horsepigcow

{start rant} I did not work hard to slowly, but organically build my influence in order to use it to boost people’s ranks in silly contests, to hock bad ideas or to retweet stuff I don’t care about! {/end rant}

I really hate the activity that comes out of an obsession with numbers. Think QUALITY, people, not QUANTITY. It’s a long term play. The other stuff is fleeting and meaningless. Really.

I pride myself on being a geeky girl who is also a girly girl. Of course, the trend is growing and no longer do people equate geeky girls with thick rimmed glasses and dowdy fashions. In fact, geek is pretty darned chic these days and even the trendiest of hipsters are learning to install their own versions of WordPress. It warms my heart.

But I used to be a little confused about my identity. I’ve always been very girly – I grew up loving fashion, accessories, hair and makeup – but when I fell in love with computers and technology as a young woman, I didn’t think I had any role models to satisfy my desire to balance the nerd with the fashionista.

That is…until I found out about Sandy Lerner.

I first read about Sandra ‘Sandy’ Lerner in a fashion magazine in Toronto. The hip and awesome makeup and skincare line, Urban Decay, had made it’s way into Canada through cosmetic heaven, Sephora. I loved the packaging, the funky colors of the shadows, the way it put sparkles into everything and the rock’n'roll glam of the line. Honestly, I was more focused on the product than the founder, Sandy Lerner, until I read the line that went something like this:

Lerner’s career has taken a dramatic shift since her days as co-founder of Cisco Systems…

Cisco? As in that technology company that is so deeply geeky that even I don’t quite understand what it does? Turns out, yes. From a New York Times article in 2005:

A selective polymath, Ms. Lerner has, since being forced out of Cisco in 1990 after feuds with the company’s chief executive, started and sold a cosmetics company (Urban Decay), read Jane Austen compulsively, schooled herself in the ways of Colonial farming, studied the history of costume, made period ball gowns, collected books on 18th-century typography and perfected her Regency dancing. “I can dance in five centuries and two sexes,” she said.

I love this woman! And, from the various tidbits found about the net about the tumultuous end of her career with Cisco, she had a great deal of sexism to fight in her day.

So…on Ada Lovelace Day in 2009, I want to celebrate Sandra ‘Sandy’ Lerner, co-founder of Cisco Systems, mathematician, geek, fashionista, sustainable farmer, dancer and all-around renaissance woman.

The advantage I’ve had while working for and with startups for most of my career is that the ‘underdog’ or ‘the new kid on the block’ gets a great deal of support and love from people all around. Somewhere deeply ingrained in the folklore of capitalism is the rags to riches story that almost everyone can celebrate. But when the riches come about…the story ends. And the loving nature of those around the company can suddenly turn to suspicion. We love to hate the successful. We help lift them to their success, then resent them for it.

I might have found that odd at some point, but have grown to understand it mostly through reading social anthropologists such as Matt Ridley, Tor Norretranders and Lewis Hyde, all of whom talk about the gift economy and its historical role in keeping those in power…in power. All the way back to Aristotle, the parable has been that those who grow all too powerful in any given economy need to be taken down a notch so that the rest of the community can thrive. In the analogy of the Tall Poppy, those that overgrow and overshadow cut off the sun from the rest. In order for the community to thrive, they must be cut down.

Thus, in the way that the tall poppies are to be cut down to size, we have a tendency to do the same for corporations or individuals that have gotten too large in our culture. Which brings me to why it is difficult to grok whuffie if you are a large company.

So why? With good cause, big companies are a little more paranoid than their scrappy, startup counterparts. Their poppies have grown above the others and there seem to be natural and politcal mechanisms put into place to cut them down to size. I was disgusted, but not surprised to hear of the number of people lurking around the corner, waiting for a successful firm to make the smallest mistake so that they can raise class action suits for ridiculous things like sending out an email without unsubscribe information or raising forward-looking information that doesn’t happen. These opportunists aren’t called out because what they do is shrouded in the purview of watching out for the public good.

Okay, so I get it. As I tweeted earlier tonight, I’m saddened that we create our own rat traps in success. Once we’re ‘there’ we can no longer do the stuff that made us successful in the 1st place. All of this was brought up by Josh Kopelman’s great post on the success of Paypal. And that success came from the fact that they had nothing to lose as compared to their rival eBay. As he wrote, “I believe that eBay understood everything that was needed to build a great payments product. They were just unable to do so given the risks involved.” Paypal could break the rules all they wanted because, well, they could get away with it as a small, scrappy startup. eBay, having established itself as a big success, could not. You just can’t behave that way when you get to be a certain size.

Or can you?

As I watched Tony Hsieh of Zappos.com on the SXSW stage last week, it gave me a great deal of hope. Zappos.com isn’t small potatoes. They just broke over $1billion in revenue, have thousands of employees (I can’t find the exact number, but I think there are 1400 in corporate and another 1400 in their Kentucky warehouse). Yet with these big numbers, Tony is committed to not being the type of company that is risk-averse. He encourages employees to tweet, listing their tweets out front and center. He’s committed to service and bringing happiness and he isn’t afraid to let any of his employees speak to any reporter, customer or blogger at any time. He trusts that he’s instilled a positive enough culture at Zappos that he needn’t censor or concern himself with the unique spin each employee has on the company. He encourages it.

Tony’s former company became the kind of company he didn’t want to work for. The one that couldn’t grok whuffie. The one that wasn’t fun or a little weird and wasn’t focused on delivering WOW through customer service. So, from the beginning, he made sure he built Zappos to be the company that was. And guess what? There don’t seem to be as many people lurking in the shadows wanting to take Zappos down a notch…even though it’s poppy is soaring above the rest. I think it’s because the tall poppy that is Zappos is deeply committed in giving back to the community that got it there. It’s part of the gift economy. Zappos has the freedom to embrace the chaos because it didn’t take out any other poppies on the way up.

So, although as companies get bigger, they tend to lose the zeal and scrappiness that got them there in the first place, it doesn’t have to be the case. Can big companies who haven’t taken the care that Zappos has build that culture retrospectively? I’d love to see – or be part of – that case study. Big companies CAN grok whuffie. It’ll just take a little TLC.