There's more to this one. A lot more. And that's precisely the problem at the moment. I have to run out for a while, but stay tuned. I'll reveal more of this strange late-breaking story this evening...

[Well, that was a long "evening," because I wrote the above on Friday afternoon, and now it's Sunday night. The updated version continues below the perplexing Army book cover (it perplexed me) and the cryptic communique.]

I received this in yesterday's snail mail, along with a personal note from the authors... "...we wanted you to have this book as evidence of the impact you're having!"

But first, in keeping with the overall style of this blog, some seemingly unrelated background. Once upon a time, I wrote...

There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.

thesis #12
cluetrain.com

I bolded the first bit of that because that's the main point here: no secrets. It doesn't take much googling to discover that your author here, Christopher Locke (that's me) also has an evil online twin: one so-called self-styled RageBoy. Above right is the only extant photograph of "the two of us" together -- thanks to some creative photoshopping by Gary Turner in the UK. If you click on the photo, you end up at our wedding registry on Amazon. Yes, we decided to get married at one point, but then we had a terrible falling out. It's a long sad story. For another time perhaps. But probably not. This page snip gives you a rough idea of the kind of thing we asked well-wishers to gift us with on the would-have-been Happy Day...

Amidst all that aforementioned googling, you might find this piece in The Guardian from a couple years ago. I met with the author while I was in London in May, 2002, speaking to the BBC about blogs and what they might be good for.

Rebel without a pause

Chris Locke, better-known as RageBoy, could have saved dotcoms millions of dollars. But he reckons 'gonzo marketing' could still lead a renaissance, writes Jack Schofield

[snip]

"You can broaden the pipe as far as you want, [Locke said,] but if everybody can play, it's not broadcast any more. There isn't that control of the passes. The channel is out of control and that makes it a different game."

What replaces mass market, broadcast advertising is Locke's "gonzo marketing", which is not really marketing but "market advocacy" through participation, sponsorship and support. The internet replaces the us-and-them relationship (creative people broadcasting to couch potatoes) with a network of conversations, which is all markets are, really.

It's the difference between a media empire such as AOL CNN IPC Time Warner and 100 million bloggers. The explosion in the popularity of blogging, peer-to-peer file-sharing, cooperative (open source) programming and similar movements means Locke's ideas are now being taken seriously by major corporations including merchant banks and the BBC, the latter having paid for his latest trip to London. But he has been saying the same things for at least eight years, both as a big company employee and as RageBoy, a "seriously maladjusted mental case and towering egomaniac with an advanced case of Tourette syndrome".

In that last bit, Schofield (the Guardian's longtime computing editor) is quoting me describing myself. Not from what I told him in our interrupt-driven interview over an excellent if somewhat chaotic Chinese dinner, but from his reading of RageBoy's whacked-out surrealism going back to 1995. Jack's been a subscriber from the start. In the first sentence of the piece, he identifies me as "a man famous for interviewing a talking horse." Mr. Ed, to be precise. You can read the interview here. I was working for IBM at the time I wrote it.

As it turned out, the BBC, though clearly fascinated by what I told them about blogging, didn't pick up on the idea of creating a Beeb-blessed blog "portal" of sorts -- thus creating instant (and cheap!) mutual advantage for themselves and the best writers emerging on the net. But The Guardian did, mere weeks later. And one of the first blogs they listed is called out there as "Rageboy." Happily, it's still there. I just checked. Brave of them, too, as RageBoy has a mouth on him, no lie, and a proclivity for, let us say, the graphically risque.

What exactly is going on here? Is it all one big joke? Or is there something else, something deeper afoot? Is there, as I once suggested, a code within the code? A method in the madness? I'm not sure if I can, or even want to, venture a serious answer to that. Explaining why a joke is funny makes it supremely unfunny. Explaining the profound reduces it to the pedestrian. My motto: keep em guessing. Because when you have to guess, you're not sure. And when you're not sure, you have to think.

But, as Dewey says to Randy in Scream 2: let's move on...

Also amidst all that googling for "locke and rageboy" you'll find roughly another 13,000 hits in which we "both" appear. Even the far more more selective Highbeam Research lists 28 articles in which the dynamic duo is mentioned. One of these is from Fast Company back in "the old days" of 2000, where I was introduced as "Locke, 52, a consultant who is best known for his alter ego, 'RageBoy'." (Ah, to be 52 again!) The article opens thus:

Do you have a clue about what the power and reach of the Web mean for the future of business? The creators of the Cluetrain Manifesto think they do. And they're eager -- make that determined -- to share their point of view with the "People of Earth" ( to whom their manifesto is addressed ). You might not agree with everything that these Web provocateurs say, you might not like their tone, but you will ignore their ideas at your peril. "People finally have permission to be human in the context of their work," says Christopher Locke, one of the manifesto's creators. "That's the real Internet story."

from: Clued In? Sign On! by Katharine Mieszkowski
source: Fast Company, 1 March 2000
via: HighBeam Research

OK, so that's the long perhaps, but necessary, setup to explain -- or at least put into context -- my surprising gift from CompanyCommand, whose mission is "building combat-ready teams." On the surface, this is a far cry from my personal mission. If you read the previous post and see that it ends with a picture of the "Davy Crocket" nuke launcher, you might get the impression that I didn't exactly put it there as a ringing endorsement of America's current military adventures. Nonetheless, here's the letter (verbatim) that came tucked into the book, Unleashing the Power of the Army Profession...

20 January 2005

Chris, As you will see in our new book (p. 191), we share with our readers sixteen books from our bookshelf -- books that have impacted our work in a significant way. Cluetrain was one of the very first books we read after we discovered that there were actually people -- other than ourselves -- thinking about connecting leaders in conversation via the Web (yes, we were sheltered). You helped set us ON FIRE! ...and we want to thank you for it by sending you a copy of our new book that tells the story of company commanders connecting in conversation to improve their effectiveness.

We appreciate you, and we wanted you to have this book as evidence of the impact you are having!

Very Respectfully,
Nate, Tony, Pete, Steve and Nancy
on behalf of the CC Team
http://CompanyCommand.army.mil

And scrawled below the typed, formal body of the letter...

Rock on Chris!
Tony

Maybe it's just me, but I find something quite moving in this. We're all of us dealing with large organizations of one form or another, whether they be companies or, as in the case above, Companies. David Weinberger, Doc Searls and myself told a lot of very bad jokes in Cluetrain. (And I've certainly told my share here.) But was it all one big yuk-fest? Is it today? The above letter seems to indicate not. And the "Rock on" addendum makes me guess that at least Tony Burgess -- and probably the rest of the team -- are well aware of my evil twin, RageBoy. The web surely makes for strange bedfellows.

This is too long already, but I want to wrap it up with a clip from an interview I ferreted out on Highbeam with "Unleashing" co-author Nancy M. Dixon, who also wrote Common Knowledge: How Companies Thrive by Sharing What They Know. As you read these thoughts from way back at the turn of the century, think about how they apply to blogging today. (Hint: they do.)

[interviewer]: ...what do you think is the most interesting thing going on in the world of KM [knowledge management] today?

[Nancy Dixon]: Well, we hear a great deal about the need to change the culture of the organization in order to make knowledge sharing possible. But I see just the opposite happening, i.e., sharing knowledge beginning to change an organization's culture. One of the ways in which I think organizational culture is changing is a heightened respect for local knowledge, which is created in the task of doing one's job. Local knowledge always competes with "sanctioned knowledge," i.e., knowledge that the organization has declared as valid. Sanctioned knowledge may come from outside the organization, or it may come from internal experts or task forces.

Historically, managers have held very little regard for local knowledge, and instead gave prominence to knowledge created by individuals not directly engaged in the task. However, disregarding the knowledge garnered through work creates disrespect between management and employees. Employees see managers as removed from real work, while managers see employees as resistant to sanctioned answers.

Through knowledge management, however, organizations are now beginning to value the knowledge that individuals learn through their work experience. This cultural shift certainly is not something that knowledge management is bringing about all by itself, but it is exerting a strong influence. Most knowledge sharing is done between peers, and the organizational "sanction" for this kind of exchange, is an implicit recognition that local knowledge is important.

from: Exploring Common KnowLedge: An Interview with Nancy Dixon by Jeff De Cagna
source: Information Outlook, 1 October 2000
via: HighBeam Research
Copyright © 2000 Special Libraries Association

Nancy M. Dixon is an Associate Professor of Administrative Sciences at The George Washington University. Unleashing the Power of the Army Profession, of which she is the lead author, is published by the Center for the Advancement of Leader Development & Organizational Learning, located at West Point, NY. So the title of this post -- RageBoy Goes to West Point -- is not a joke. Although, to me at least, it's pretty damn funny. As Bruce Willis says in Die Hard: who knew?

Tomorrow, or later tonight -- whichever comes first -- I'll say more about how all the above relates to this particular blog. And what that says about CBO's underwriter, Highbeam Research. Until then, as in so many circumstances we find ourselves facing in these strange postmodern times, the following immortal words are well worth remembering...

Randy:[from the Scream 2 trailer] There are certain rules that one must abide by in order to create a successful sequel. Number one: the body count is always bigger. Number two: the death scenes are always much more elaborate - more blood, more gore -- carnage candy. And number three: never, ever, under any circumstances, assume the killer is dead.