The following sentence is found in the final chapter of The Cluetrain Manifesto.
But if you think of yourself as a company, you’ve got much bigger worries. We strongly suggest you repeat the following mantra as often as possible until you feel better: “I am not a company. I am a human being.”
When I reread this, something “clicked” again inside of me. It is the same feeling I got when I read The Cluetrain Manifesto the first time. And yet, after these past few years nothing has seemed to change. Most companies still don’t seem human. Even more so, I’ve tried multiple times to start my own company and yet everytime I did so, it didn’t feel right. It felt like something was missing. I kept following the formula of what a “business” should do, yet it just didn’t feel right to me as a person. I think the greatest problem I kept having was that everytime I tried to create my own business it didn’t feel like it really represented me as a person. Instead it represented something entirely different that I didn’t like.
I really would love to have my own business. And yet I don’t think I can until I understand how I can best represent myself as a person instead of a business. I’m hoping that discovering these cultural values from the Web will bring me closer to discovering how I can run a business and yet still “feel” human.
Another question is that maybe if we want to evolve we need to start redefining what a business is then? Or maybe we need to find an entirely different word to use instead of company or business?