Change Agent - Issue 33

"Because," he told me, "my job description doesn't allow me to buy media aimed at the small-business market." Anticipating my follow-up question, he added, "And as far as I can tell, there isn't anyone in the company who does have the authority to spend money on something like this. And frankly, given the way that this place works, it's just not worth calling a meeting and hashing out whose budget this project would come out of."

While we're on the subject of failed bureaucracies, inert organizations, and brain-dead "corpocracies," why don't big companies publish their org charts and phone directories? Put 'em online, I say. A vice president at IBM once spent a full hour drawing an org chart for me, in an attempt to make her company more accessible, because she realized that a fortress mentality wasn't good for IBM. Of course, as soon as she'd finished drawing the two-page chart, IBM announced a re-org. So much for making it easy to do business with IBM.

The other day, out of boredom, I engaged in one of my favorite hobbies: I called Microsoft at 425-882-8080. "Hello," I said. "Could you please tell me the name and extension of the person who's in charge of marketing Windows 2000?" (Note: That person's name is not much of a secret. A quick Web search will get you what you need.)

"I'm sorry, sir. I can't divulge that sort of information," a courteous but officious receptionist responded, as if I were the first person ever to have the audacity to ask for such private information. It was as if I'd asked her for the Windows source code, rather than for a marketer's name and extension.

Here's the New Economy Customs Form Question of the Month: What sorts of bad things would happen if every vendor, every analyst, every customer, and, yes, even every headhunter knew exactly who did what, why, and how -- at Microsoft or at your company? What would be the big deal if your occupation were trumpeted far and wide?

One of the reasons that we hesitate to make such information readily available has to do with fear. But that's a story for another day. An equally important reason is that in our fast-moving, very flexible world, any org chart would be obsolete the day before it was printed. Or, alternatively, the very act of getting an org chart done in the first place would probably require so much internal soul-searching and politicking that it might never get written.

But how can a company be fast if everyone on the team doesn't know who's in charge of what? How can a company be permeable to the outside world if the outside world doesn't know whom to talk to? Is it really possible to create a system of rapid, informal communication that keeps all parts of an organization in sync? When an invoice comes in, you route it to the guy in accounts payable, because that's his occupation. But whose job is it to decide whether using MP3 technology to improve customer satisfaction is a good idea?

Which leads us right back to where we started. The chances that you have just one occupation are slim. And rather than pretend that we all have just one occupation -- as the British government seems so intent on doing -- maybe we ought to embrace the "multipational" nature of our jobs. ("Multipational" is a new word that I've invented. It means "having more than one occupation at a time"; it's the workplace equivalent of "multinational.") We could each pick a new, all-purpose title that signals what we're really focused on -- titles such as "customer joy specialist," or "change agent," or perhaps even "gal who will take a meeting and then work the organization."

It's not silly. It's about communicating -- to your peers, to the outside world, and to yourself -- what you really do all day.

I'm proud to say that after some soul-searching, I took pen in hand and wrote, "Dad, Husband, and Bald Guru in Search of Real Answers." Then, I squared my shoulders and handed over the Customs form. And I didn't even get busted.

Seth Godin (sgodin@fastcompany.com) is permission-marketing yahoo! at Yahoo! His most recent book is "Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends, and Friends into Customers" (Simon & Schuster, 1999).