Sharepoint is a plague upon the American workforce. This ubiquitous piece of collaboration software has taught millions of people that Intranets are destined to be places where you can’t find anything.

It doesn’t have to be this way, despite what Microsoft may have you believe. There are alternatives to Sharepoint that actually work in ways that ordinary humans can understand.

One of these alternatives is WordPress. You can set up your own Intranet using WordPress with a minimum of technical knowhow.

It’s certainly better than learning the maddening intricacies of Sharepoint, as developer Ben Balter discovered. Given the dreaded task of updating the Sharepoint site, he instead decided to spend three hours to see if he could come up with an alternative.

The result was WP Document Revisions. This is a WordPress plugin that allows teams of any size to collaboratively edit files and manage their workflow. In other words, the core of what you probably would use Sharepoint for if it was actually usable.

Ben wasn’t done. He’s since gone on to craft additional plugins, as he described in WordPress as a Collaboration Tool, a talk he gave at the monthly WordPress DC meetup. The tools he created essentially improve upon all the functions of Sharepoint, but in WordPress, so you don’t need expensive licenses or pricey database experts to keep the whole thing from crashing.

By using WordPress, you turn “add this information to the Intranet” from a frustrating task into something as simple as blogging. And just think how good your Intranet could be if people actually wanted to contribute to it.

Improving internal communication does more than just lead to happier employees. It contributes to the bottom line by saving the time of staff. Do you want people spending hours trying to figure where their document disappeared to on Sharepoint or do you want them to do, well, something productive?

Most of us, however, have no control over what software we use at work. I asked Ben what to do in this case. He replied with the truism that it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission. He also demonstrated what WordPress could do and developed internal support for it. When presented with a credible alternative, rational decision-makers will make the right choice, if they can.

There’s a lot of caveats in that last sentence. I know. Big organizations choose big software for reasons that defy reason.

But life’s too short to use bad software. Investigate the alternatives. Anticipate objections. Present your case. Just something is ubiquitous doesn’t meant it’s right or destined to last forever. The way we work is changing, and software should change with it.

Update: I cross-posted this to GovLoop, which prompted a great deal of discussion from govvies.

Washington Post, what happened to you? You’re the paper of Woodward and Bernstein, a beloved local institution and a veritable fourth branch of government.

Coming home after a Saturday night carousing, I used to love to see the trucks lined up outside your building on 15th Street. Back then (the 90s), the paper was printed right next to the Post’s HQ. Blue trucks would be double-parked along the street, waiting to deliver the news to the region.

And if I stayed out late enough, I could pick up the fat slab of Sunday’s paper while it was still technically Saturday night. There was a weird thrill to this, getting the news ahead of everyone else. The Sunday paper was an event, something everyone read.

This is all gone now. Where once stories were reported, fact-checked, edited and edited again before the presses rolled, news these days emerges in electronic form, often-rushed and incomplete. This is a good thing. I am for more news, more information, for the great cornucopia of the web. No more gatekeepers, let the public decide what matters.

But the Washington Post is an institution. It is a brand expressing journalistic quality and integrity. When they publish something, I expect it to be true.

I don’t expect the Washington Post to be running a digital sweatshop, where young journalists are expected to churn out regurgitated news items in the mad pursuit of impossible traffic goals.

How does this fit into the great tradition of the Post? The strength of the paper is its ability to really delve into issues. Why are they trying to be like some smarmy blog?

And getting a few hits on your site – what is that really winning you? Traffic rushes in to click on a link and then rushes off to some other site.

At the What’s Next DC conference, I watched Katharine Zaleski, the paper’s digital news director, give a presentation on the strategy. Coming from the Huffington Post, she brought a relentless focus on metrics. News was to be measured. And the measurement was site traffic. She had charts showing how traffic to the site had increased as the Post increased its “buzziness,” with efforts like news aggregation and blogging.

Does the Washington Post really want to emulate The Huffington Post? Do they want to “surf the trend waves on the Internet”? Shouldn’t the paper be making waves rather than trying to catch them?

And are ephemeral bursts of web traffic the right metric to follow? If so, why not just turn your site over to cat videos? But the Post is more than that, isn’t it?

Stay true to your mission – quality journalism. It’s what you do best. Stop trying to be cool. Don’t go for viral. Avoid “buzziness” and all its advocates.

Instead, simplify. Be the Apple of newspapers. Don’t add more web gimmickry to your cluttered and unusable web site. Focus on what you do best.

Don’t measure web hits – look at engagement. How long do people stay on the site? How many stories do they read? Try to duplicate the loyalty readers once felt toward the paper that they lovingly held in their hands. Better to have 100,000 devoted readers than a million casual followers.

No more second-rate social media. It’s beneath you, Washington Post. Simplify, focus on your strengths and pursue engagement with readers to be true to your news-breaking legacy.

I was there at the beginning.

In 2007, Twitter leapt into geek consciousness at SXSW Interactive. Monitors had been placed in the halls of this tech conference, displaying what people were tweeting about. I thought it was an interesting curiosity, like watching telegrams in real time. Little bursts of text scrolled across the screen, as people shared opinions about the workshops that they were in.

Imagine, prior to this epochal event of just five years ago, we had no easy way of getting real-time information from our friends, unless of course we talked to them. And when we went to events, we were fully present, listening to speakers without constantly checking our electronic devices. We paid attention, more or less. Or nodded off. Or wandered away, in search of something more interesting, guided only by instinct.

I blame Margie Newman. An early-adopter of social media, she sold me on Twitter, pitching it (she does PR) as a great way of getting relevant information delivered right to your iPhone. I followed her as she shared interesting articles about digital marketing, as well as her daily coffee runs.

And it was good, this small-scale tool, this curiosity that entertained and informed me during odd moments during the day. It was a niche web service, used by the super-geeky and wired.

The fact that it failed on almost daily basis (the Twitter fail whale became an Internet meme) confirmed the fact that it was not ready for the mainstream. No one talked about its potential – just having Twitter working seemed like a feat.

I found a use for it. I tweeted the news that I was writing a book, Murder in Ocean Hall. I tweeted how many words I had written. Friends replied that they were looking forward to reading the book. This type of public accountability ensured that I would finish the book, no matter what. And it built an audience for my novel.

While I was engaged in my archaic writing activity, Twitter took off. Tweetups were held. Celebrities began using it. Tweets floated down from space.

The potential of Twitter was fully-realized, as it tied the world together in 140-character chains. Which was wonderful. It’s a great and easy tool that’s perfect for the non-geeky.

Twitter was big, mainstream and it even worked. The fail whale was no more.

But as Twitter and social media took off, several insidious psychological elements of the experience became apparent.

Celebrity Syndrome

The idea of “followers” is contrary to our democratic ideals. We don’t slavishly follow our leaders, as if they’re Eva Peron. We’re not Argentina.

Early Twitter was a free exchange of information among equals. But now Twitter has become about popularity contests and numbers of followers. It’s about sucking up to some pseudo-famous person for a bit of recognition.

This is galling. It’s like recreating the world of high school cliques in cyberspace. I see the Washington Post’s top tweeps and I’m not sure what’s more absurd, a dead-tree paper defining Internet success or the dubious nature of their picks.

Social Media Expert is an Oxymoron

How can you be an expert in a medium that is so new? More than another media, social media is guided by zeitgeist and the fickle whims of the public. You cannot make a video go viral; only millions of people and their individual choices can do that.

You can train people to use social media but, in the end, it’s about knowing your audience and connecting with them in an authentic manner. And then hoping for the best.

The expert that promises that there’s some magic formula is not to be trusted. And if someone labelled as a “guru” or a “rockstar” comes waltzing into your office, then hold on to your wallet, for you’re about to make an expensive mistake.

The overhyped aspects of social media irritate me so much that I included a social media guru in my latest novel, Don’t Mess Up My Block. She writes only in lower-case and is constantly “crushing it” in everything she does.

The Collapse of Attention Spans

I worry about Millenials. Growing up digital once seemed like a gift. It may be a curse. I’m fortunate that I was young before the onslaught of attention-stealing electronic media. As a child, I could sit and read for hours. I still can, but it’s more of an effort now. I have to put the iPhone and iPad out of reach.

In the brilliant book Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky makes the point that the rise of the West can be traced to coffeehouses. Caffeine allowed us to concentrate and keep working. But if social media is destroying our ability to focus then how can civilization progress?

The Melding of Work, Life and Home

Facebook comes with one major misgiving for me – it mixes together people from different spheres in my life. Coworkers, high school friends, college buddies, family members and professional contacts are all thrown together in a boiling stew of political theories, recipe suggestions, kid photos, medical problems and news of the weird. It’s disturbing, this mix of people from different times and places, jumbled together and all sharing way too much information.

We used to keep different parts of our life separate, like Don Draper. I’ve known people who have quit Facebook entirely, unable to tolerate this blurring of social and professional lines.

So, What Do You Do?

My advice is to only use the tools that you enjoy. You don’t have to be on Facebook or use Twitter. For me, it’s Twitter, Flickr, Instagram and Facebook (with misgivings). I’m interested in tech, photography and events in DC.

Not on my list: Foursquare (why let people know where I’m at?), Pinterest (it’s just for girls, right?), Tumblr (don’t understand) and YouTube (cat videos).

You could spend all your time tweeting, retweeting, sharing links, rating videos and commenting on life around you. Or you can get out there and live.

After all, on your deathbed, you’re probably not going to say, “I wish I had tweeted more.”

My favorite books are short ones.

The Great Gatsby is a slim 180 pages. That’s all it takes for Fitzgerald to recreate the Roaring 20s and give us the quintessential American striver.

Ernest Hemingway is a master of economy, using just 251 pages to tell the tragedy of The Sun Also Rises.

A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh is another brilliant little book from the interwar period. It traces the fall of the British aristocracy in just 264 pages.

Yet, contemporary books seem to sprawl unfettered, as if editors have just given up on their duties. Authors ramble, they discourse, narratives go off into tangents and down weird little cul-de-sacs.

For example, Swamplandia! by Karen Russell. It clocks in at a wearying 416 pages.

The novel starts off incredibly strong, giving us the colorful portrait of the Bigtree family, famed alligator wrestlers of the Everglades. Being from Florida myself, I’ve felt that the comic potential of the state has been underutilized. From exiles plotting revolution to greedy condo flippers, if any state could produce The Great American Novel, it’s this one.

The collapse of the Bigtree family mirrors what’s going on in “mainland” society. Their struggles are shared by many in more prosaic circumstances – they lose it all and the family falls apart.

The section of the novel where the Bigtrees adapt to normal life is fascinating. I loved Russell’s depiction of The World of Darkness, a hell-themed amusement park on the mainland. It’s like a Disney World created by sadists.

But then the book rambles, in an endless journey through the swamp as 12-year-old Ava Bigtree goes in search of her older sister. Lush descriptions of flora and fauna are piled one upon another, creating a mangrove thicket of prose that nearly stops the reader cold.

It’s one of those books where you find yourself peeking ahead a few pages. When is the story getting back to the World of Darkness?

The odyssey in the Everglades takes so long that the ending feels rushed, unresolved, leaving dramatic threads hanging.

Swamplandia! is a good hundred pages too long.

Despite growing up reading books, even I turn away from novels that resemble doorstops. Reamde is a book that I desperately want to read. Yet, at more than a thousand pages, I don’t even want to start it. The novel represents too much of a time commitment in our distracted age.

It’s ironic. The Internet and our ever-present electronic devices have collapsed attention spans. Yet, our books keep getting longer and longer.

No wonder why so few people read novels.

Our lives are crowded with information. In order to break through the electronic din, a novel has to be concise and powerful, a book that looks more like The Great Gatsby than Swamplandia!

I’m quoted in this AOL Government article on citizen participation. The story makes the point that you can have a much bigger impact in your community than at the federal level.

I’ve seen that in DC (the city, not the metaphor), where local issues are frequently debated to death. For example, the ten-year long struggle over the redevelopment of the Wisconsin Avenue Giant. The plan to upgrade this grocery store was so contentious that it claimed the job of one local planning director and caused her successor to steer clear of the whole mess.

Which is why I’ve been so impressed by the District Department of Transportation (DDOT), as I mentioned in the article. They put a bike lane down the center of Pennsylvania Avenue, a project that benefits bikers (like me) and is a powerful example of including bikes in transportation plans. They also put in a protected bike lane down 15th St, a block from where I live. This was done in a matter of months, compared to morasses like the Wisconsin Avenue Giant.

A gorgeous bike lane through the center of Washington.

And DDOT will respond to you via Twitter, within minutes. It’s a little thing but getting a timely reply about a pothole is pretty remarkable, especially from a city government that, at best, can be described as bureaucratic.

(Full disclosure: I worked for nearly a year as a contractor on the DC.gov web site. In addition to being a DC citizen myself, I’ve responded to resident requests, which is why I’m so sympathetic to local government officials.)

Whoever runs the @DDOTDC account must possess remarkable patience to deal with constant complaints about DC roads, delivered quite personally by drivers suffering from broken shocks. Despite the abuse, they respond quickly to complaints.

Parks and Rec does an excellent job at capturing the intensity of an engaged local citizenry. The time capsule episode of the NBC series is one of my favorites:

Leslie tries to encourage civic pride through a time capsule, but it descends into chaos as Pawnee citizens argue over what to include.

Leslie’s efforts to bring the community together tear it apart, as residents argue over what should be in the time capsule, including, among other things, dead pets and copies of the Twilight books. Leslie comes up with a brilliant compromise – the time capsule will include only a video of their discussion, thus showing future generations the town’s “passion”.

If you are going to work in local government, you must have the equanimity of Leslie Knope.

Unlike on the federal side, hidden away in inaccessible buildings thousands of miles from constituents, local government is up close and personal. It’s your friends and neighbors, people who care about the community as much as you do – but frequently have very different ideas about how the place should be run.

Accountability to local citizens can be immediate. The reformer Mayor Adrian Fenty, who pushed for a better-performing government, was bounced out of office by a citizenry more comfortable with the soft corruption of Vincent Grey.

And the DDOT Director who brought a bike lane down the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue – Gabe Klein is gone too, scooped up by the more enlightened city of Chicago.

In local government, you can achieve immediate results – and suffer immediate consequences. It’s the Parks and Rec effect.

It doesn’t matter what your business model is as a photographer. It matters what the customer’s buying model is.

The above bit of wisdom is by Guy Kawasaki, who is quoted in an interesting article on rethinking photography business models.

These days, just about the only way photographers can make a living is by shooting weddings. But brides are creatures of our modern age too and are balking at some of the more old-fashioned elements of the business. Scott Bourne writes:

Gone are the days when we can just send some negatives to the lab, order some cheap 8×10 prints, put them in a black folder, mark them up 400 percent and call it a day.

Instead, brides want everything done digitally. They want all the pictures taken during the ceremony burned onto a CD. They even want the unprocessed files so that they can Photoshop them on their own.

Photographers must adapt to what customers want in order to survive.

I see the same thing in the book publishing business. Customers have e-readers, wonderful devices that allow them to buy books instantly. They don’t believe that e-books should be as expensive as print. While publishers may resist, customers believe that e-books should be priced somewhere between free and $9.99.

Readers also don’t care who the publisher is. They talk about the new Stephen King not “Have you seen the St. Martin’s Press catalog?”

But publishers are sticking to their business model, of bringing out books slowly and pricing e-books sometimes even more expensively than their print equivalents. They won’t survive.

Instead, the publisher as middleman will dissipate as authors and readers find each other on Amazon and other e-bookstores.

Social Media Week has been going on this week in DC. One of the sessions was on open source culture. Derrick Ashong is on a mission to give away a million downloads of his music tracks.

How can you make money at that? You can’t. But the sad truth is that most musicians never see a dime from album sales. If you’re a new artist, it’s better to give your stuff away and make money from concerts. (Or, if you’re a rapper, from your clothing line.) But first you need an audience. Giving away music is a way to develop that audience, a model that is explained in Free by Chris Anderson.

In his talk, Derrick explained that the hardest thing to get was people’s attention. “I’ve never heard of you – why would I listen to your music?” Giving away music is a way to start the conversation, to hopefully turn the disinterested into fans.

Can you give away music and make a living? How do photographers adapt to a world of photos everywhere all the time? What does a writer have to do to connect with an online audience?

Nobody knows the answers to these questions yet because the traditional business models are changing, driven by advances in connectivity and consumer demands. But hanging onto the old will lead to irrelevance. Those that adapt to the wishes of consumers will succeed.

I’m quoted in this article on AOL Government about using internal social networks. Imagine a company-wide version of Twitter or Facebook and you’ll have a good idea of how an internal social network works. They’re non-hierarchical, open environments where employees can share information.

Perhaps the best known of these systems is Yammer. It’s billed as an “enterprise social networks” but looks and operates so much like Facebook that people can start using it immediately. If you know how to post updates and respond to friends on Facebook, then they you quickly figure out Yammer.

Yammer feed

But should you?

Yammer is an amazing tool enabling easy collaboration among employees who could be anywhere. It lets them converse, share files, create wiki pages and organize groups, either from their desktop or mobile phone. It’s a generational improvement over bloated SharePoint.

Yet, it’s very openness makes managers nervous. If you give employees a tool like that, they will inevitably post pictures of their cats and “clutter” the network with notices about carpools and old iPods for sale.

I’ve seen it happen. Way back in the 90s, in the era of AOL bulletin boards, I worked for AARP. We carefully set up boards for AARP members to discuss Medicare, Social Security and other very important issues.

But members gravitated to the AARP Love and Relationships board. Thousands of messages were posted there. People connected. Friendships were made. Marriages occurred.

Nobody talked about Social Security. It was what we thought was important. But not what our users wanted.

If you set up Yammer for your company or organization, this will happen. Employees will come up with new and unexpected uses for this tool, for good or ill. They may collaborate to develop a brilliant new product or a way to save thousands of dollars. But they’ll also probably be spending a lot of time sharing restaurant recommendations and commuting tips.

Or worse. They’ll start bitching about their bosses.

I’ve seen it happen. Yammer was rolled-out casually in an organization I worked for. An all-staff email was sent out, encouraging people to use it. I was intrigued. All the “power users” were on it, the super-connected adopters of new technology. Everyone who was a fan of Twitter or social media signed-up immediately. It was really popular among young employees.

One of these employees was dissatisfied. He made his grievances known on Yammer, for everyone to see. He complained in a very emotional manner about his assignments and the lack of respect that he was shown. It was embarrassing for him and his manager.

What to do?

Yammer wasn’t shut down. Restrictions weren’t put in place on what employees could post. A committee wasn’t formed to come up with guidelines on appropriate uses of this new tool. All of these efforts would’ve killed off participation.

Instead, the manager met privately with the employee. He removed his posts. Everyone moved on.

This is a common-sense solution, one that treats employees as adults. You’re responsible for what you say online. We expect you to be professional. We don’t need to shut down the whole system just because one person makes a mistake.

It’s inevitable that social media is incorporated into the way we work. Doing so will bring enormous changes to relationships between bosses and employees, subverting traditional hierarchies and creating faster, more effective methods of collaboration. Companies shouldn’t look at these changes as threats, but as opportunities to grow their businesses by tapping into the creativity and productivity of their most important resource – their people.

I’m old enough to remember the early days of the web. Back then (not too long ago, the 1990s), organizations didn’t take this online medium seriously. The web site paled in importance to the newsletter or magazine, at least according the leaders of the time. After all, who reads things on a computer? The Internet was a place for nerds and geeks, for them to discuss Star Trek trivia and learn arcane HTML codes.

If you ran a company or a nonprofit, you really didn’t need a web site, or so people believed. And if you wanted a web site, you could have your nephew build it. He could make something flashy and “cool” like MySpace.

I see the same attitude today toward social media. Why should an organization invest in Facebook or Twitter? Let the interns handle it…

But would you trust an intern to be the voice of your organization? That’s the point I made in a recent article in AOL Government. If you accept the fact that social media is important (and you should, because that’s where the audience is), then why would you hand over these communication efforts to those who know the least about your company? Do you trust college kids to spread your message, respond to questions and interact with potential customers? Do they know the hot-button issues within your company? The language that you use with customers? Your customer service standards and policies? The things that they’re *not* supposed to talk about?

And what happens when the interns leave? They take all that hard-won knowledge about your organization with them, as well as valuable expertise in social media. And they may take the Twitter account as well.

Social media is too important to be left to a transient workforce. Companies and organizations should take a deliberate approach to this dynamic new tool. The keys to the social media kingdom shouldn’t be in the hands of someone who just walked in the door.

Your voice online should be controlled by someone who both knows your company and is familiar with the culture of the web and social media. Look around – you probably have someone already with the requisite experience and interest. They’re probably doing something perceived as more important. But what’s more important than representing your brand in a medium that reaches millions?

On the streets of Washington, you will find two competing visions of America.

At the Apple Store in Georgetown, a tribute has been erected to Steve Jobs, artist and entrepreneur. Loyal fans have brought mementos celebrating his illustrious life. The things he created – the Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad – brought joy to millions as they allowed ordinary people to creatively participate in the wider world.

Steve Jobs tribute

Jobs was an optimist and a revolutionary. This college dropout embraced the future and believed in technological progress. No longer would computers just be used by scientists – Apple created beautiful devices that were for the rest of us.

The process was messy. The iPod wrecked the music industry and ended in the demise of stores like Tower Records. The iPad and the Kindle are doing the same thing to the publishing business, with Borders already on the way out.

I don’t think Jobs fretted over this. The future was something to be welcomed.

Across the city, OccupyDC is offering a different vision of the future. Though they depend on Apple, ATT and other companies to organize their protest, they believe that corporations are the enemy. Big companies must be stopped, and bent to the will of the people. What this means, and how this is to be done, is unclear.

These occupiers no longer believe in the American dream, despite holding in their very hands the evidence that it still exists – the iPhone.

OccupyDC on Freedom Plaza

They’re against war but tried to force their way into the Air and Space Museum, to shut down an exhibit on military drones. They bragged about how they forced the museum to close, sending home thousands of unhappy tourists on one of the nicest days of the year.

OccupyDC wants to return America to a time when incomes were more equitable. They want a great leveling, taking from some and giving to others. With a belief in left-wing conspiracy theories, they reject our democratic institutions and call for direct action to achieve their aims.

Two Americas. One that celebrates individual rights and technological progress. The other that calls for redistribution by force.

Which one do you want to live in?

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
- Steve Jobs

With the iPod, iPhone and iPad, Steve Jobs changed the way we lived, making computers accessible and personal. He transformed how we relate to electronic devices, putting a heretefor unseen premium on design and usability. Along the way, he upended entire industries, breaking the monopoly pricing enjoyed by greedy music conglomorates and forcing telephone companies to meet the needs of consumers.

Apple is one of the most successful companies in the world and proof of what this country can still accomplish. Only America offers the freedom, creativity and technical knowhow necessary to give rise to a media corporation like the Cupertino giant. Steve Jobs liked to say that he existed at the intersection of liberal arts and technology, a genius that would have been crushed among the slave laborers of China or the repressed salarymen of Tokyo.

And all this was done by a man without a college degree. As noted in his widely-read commencement address, he was a person who followed is interests wherever they led. Not wanting to bankrupt his parents, he dropped out of Reed College – and then “dropped in” on whatever courses interested him. This meant studying calligraphy, perhaps one of the most impractical courses available. Picture a bearded and half-starved Steve Jobs hand-lettering posters as he followed his curiosity.

What would you call a person like that today? A flake. Can’t you be more practical? What’s calligraphy going to get you? Please, be realistic, there are no jobs for calligraphers…

Yet, as Jobs noted in the quote above, his journey makes sense only in retrospect. He was not on a career path, a linear ascension on a road that others had laid out for him. Instead, he surrendered to his interests. As he studied calligraphy, he had no way of knowing that it would lead to the beautiful typefaces found on the Mac.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.
- Steve Jobs

Can you imagine a world without the Mac? Computers would be ugly, utilitarian devices, with software to match. Jobs stressed the power of good design, whether it was the feel of an iPhone in your hand or the pleasant experience of dragging icons on a desktop.

This is a beauty that you will not find in any spreadsheet. Bill Gates said that what he most admired about Jobs was, “His taste.” His eye for quality and usability was something that Microsoft could never fully duplicate, no matter how hard they tried. It was embodied in a person, not a corporation. Like with iPad rivals, everything else feels like a cheap knock-off.

There’s an irony that America’s best company was lead by a man without business training. Steve Jobs did not have an MBA. An iconoclast, guided by hippie-era values of self-discovery, he followed his gut, and confidently let the market decide. Better to be a failure on his own terms than let his ideas get watered down by committees of number-crunchers.

This artist exposed the folly of an entire generation of MBAs, proving that you didn’t need an advanced degree from Harvard to build a wildly successful company. In fact, having such a degree may be a hindrance to revolutionary products, as evidenced by other great college drop-outs like Mark Zuckerberg.

Yet, as anyone who works in an office knows, America has been infected by the soul-crushing business terminology and theories of MBAs, from the meaningless “value-added” to the we-know-best attitude of “business process reengineering.” Rather than concentrating on building great products, busybody managers concentrate on vision statements, stultifying PowerPoint presentations and endless hours driven by utter disorganization.

It’s no wonder that people are drawn to the principles of REWORK, a brilliant book by a couple of other visionaries. They spell out a more humane and more productive way of working together.

This revolt is also seen in the agile software development, an iterative approach to software design that frees people from doomed-from-the-start “waterfall” models, like Microsoft Project.

In web content management (my field), this means moving away from complicated leviathans like Vignette in favor of nimble software designed around the user, such as my beloved WordPress.

American companies would be wise to ditch the MBAs. Instead, concentrate on building great products, stuff you actually want to use. And have the courage to hire creative iconoclasts like Steve Jobs, people at the intersection of liberal arts and technology. Painters, writers, photographers, designers – maybe even add a calligrapher to the staff. You never know where it might lead.