My Open Balancing Act at Yahoo!

My first blog post as a Yahoo! employee. I’m now gainfully employed, working for the only company I know whose name ends with an exclamation point. It’s a fine company. But don’t worry; I’m not going to turn this blog into marketing rah-rah. Obviously I see things about Yahoo! that attracted me to it. And I’ll share enough to allow us to focus on the relevant lessons that you can apply in your work.

I’m pleased to notice that Yahoo! has a very active intranet wiki. Every employee has a personal profile page on the intranet — in which they can include their picture and other information about themselves, including tags that they share with others. There are many internal email-discussion lists – listed on the intranet, with opt-in/out capabilities; some of which are on non-work topics. I already started my internal blog on day #2 of my work. And I work on a virtual team consisting of a diverse collection of engineers and attorneys who report into different parts of the company, but volunteer time because they have developed a sense of shared purpose. In many ways I see the principles and tools of E2.0 at work in the daily lives of the Yahoo! employee.

And yet — (caveat: I’ve been here less than a week) — don’t think there are no challenges in the workplace. E2.0 is not a silver bullet that magically removes all barriers to effective work. Yes, it helps, but people are people. Some are passive-aggressive, or worse. I hope I run into some active resistance along the way. I believe that if you don’t run into resistance at work then you are probably not doing enough. Maybe that’s my east-coast mentality speaking, but hey — friction causes energy. Hoping Yahoo! is ready for me!

Note: I’ll avoid sharing Yahooo! details here. First, it might bore you; and its off-topic. Second, as an employee, I have an obligation to my company to honor the propriety of their information. Simply put, there is a difference between being “open” and being “untrustworthy”. I believe that openness is a big enabler to successful business. Process transparency usually results in process improvements. Socially, people are motivated when they know that others can see what they are doing. And pragmatically, sometimes you’ll get someone sharing a great idea for improvement — something they can do if they can see the process. But openness does not mean without discretion. In fact, being open about some things results in being considered un-trustworthy. Loose lips sink ships, and companies compete.

This very balance is at the heart of Enterprise 2.0 — the balance between an environment where information is shared and leveraged within networks of connected employees and the reality that businesses must manage and protect information for both competitive and legal reasons. This very balance is found elsewhere too. Remember this post which I posted as a result of attending a conference where two pairs of authors spoke about trust and social media?   Brogan and Smith promoted the ideas of being transparent and visible in the social media to be viewed as a “trust agent”. Green and Maister echoed this idea, adding the careful and mature perspective that discretion is at the heart of being worthy of trust. You engender trust by focusing on the needs of others – e.g. your client. Your client needs you to be transparent with them, but not to betray their confidence to others.

One of the things that attracted me to Yahoo was that my new role is all about this finding this balance as it relates to source code. My title is Director of Open Source Products — which means that it’s my role to ensure Yahoo! leverages open source opportunities while protecting it from the intellectual property risks the model introduces. My role has some very technical elements — technical in the geek sense: related to the way software is created; and technical in the legal sense: related to the way our attorneys evaluate risks and terminology. But there is a significant strategic aspect to the role: related to how and why we want to be open about information that we could have otherwise associated a copyright or even a patent claim. Why would a company give something of value for free? And how can it be both open and also honor the needs to protect some information from non-friendly eyes.

If you are not familiar with the term: Open Source is a complex set of things that I’ll discuss in more details in a future post. But for now, I’ll call it a legal and economic model that honors the idea that there is value in sharing some information (in this case, the information used to program a computer) freely. But the mechanics of the sharing is still constrained by some of the many variations of open source licenses.

As I transitioned from being an independent analyst, openly blogging my thoughts here — I am reminded that being an employee implies a set of obligations. Let me remind my fellow E2.0 advocates — being an employee fundamentally imposes limitations on expression. E2.0 seeks to create business-purposeful openness inspired by the openness we see in the social media world. But yes, a very different kind of openness. So I’ll tweet a bit less, and maintain a focus on my work — but I will strive to remain relevant to you too. Here’s how:

My next few blogs posts will cover the topic of personal branding as it relates to helping you get a job. I’ll also blog about the issue of personal branding and corporate blogging platforms. I have a lot of thoughts I have been holding inside about a recent debate about how one company will manage their “rock-star” bloggers. So stay tuned. Year two of this blog will be different, maybe even better. Your feedback will be essential.

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Tagged as: Open Source