By Lee Gibbons, Podango CEO
In life there are defining moments when one flashes upon a concept that shapes them fundamentally. These moments of epiphany do not come randomly, although they seem to have their own timing. They do not merely appear out of nothing, and yet they are usually unanticipated. They rarely come all at once with full clarity of meaning or alignment with our experience, and yet they ride into our conscience with sufficient resonance that we experience an alignment between them and our prior framework of understanding such that we embrace them. They feel at once as familiar as a old, best friend, and yet as exciting as a newly found love, motivating us to change and reach to embrace them while we also feeling to push them away out of a sense that with them we are irreversibly changed and accountable to their power within us.
Now what does all that have to do with the Podango Rule #2, “Don’t be evil?” Well, one such moment of clarity came at the end of a college course required for my advertising communications major, “Persuasion 295.”
Throughout the semester, the professor (Douglass Gibb) began the semester by making it very clear that in this class he would grade much differently than we had experienced in other classes, even the ones we might have taken from him. He told us that we were to pick a partner in the class and that we would work with them closely throughout the semester. I chose a friend I had known for years throughout high school. Carrie Bestor and I had been in musicals and performing groups together throughout our high school years. Our senior year, I was Captain Von Trapp and she played Maria in the Sound of Music. She was bright, talented, and like me, recently married. I felt safe.
Then, Professor Gibb told us that we were to compete with that person for our grade. He gave us an assignment to pick a couple of competing categories of products and pitch them to local high school classes. I remember choosing Aqua-Fresh toothpaste while Carrie was stuck with some new twist on Crest. I was stuck with Burger King while Carrie got to pitch Wendy’s which had just opened franchisees in the area with their improved speed and new, juicy square patties. The results came out split!
We were also given an assignment to cooperate and present the winning products to our classmates, and we were to give each other a grade on that project. This, knowing that we were competing with each other for the top grade, brought me feelings of real angst about what to give Carrie. She had pulled her weight and been great to work with, just as I knew she would. Yet I also knew that I really needed an A from the course. I also knew that we were neck and neck in terms of the split result that the competitive products had yielded.
At the end of the semester, Professor Gibb gave a final lecture wherein he reminded us where we had been: First, we were in competition with one another. Then, we cooperated. He had the class us compare and contrast those experiences. We roundly agreed that cooperation was the higher law–the way to live! We concluded that working in a manner that generated a balanced resulting consequence for both parties was far superior both in terms of the reduction in effort as well as the improvement of the end result.
He then told us that there was a higher law; that of contribution, wherein one gives freely, without expectation of balanced reward. He may not have used these words, but he taught us that contribution requires that we have an abundance mentality and give freely, believing that if we help others advance their cause, we would have greater good returned to us.
It felt right, and felt possible, but seemed unpredictable, as some people might take advantage of such selfless giving. Still it rang true. I had experienced my greatest joy as a human when I had given pure service to others in need.
The semester ended and we received our grades. To our utter delight, Doug Gibb had gone against the college’s grading policy of grading classes on a curve and had given every member of the class an A. He explained that it was his contribution to our success. My GPA benefited just as I needed it to, but more importantly, I had one of those key learning moments.
Now, some 20 plus years later, having practiced “The Contribution Principle” again and again and never yet having had it fail me, I am building a new company. Podango, like every other company, has to make money for its investors and stakeholders. However, the power of the new web—called by some the live web, Web 2.0, or the open web–is created by the same abundance mentality and openness taught by Doug Gibb in Persuasion 295. It is structured around win-win relationships and is creating mammoth opportunities for contribution and fantastic benefits to the communities served by those contributive efforts.
I love Digg, Technorati, del.icio.us, TechCrunch, NewsGator Online, PodZinger, Evoca, Flickr, Findory, Wikipedia, BlogLines, MySpace, WordPress etc. (I could go on and on…) They provide us with unprecedented opportunities to contribute to others’ successes. And, true to “The Contribution Principle,” they invariably return to greatly benefit she who contributes through them.
In the post that becoming known as “The Podango Rules Post,” I wrote:”Rule #2: Don’t Be Evil! Podango provides world class podcasting infrastructure and ad connections and Podcasters keep their RSS feeds!”
This rule reflects my desire to contribute to the success of our Station Directors, Podcasters and the Communities they serve. I truly desire that our Station Directors have the tools to become the greatest contributors within community their station serves. I want podcasters affiliated with Podango to profit and benefit from superior infrastructure and more plentiful ad revenues than they can make elsewhere, while enabling important conversations between them and their listeners. Finally, I desire that listeners will be served by amazing community interaction that enables them to contribute openly to the benefit of the communities of interest in which they live and play.
Podango gives away to Station Directors, for free, the right and ability to begin a Podango station so that there are no barriers as they begin to serve their communities. We have built in transcriptions and linking technologies to generate better search engine rankings so that people looking for information can find Podango Stations more easily and then become served by their Podango Communities, led by our Station Directors, and find boat loads of great information within each Podango station. We provide top notch community services to allow the richest possible online conversations to take place between community members.
All this is starting very small, with us contributing what we can with what we have, but I firmly believe that abundance mentality attracts abundance. I believe that allowing podcasters to retain rights to, and control over their RSS feeds will lead to improved podcasts and greater loyalty. I believe that allowing Station Directors to own, grow, profit from, and someday sell their stations will facilitate greater passion and superior quality in stations delivering greater benefits and making greater contributions to the communities they enable and serve.
That is what I meant by “Don’t be evil.”
Some have thought the “Don’t be evil” was pointed at one particular company or another. The truth is, it came out of a conversation we had with Rob Walch of the podCast411 podcast wherein he encouraged us to let podcasters keep control of their feeds. The practice of not doing so seemed to me to be small thinking… not born in an abundance mentality.
Finally, To compete may be viewed as a necessity in a free market society. However, cooperation between ‘competing’ companies has been shown to generate greater opportunity through mutually growing markets and industries. But, as illustrated by open source successes, nothing is as powerful as contribution.
I sincerely invite any who have a relationship with Podango to shout us down if ever we appear to behave in a small or “evil” manner and to help us understand what we can do to truly contribute to your efforts to give to your communities of interest.
Tell us! What do you need in order to succeed?