Follow-up: Lesson to All - Coke/New Coke, BeiMac Version
Follow-up: Lesson to All - Coke/New Coke, BeiMac Version
- Subject: Follow-up: Lesson to All - Coke/New Coke, BeiMac Version
- From: David Feng (Yan Feng/馮巖) <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 16 Oct 2004 02:12:50 +0800
A follow-up to all of this. What did we learn?
1. The 2002 group and the early 2003 group focused less on making
BeiMac's "government structure" and more in results -- better meetings,
more people, more members. The moment we got into how to create the
CEC, and made our group from a community into a virtual micronation,
all hell broke loose.
Moral 1: It's a group, not a company, not a nation. It's people, it's
activity, it's society, it's a society.
2. Groups are groups.
David's definition of a group: a collection of people; a group is
bonding them together.
User groups are not groups, or called user groups, just for the sake of
it.
3. Think of grand visions as fish.
In other words, never force something down a group. (See the
imagery-like example below.) Even less, refrain from enforcing your
great, lofty ideals if they're going to be hard, or complex, to
realise.
I'm not a guy for seafood (on a recent trip to Tianjin, by the coast in
NE China, I had like a leg -- just a leg of crab -- and I swear, that
did my stomach in), but to wit: suppose you like, say, fish. The way
you eat it is bit-by-bit. (Hey, that's how I eat this stuff.) It'll be
impossible to toss the big fish into your stomach without (a) making a
mess, (b) getting attacked by the sharper parts of the fish, and (c)
looking like quite a candidate for the Guiness World Record of Biggest
Lunatic.
Take a grand vision of a group as that fish. Only digest your dream the
way you consume fish. (We're talking about larger sized fish. The
anchovies you buy down at your local grocery, obviously, pops into your
mouth in one piece, although your teeth crushing it is another
matter...)
4. Get yourself/your group a Chinese manner.
Seriously.
Regardless of the books being from Berlitz or Lonely Planet, books
pound upon you the fact that Smile Diplomacy works in this people's
republic of 1.3 billion.
I know plenty of you are on the wrong end of the Pacific. But even in
the US, try to do your group's exterior affairs using a Chinese manner.
Smile. We folks on the right side of the Pacific honour peace.
Then again, we're not immune to attack. If someone comes up to us with
a knife, we've got treatment... Don't. Getting brutal is ugly.
Seriously. It's ever so sad when groups start fighting, either inside
or outside the group. Always try to resolve problems as peacefully as
possible. Sadly, we didn't do that quite well with the other group.
5. There will always be people who like New Coke.
Proven: a great majority of you don't. But there's always the weirdo,
the round peg in the square holes, who likes that stuff.
Moral 5: (skipped the previous three) -- I'm not prohibiting you from
"New Coke"-ification: if you've a great, drastic, dramatic thing for
your group -- shoot away, but ONLY AFTER considering its potential
effects.
New Coke failed. You have been warned!
All I can say is that the BeiMac stomach doesn't like New Coke,
MUG-wise...
Best,
David.
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