Mostly, I read tweets. I click on links. I learn. Twitter is good.
I followed a link from a @GuyKawasaki tweet today that took me to a demo page for a new web company called KickLight. They’ve got a way of integrating graphics with a videoplayer, so the graphic block below the video can be synced up with the video being played. It looks like it could be very useful for online presentations of various kinds – informational, training, sales, etc. I look forward to hearing more about KickLight. That was the learning part.
Sometimes, though, it’s not about learning something I didn’t know so much as having someone make me think. One of the four examples on the demo page was an excerpt from a Art of the Start presentation Guy did at some point in the past. In it, he talked about his stance that companies that focused on meaning were almost always more successful than those that focused on money. The core of a company, according to Guy, should be “making meaning” and that if a company does that, it will make money. Which I’ll translate into being successful, since Guy was addressing a group of entrepreneurs at the time. I hope he doesn’t mind.
We all have our own experiences that shape our perceptions of things. I’ve worked for Delphi Forums for, well, a while now, and I’ve seen the meaning being made in lots and lots of our forums. The support forums for medical conditions and diseases, for example, provide a lifeline for many of their members. I’ve had tears streaming down my cheeks more than once while reading member posts about the importance of a forum community to someone with a life-threatening or even life-ending illness. Online communities make huge and real differences in many people’s lives. The hosts of those communities and their staffs obviously make meaning with and for their communities. Because Delphi doesn’t provide any monetization for forum hosts, money can’t be the measure of a forum’s success. But all you have to do is read through some of the posts by a forum’s members to see success. True success.
I’m not high enough on the food chain at Delphi to know exactly what, if any, monetary success we’ve had. I have a sense that we’ve done okay. Well enough that the bills get paid, but probably not enough to do a lot of open development. (Meaning development that isn’t funded by one of the larger paying clients of the parent company…) But in terms of providing a service of value to our members, I think we may be among the most successful companies online. Sure, we have our stumbles from time to time, but we have lots and lots of communities that are an intrinsic and meaningful part of the lives of their members. It’s something that makes me proud of being associated with Delphi Forums, and fits rather neatly with my whole service thing. (I’ll blog about my service thing later.)
I’m not quite as clear on how “making meaning” applies to the business I’m part owner of. When we started the restaurant 29 years and 2 weeks ago, I don’t recall ‘changing the world’ as one of the guiding principles. We wanted to make a living – money. But maybe the uniqueness of the menu we chose, and the underlying philosophy of producing a high quality product at a fair price was an attempt at changing at least the local restaurant world. I’m not so sure we changed that world, but we’ve certainly provided an alternative that seems to satisfy the needs of a fair number of people. We know what a rarity it is to survive for almost 30 years in the independent restaurant business, let alone thrive for that long. We’ve served a lot of food to a lot of people over the years. Perhaps it was a different world we were changing…
