Get Something Done
I drove over the San Mateo bridge to Foster City this morning to VISA headquarters and attended a demonstration of the VISA internal web site with a group of web managers from other companies such as Charles Schwab, Bechtel, Clorox, Levi Straus and Airtouch. The meeting was sponsored by a group from the Stanford University Communications School conducting a study on internal company communication and how that communication may be changing through the use of the Intranet.
They're interested in how internal or Intranet sites started, who started them within our companies and how they've grown, how they've justified their existence to management and how their use may have changed traditional communications patterns. I wouldn't normally attend this meeting, but our representative from corporate communications was tied up with the presentation of the new management structure at our own company meeting later this afternoon so I got to go in his place.
My description of the Stanford study may not be accurate, but it's pretty close. VISA has a thousand or so fewer employees than we do so a program similar in scale and size would be feasible for us to implement. VISA's intranet is staffed and developed way beyond our current internal web operation (which is still basically a bunch of techies fiddling around on the side with certain very specific exceptions such as sales and marketing) and it's pretty clear we need to get off our collective butts. It's also my guess we need to bring someone into the position from the outside with proven experience in setting up Intranets and there's little chance that person will be found inside the company as in moi. Awww....
(I wrote a few paragraphs here that I decided to trash. Basically, life is not over, this is an opportunity, yadda, yadda, everything is wonderful now. Really.)
I returned to attend the company meeting I talked about yesterday in which our new senior
management went over the new redesigned optimized for battle everything's going to work alright from here on out company structure. Whoop! I'm seen a number of these in the last five years, so I have to say I'm going to hold back and see, but the changes being made seem right and the people making them are people I hold in good regard. Someone asked the CEO who he considered our competition to be and he responded, "anyone who's still standing". I liked that. Shows the proper attitude. I would have liked that even more as a younger no brains ready to roll punk kid just starting out, but I liked it none the less as an old fart thinking about what the next step might be on this brilliant career of mine. So, another chapter underway, the under managers now fighting over who gets to own the peons and the gossip, at least, will be interesting for a while. Be curious to see if they ever take a breather and begin to get something done.
Time for a weekend. Any old weekend.
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