I just returned from a "fact-finding" trip to the Bay, sometimes known as Silicon Valley (yes, I know I'm 'up there' weekly for various reasons, and I love returning to 'the ranch' more and more these days)--and this trip was edifying, which is a big word for "oh jeez, Charlie, you knew that, dammit."
The question I posed in some sixteen separate individual interviews was around the value, worth, and interest in the history of high-tech firms, technologies, and concepts, and in particular their impact on our world.
The results were that eleven of the sixteen interviewees were dismissive, some even downright blatant about it, saying that they couldn't be less interested, either for their own work or for that of their field, company, industry, etc. And these were not just 'man-in-the-street' interviews, but instead they were ex-CEOs, or C-level execs, or other prominent Silicon Valley personages.
The other five varied from pensive, to worried, to clear that it was a shame, but they too agreed with the findings--history doesn't matter, even for (or maybe especially to) those who created it. Three of these five were/are historians.
My unintended seventeenth interviewee was my wife, on the four hour drive home. "Whaddya find out?" she queried. Summarizing the interviews with pungent commentary about my disappointment did not elicit sympathy or consoling words. Instead, the rejoinder was, "So how long are you going to pursue this will o' the wisp?"
Her advice--"you need to talk to people about something THEY care about. They have jobs that are impossible, no time to breathe or reflect on anything, and YOU want them to get enthusiastic about stuff that happened a long time ago, in different circumstance--what's that got to do with their needs?
We drove on in silence for quite a while. Los Banos isn't exactly one of those towns that stimulates creative thought anyway. And then she said, "Don't you have a blog about Intrapreneuring? And isn't that something you always teach at Stanford, and at HP, and in Brazil and HongKong? Why do they invite you back? Maybe you're overlooking something there."
This is that blog she referenced. And it gets ... umm ... spotty, as in SPOTTY readership. Especially compared to my blogs about HP (HPPhenom.blogspot) or InnovaScapes Institute (Innovascapes.blogspot). The HP blog has 157,000 page views (many created whenever we have a new CEO--lots of opportunity there in the past few years), and InnovaScapes has 11,000+. This one is a mere 2,300 in two and a half years, hardly enough to 'pull Granny off the pot' so to speak.
So, maybe I've been seduced into thinking this is not a very popular topic, when it may well be that it is not presented well, or advertised at all, or ....
Food for thought?
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