer solely by observing my words and actions.

Perhaps if there were several hundred thousand of us blogging, you could “triangulate”, to use the blogging vernacular.  And I would readily concede that a reasonable approximation could be accomplished with a small fraction of that number.

But to get down to the point where you could get real insight into that part of the story by reading only one, or perhaps a few, blogs; well then, IMHO, you would need to seek out the people who are doing that part of the work.

It seems like senior management had access to “the outside” before blogging, and that shouldn’t change now. Since Sun execs are blogging, I would guess Tim just didn’t bother to mention it. The real news is that blogging brings more visibility to those of us at the bottom of the org chart.

Hmm, you could turn this around.

• The people who are really doing the work tell the story to the world, directly.
• Management works hard to make sure that every employee understands their goals.
• Senior management works out a company’s messages from their goals.

Sam, sorry about the closed comments, but - given I got maybe a comment a month and maybe a half-dozen (or more) attempted spams every day - it just wasn’t worth the effort.

Seemed to me you were contrasting “really doing the work” with management in a Dilbert-esqe fashion.  Perhaps I am mistaken.

Not all management is completely obtuse. 

Assuming your senior management has a clue, then they will try to set goals for the company that make sense.  The goals set likely will cross organizational boundaries.  Any one guy “really doing the work” will not have all the pieces, and is unlikely to know how to work on more than a part of the goal.

This is where management in the middle “works” (or should).  Translating the company goals into action in units within the organization, figuring out the bits needed and how they fit together, tracking the work within and between units - this all takes time and energy.

Sometimes the guys “really doing the work” know bits that management does not - and needs to know.  This is where you have to push information back up the chain.

My point of view - assuming we are talking about the same subject.

Preston: my wife is an middle manager.  In many ways, I am in a “middle” technical position myself.  There are areas where I either directly set, or at least influence, strategy.  Either for my employer, or for foundations like the ASF.

Let me make this more clear: I have cases where peers or “superiors” have asked me to blog something.  In many cases, my response is (somewhat paraphrased): “get your own blog”.  Or something like that.

Guess I would add only one observation to this. 

The ability to express yourself well in written form could be viewed as a talent.  If the talent is less than universal and not a requirement for a management position, then odds are in any group the guy with the talent and inclination will not be in management.

On the flip side - the fact that Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz has this sort of talent may prove of enormous value to Sun.  Heck, reading Jonathan’s weblog was enough to convince me that Sun has a future - before I was rather doubtful.

There is an interesting discussion about Public Relations and blogs going on in Sam Ruby’s blog here ( Sam Ruby: The New Public Relations). I believe that we are already leaving the period of the amateur bloggers, and that pretty soon most of the...

As I see it, the critical thing is that the management’s PR is telling the public what they want the company to be doing, while the workers' blogs tell the public what is actually going on “at the coal face”.

These are not so much two different things at odds as they are two separate and necessary functions (sort of like “church” and "state").