Bloggers on Corporate Management

For those of you who are new to blogging and don't know,  the "godfather" of the blogosphere is Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee who writes the influential Instapundit blog as well as a weekly feature called "Reynolds' Wrap" at Tech Central Station. This week it's called The Unbearable Rightness of Nick Denton.

Even as a columnist, he writes like a blogger, liberally quoting what Nick Denton wrote two years ago.

... Modern communications, and the growth of weblogs and web bulletin boards in particular, have also given power to bitter employees.... Asymmetric warfare has come to the workplace: managers may sometimes have the power to hire and fire, but the peasants have the internet now.

Then relating it to an earlier story in the New York Times about how the  U.S. government is  having fits over the employee bloggers at the Los Alamos National Lab and from which he quotes.

A blog rebellion among scientists and engineers at Los Alamos, the federal government's premier nuclear weapons laboratory, is threatening to end the tenure of its director, G. Peter Nanos.

Four months of jeers, denunciations and defenses of Dr. Nanos's management recently culminated in dozens of signed and anonymous messages concluding that his days were numbered. The postings to a public Web log conveyed a mood of self-congratulation tempered with sober discussion of what comes next.

And tying it together with his own thoughts.

Things will be different, and already are. Even in the military, email and chatrooms are flattening hierarchies and changing power dynamics....-- employees don't necessarily resent managers who run a taut ship, so long as they feel that merit is being rewarded over sucking up....

The smarter managers will read blogs, looking for real problems that need to be fixed, and they'll respond (perhaps on their own blogs?) to the critics; the smartest ones will even realize that employees know the difference between the chronic bellyachers and the people who have serious complaints, and will respond accordingly.

Reynolds concludes.

How many managers are this smart? I guess, thanks to the Internet, we'll find out.

Managers not only have to worry about what their customers are saying about their products and services, they have to worry about what their employees will say about them.  Out Loud and on the Internet.    The transparency of the Internet now reaches behind the firewalls. 

UPDATE:  Better managers make for better companies and happier employees.

In a study by Sirota Consulting, the firm examined the stock prices of 28 companies that had tracked their employee morale during the past four years. The results: The 14 companies with "high morale" saw their stocks increase more than 5 times those of the half-dozen companies with "low morale" (16% vs 3%).

Via Kevin Salwen at the Worthwhile Blog