What is “Grown Up” Internet?

When we were little children, the world was all about us. "Gimme, gimme, gimme" was our mantra. 

Eventually, our parents might have agreed to give us a puppy or goldfish to take care of (depending on how risk averse our folks were). 

We gradually took on more responsibility as kids... from goldfish to little brothers or sisters to our chores to our extended family to our community ... and so on. 

Despite the fact that some people never get beyond "gimme, gimme, gimme," a healthy progression can be seen in most of us as we mature.   Some people keep on moving up that curve until - like Gandhi, Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King Jr. - they feel responsible to most or all of humanity. 

This progression or increased world view and responsibility doesn't just show up in humans.  It shows up in the groups that we form.  With the help of the Internet and the Web, I would suggest that the business world is finally "growing up".  Read on for ten tips you can use to help your internet business "grow up"...

Following the ten tips, we discuss more about how this change came to be and some of the pioneers in this kind of thinking.

If I were to characterize this new kind of thinking, I would use words like abundance, non-attachment and goodwill. Personal motivation has shifted from creating personal wealth to things like creating a strong reputation, feeding one's passion for a topic or being a good citizen in a community of like-minded individuals. Yet people continue to make money in these models.

Ten Ideas for Injecting "Grown Up" Internet Values into your Business

Here are some ideas on ways that you can create your Internet business with a "grown up" attitude. 

1. Give away something for free. It needs to be useful to people. Put a PDF on your web site that has genuine value. Write an advice column. Create a blog and cover topics that your audience cares about. Speaking of which…
2. Seek to build and join communities of like-minded people. A blog is a great first step to creating and engaging such a community. Encourage comments. Read the comments people leave. Respond. Repeat cycle.
   
3. Reach out to a hero. One of the great things about the new world is that we can not just read about inspirational characters in our business, but we can interact with them. Drop them an email, a blog comment or an invitation to connect on a social networking site. They won't always
   respond, but you may be surprised when they answer your question. (Just don't forget to "pay it forward" when someone connects to you from out the blue.)
   
4. Play out scenarios with your business model. In the safety of your office, work through models that you'd never consider for your business. What if you gave away your basic service or product for free and charged for upgrades, maintenance or consulting around the model? What would have
   to change to be a truly global enterprise? Create some spreadsheets with projections.
   
5. Play out scenarios with different target markets. Could you take your product up-market, down-market? Can you tighten up your target market to gain better traction, knowing that you can "go global"? How many different "long-tail", niche markets exist for your product?
   
6. Make a habit of asking great questions. When all of the knowledge in the world is at your fingertips, you should really think carefully what you ask from it. Summoning the genie can be an awesome experience with tremendous ramifications … or a whack in the face with an ocean of
   data. Have good question generation techniques. For example:
   
   • The basic "Ws" are a good start "What? Why? When? Where? How?".
   • Ask others about their expectations before beginning a task ("What is the best possible outcome of this meeting for you?")
     
   • When examining a new industry or arena, try to find out things that you "don't know that you don't know"
     
   • When examining lists of comparative data (e.g. companies in a competitive assessment), consider all the dimensions along which you could organize the data. Which dimensions are most polarizing? Which dimensions provide the most helpful insights?
     
   • And when the question comes to you, before answering a question, considering asking the questioner "why do you ask that question" to understand the underlying motivations.
     
7. Ask the web. Once you have your great questions, you can start a dialogue with knowledgeable and eager people across the planet in a number of ways. Sites like AllExpert.com provide experts willing to volunteer answers on a wide-range of topics. Social networking sites are excellent places to seek free advice. LinkedIn has an Answers section with business questions flowing through and being answered daily. 
   
8. Write a book. There are more people seeking information on the topic you know than you think. The bar for creating a book is lower than ever. Today you can author it, publish it, and sell it all by yourself. It positions you as an expert and creates a platform for a conversation. It also establishes you as a serious contributor to the conversation. You might make a few bucks as well.
   
9. Create forums that ask your community for their input. This might be a database of ideas that can be extended by users on your web-site. It might be as simple as a blog post with an open-ended question for users to comment on.
   
10. Delegate as much as possible. By focusing on your core strengths and looking for ways to leverage those strengths, you can use delegation (including outsourcing) to support that leverage. While I haven't read it yet, I understand that the book The Four Hour Workweek emphasizes this to an extreme. I like extreme. It's that kind of thinking that will break us free from the shackles of old business-think.

Even though the modern corporation seems well entrenched in our daily lives,  these business structures are a relatively recent human innovation.  The modern corporation was built on the "bottom line", a specific reference to the bottom of an income statement. The profit line represents the amount of money that goes into the owners' pockets.   

The rule is: The more money in our pockets, the better.

Translation: Gimme, gimme, gimme.

Over the past 30 years, a growing set of business wizards like Peter Drucker, Peter Senge, Tom Peters, Fred Kofman and Stephen Covey have been teaching us the value generated by businesses who take their employees, their partners and their customers as heart-felt responsibilities.

The rule became: Create value chains that are truly win-win and we'll make more money together.

Translation: Be a good citizen and family member - and the family and community will return the favor.

For the past ten years, a new kind of business ethic is emerging.  Open source software projects are competing with traditional software companies.  Freemium business models are emerging in which the basic service is free.   In some cases, like the popular business network LinkedIn, less than half of the users are subsidizing the service for everyone else.  In the case of open source, large quantities of software labor are donated to the effort without any direct promise of recompense.

What's going on here?

Sergey Brin and Larry Page founded Google as a free service to users that would not earn anything until enough users found Google helpful that they became a crowd worthy of advertising. So the simple mission statement:

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful 

is all the more credible, because their primary motivation is to deliver value better than anyone else. Let me say that again...

Their primary motivation is to deliver value better than anyone else.  To everyone.  For free.

Translation - help as many people as you can - anywhere in the world and your good work will be rewarded.

There is a great deal more to say about what a company like Google - or LinkedIn - or Red Hat might be like to work in.  Or what a new kind of organization like Sourceforge or Eclipse (two big open source organizations made up largely of volunteers) will bring forth in the years to come.

However, the point I am trying to make is not so much about what they are like as work environments as it is to recognize as a more "grown up" business model. To be fair, previous businesses didn't have the advantage of Tom Friedman's Flat World,  The Cheap Revolution or Google. 

But those things are here today... and Internet Startups would do well to consider how grown up they plan to be from the very beginning.

Comments

[Jens Thang]

Hey Skip,

Great post! Thanks for sharing.

The part on delivering real value to the world for free is a piece of good advice. All great teachers of the world will agree with you on this.

Brilliant guys like Tom Peters and Seth Godin are still giving away free stuff. And i'm sure they get rewarded for their generosity.

"The more you give away for free, the wealthier you will be." - Scott Ginsberg

Cheers,
Jens