Lisa Welchman: CS Forum podcast episode 9
10 July 2011 ❧ Jonathan Kahn
Listen to the latest podcast from our series featuring CS Forum speakers. This week, Lisa Welchman talks to Jonathan about web strategy, governance, and the career choices facing maturing web professionals.
In the ninth episode of of the Content Strategy Forum podcast, we interview Lisa Welchman, one of our invited speakers.
This really isn’t about making an effective content strategy. We know that that can get done. The problem is once you have it, can you implement it? The challenge of implementation is a management challenge; it’s not a technical, tactical or editorial challenge.
Listen now
Download the MP3, or subscribe in iTunes.
Transcript
This is episode 9 of the CS Forum podcast. I’m Jonathan Kahn, and today I’m talking to Lisa Welchman, who’s one of our invited speakers at the Content Strategy Forum 2011 in London.
The Forum is from the 5th to the 7th of September in central London. That’s three days of presentations, workshops, and parties. We’re featuring 39 speakers from 11 countries, and attendees have already registered from as far away as Bangalore, Melbourne, and San Francisco. Find out more at csforum.eu and register using code PODCAST09 by the 18th of July to save £50 off standard rates.
Jonathan Kahn: Joining me today from Baltimore is Lisa Welchman. Lisa is the world’s leading thinker on web governance and strategy. Through her consultancy work, she acts as a web therapist, helping executives understand and embrace the revolutionary changes to business that the web has created. Her clients include the World Bank, Thompson Writers, Research in Motion, and the US Environmental Protection Agency. Lisa is going to be joining us at the Content Strategy Forum in London to speak, so we’re very excited about that.
So Lisa, welcome and thanks so much for joining me today.
Lisa Welchman: Thanks for having me.
Jonathan: I’d like to start with your e-book, which is…. how do you pronounce it? “The Digital Deca”?
Lisa: Yes, that sounds perfect.
Jonathan: It’s an e-book, which I really would recommend. If anyone doesn’t know about Lisa, this is the first thing I think you should look at. It’s on your website and it’s this PDF beautifully designed and it’s just got these 10 key points for managers and people in corporations to kind of understand some of the issues you’re dealing with in your consultancy work. So I’ve just picked up a quote to get us started for your book, from that little book, which is this. “Most organizations address low web quality by redesigning their website or installing expensive infrastructure technology. The real reason your website keeps falling into disrepair is because your organization’s management practices don’t align with the 21st century business dynamic.”
Could you just tell us what you mean by that?
Lisa: Sure. Usually if the phone’s going to ring here, it’s one of two things. Either we try to implement some technology and we couldn’t, or we tried to do a whole scale website redesign and we couldn’t. That’s usually how people begin to understand that they have some sort of governance-related problem. So the piece about not aligning the 21st century business dynamic is, I think, that folks have underestimated from a management perspective how much digital has impacted the organization itself.
We know that people communicate differently; we know about social, we know about all of these various channels that have opened up. But I think folks really underestimate how much business change and organizational and process change needs to occur.
It’s not just a reorganizing or figuring out where the web team sits in your organization, or do we need a chief content officer, or do we need a chief web officer? It’s not really about that. It’s really about business isn’t going to be done as usual anymore and that there’s going to be a new normal. And if those are the sorts of changes that executives have to initiate and put into place, it can’t really be effectively done from out of the web team.
So that’s really what my intention is; that is, trying to give a wake-up call to executives and help them understand that they have a key role to play in getting their organizations aligned for the digital age.
Jonathan: Cool. So that kind of takes me to my question that I’ve pulled out which is “The web changed the rules not just for the way that you communicate with your customers, partners, employees or the way that you process transactions or disseminate data, but for your entire business.” That’s a quote from your book. If someone is calling you because their redesign failed, are they ready to hear that their root of their whole business has been changed?
Lisa: Well, I think the answer is no. They’re not really ready to hear that. I think more importantly, they’re probably not in a position to do much about it.
Jonathan: Right.
Lisa: And so even if they are the senior-most web person in the organization, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they have the power or the clout to enact corporate-wide changes. Some people have thought that means “Oh. Well then we really need a chief web officer or a chief content officer so that those changes can be enacted,” but I would challenge that. I’ve worked with some clients that do need a role like that, but it’s because of a business reason. It’s not because of a deficit in the way that the company’s being managed. I think that’s one of the challenges for web folks. I also feel that most web and digital and content people aren’t really mature enough from a management perspective to get that work done at that very executive level.
It’s really one thing to know a lot about content or to know a lot about technology, and quite another thing to understand how to run an organization and the types of tradeoffs and changes and strategies that take place.
So it’s a deep and rich problem and I think we’re going to be dealing with it for the next 10, 15, 20 years as we watch businesses turn and as we watch the demographic change. When we get this kind of digital native population deeply into management roles in large organizations I think a lot of this will turn naturally. It’ll be very interesting to watch.
Jonathan: Right. So it’s a bit of a longer term change piece.
Lisa: Sure.
Jonathan: Cool. So I just want to read three more things out for people to hear from this e-book. These are just three statements that I just wondered if you could talk about. These are three of the ten. “The organization owns the web presence,” “The web is an asset,” and “Standards enable collaboration.”
Lisa: The organization owns the web presence – is my kind of smack-back response to people who say to me, “Well, who owns the web?” Communications owns it, marketing owns it, IT owns it. Who’s going to own it? The reality is – it is, and the whole point of “The Digital Deca” for me is your web presence or your digital presence is a manifestation of your organization. It’s a digital manifestation of your organization. It’s owned by the organization and certain people are fortunate enough to be able work on it. It’s not owned by communications or marketing or anyone like that.
The web is an asset is – really the idea that people really think of it as a cost center. “What is it costing me?” as opposed to realizing what an enabling force it can be and that most organizations understand that they have to have a digital presence but they’re not understanding it as something that can actually perform for the organization, unless it’s something obvious like e-commerce, but just really deeply understanding how much it can be a business asset.
And then, Standards enable collaboration – which is probably my favorite of all The Digital Deca and the one that I talk about nonstop is just a remembering for those of us who work in the web world to understand that the worldwide web itself is a standards-based platform. The fact that its standard based is what enables us to collaborate so successfully and so quickly.
When you think about how deeply and how quickly the web took hold in parts of the world that have Internet connectivity, it’s really staggering. So when people don’t want to have content standards or they don’t want to have other sorts of standards related to the web because they somehow think it’s stifling, I remind them that a standards-based framework, properly placed and implemented and enforced is really the way to get a lot of significant and deep work done.
Jonathan: One of the first resistances I get when I talk about web governance is that, some people hear web governance as being top-down, like some guy at the top giving orders and everyone has just to fulfill them; otherwise they get fired. I know that’s not what you really mean by web governance. Is that linked to the standards-enabled collaboration that if we can all agree on appropriate standards for the work we’re doing, then we’ll stop fighting and we’ll be able to actually use our skills appropriately?
Lisa: That’s exactly right. I think the fear is that if you say governance, the fear for web people is that, if you say governance that some executive who doesn’t know anything about digital is going to start making crazy rules and that you’re going to have to follow them. But I’ve never really seen that happen. Yes, I’ve seen some executives pick a bad web content management system on the golf course with a buddy who said, “We have this,” or something like that.
But the reality is, I’ve never seen it happen at all. In fact, frequently executives are waiting for the digital team to perform more maturely. It’s fascinating when they come up and say, “We want to do a standards-based framework.” They almost think, “Well, we thought this was what we had already.”
So, I think there’s a disconnection there on some real room of opportunity.
Jonathan: Yeah. I think that the other thing is; if your executives don’t, if they feel that they don’t get it, they don’t get technology or they don’t get the web or communication, they probably trust you more than you think. Whether or not they’re empowered to do what they need to do, the web people tend to have actually quite a lot of trust, because they hold the keys.
Lisa: Sure. Most executives believe that the web team is probably doing the best that they can. They’re not as engaged with the digital channels and website or whatever and a lot of folk, particularly content people and technologists, can be really cynical about this. But a CEO is not going to spend all day on your corporate website. They have people that they pay to actually make sure that functions properly. And so, I think in many instances, people don’t like it when I say this – in many instances, people who work in digital actually from a management perspective are very immature. You have a lot of individual contributors who are savvy about what they do, but not savvy about how to get stuff done in a corporate environment or in a large organization where the types of negotiations or business cases that need to be developed in order to get things to happen.
I’m hoping, in the next five years as the demographics of people who have worked on the web grows as well – a lot of people started working on the web straight out of college and have been at it for 15 years. So as those people get older and more mature and hoping that they understand that they need to augment their skills with management skills; so that they can actually start driving the business processes that they need to in order to have this work in a more mature way.
Jonathan: Yeah. I want to come back to that, but let me talk about how this relates to content strategy.
Lisa: Sure.
Jonathan: I want to take you first to talk about this title that I’ve seen you recently given yourself which is “Web Therapist.” I think this links to my question earlier on. I said, “Are people ready to hear what you have to say when they call you?” and you said, “No.” So, why do you call yourself a web therapist and what type of things do you do to help people move towards accepting their reality or whatever the first stage is?
Lisa: Well, I call myself a web therapist because some content people told me I should. [laughter]
Lisa: I said, for years that I feel like a web therapist because it’s sort of the same lamenting call that I get all the time. So, I put it up on the website because people really resonated from that, even though I thought it sounded kind of goofy. This is the reason why I think organizations need web therapy, or why I feel as if I act as a web therapist. A lot of folks are really in denial about really what it’s going to take to get this thing moving the right way.
Jonathan: Absolutely.
Lisa: It’s really sad. I’ve watched organizations spend millions of dollars, turn over head count, hire people, in order to avoid the truth.
Lisa: They have to make a lot of really tough management calls or that their web presence is irreparably broken; and maybe they need to start all over again. Or that……There’s just a list of ‘or’. In some cases, if I’m talking with a digital person – whether they’re technology focused or content focused – they might be the problem. There are a lot of control freak technologists and content people.
Jonathan: Sure.
Lisa: Who really believe that they have the solution, that they alone have! They call me and they say – I want you to put in a governance framework that’s going to tell everybody that I’m in charge.
Jonathan: ….which links the other scary piece. Going and talking to the different departments and listening to them and all that…
Lisa: Yes. Exactly!
Jonathan: When I suggest that, people look like I’m threatening to kill them or something like that. They’re just petrified.
Lisa: Yeah. They don’t want you to talk. So, that’s the therapeutic aspect of it. Going around a kind of messed up corporate family and interviewing everybody. And then kind of teeing it up and saying – look, here’s what’s going on.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Lisa: What do you want to do about this? There’s some best practicing things that we can recommend. In some instances people may feel like…., well, that’s just the way we work and we don’t want to change. Then I help them to understand – you’re always going to get this result.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Lisa: So you might as well figure out a way to live with it. Because there’s no magic button where people are going to, all of a sudden, start to behave differently; unless you put things in place that are going to force that to happen, in most instances.
Jonathan: Isn’t there always a need to actually own some mistakes? So often I’m in a situation where someone has spent a very large amount of effort and money on a piece of technology. You can’t really keep on denying that, that was a bit of a mistake if you’re going to do a better job next time.
Lisa: Sure. Web teams aren’t 100 percent clean, and some of it’s just a maturity curve. I try to really put it in that context so that people don’t feel like I’m dumping on them. We all implemented crazy content management systems. Overly personalized portal technology where nobody’s going to fill out the form in order to get.
Jonathan: Absolutely. I call it fantasies.
Lisa: Yeah.
Jonathan: Like, let’s have a fantasy of how it could work. Most of us have spent most of our careers doing that and not really seeing that it didn’t quite deliver on our hopes.
Lisa: But more importantly I think, we’ve spent most of our careers doing that and not having to be accountable for the bad consequences.
Jonathan: Absolutely.
Lisa: So, in other more mature areas of the business… If you had a consistent stream of failures or less than optimal outcomes, you might have actually lost your job. Or not been on an upward curve in terms of promotions and that sort of thing. I’m not saying that people do these things deliberately. But we’ve kind of been living in a very, it’s not a fantasy world but a charmed world, where we’ve been allowed. Because the digital channels were so immature and nobody really knew a right way to do anything, to kind of play around.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Lisa: Now we’re really getting into big dollars, and we do understand best practices. And so, now it’s at the point where we have to understand and look back and say. Now, from a maturity perspective, that was like the leading edge, bleeding edge, coming into maturity piece. And now we’re really at the point where we have to figure out, what does it mean to operate your web presence maturely? And try and work with management in order to make that happen; instead of intentionally operating things like the Wild West.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Lisa: People will criticize me for that, because they think I’m against rapid application development or R&D, and that’s not true. It’s just that everything can’t run like that. There are aspects of your digital presence that are fully operationalized and that you can kind of manage in that way. There are other aspects of it that need to be able to react more quickly. And you just need to make sure that you have a framework in place so that you can take care of all of that stuff.
Jonathan: Sure. I want to ask you specifically about your core areas of web strategy and web governance and what they actually are. Because I think most people can probably be helped by getting a bit of a handle on what you mean. I just noticed that people have been talking about web strategy for a little while. But they normally mean, what’s the reason for this specific website to exist? And I think your idea of web strategy might be a little bit broader than that. So, could you explain what it means to you?
Lisa: Sure. For our website and how we talk about our services, over the last year I’ve started to put the word ‘corporate’ in front of it. Because I think it just crystallizes a little bit.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Lisa: So, our sense of web strategy is a corporate web strategy. Why does your organization have a digital presence? What are its values and relationships to that digital presence? How are you ensuring that your organization can actually get web work done? So that’s really got nothing to do with how many sites you have. What’s your social media strategy? What’s the content strategy? When I’m talking about that, I’m looking for guiding principles, which is kind of like a mission statement for digital. Then I’m looking for this thing that we call formalization of authority.
Jonathan: Yeah. So what’s that mean?
Lisa: Formalization of authority is actually ensuring that there are three things working. One of them is that you actually have a governance framework in place. So, who makes decisions about digital? Not, what are the decisions, but who makes the decisions?
Jonathan: Yeah.
Lisa: Who makes the decisions about content? Who makes the decisions about taxonomy? About, if you’re going to buy a portal system, what technology might that be? Search, network and server infrastructure, load balancing. There’s this full range of very editorially focused to very, very technology focused decisions that need to get made. Who gets to decide those things? So, do you have a framework for that?
Jonathan: Yeah.
Lisa: And do you have appropriate policy in place and standards? For us, policy and standards are two really distinct things. And I know, on different sides of the Atlantic and within any organization, those two words can be exchanged. But when we talk about policy, I’m talking about risk mitigating, compliance focused. We don’t want to get sued. We want to operate within the bounds of the law.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Lisa: So, security, data, privacy, all of that sort of thing, as well as content focused ones. Standards are specific protocols for what your digital channels look like and sound like. Taste, content strategy components would go in there. Metadata of various architectural components that could be a rich set. So that’s the governance piece. We want to make sure that you know how all that happens.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Lisa: So that’s really, really different than saying, here’s how many times you’re going to update your content every month. So, this is making sure that the organization’s enabled to do that. The second piece of the governance formalization of authority piece for us has to do with execution. And that really has to do with understanding. Where is the web team? How do they get paid? How are they structured and what’s the dynamic of that? And, even more broadly, what’s your strategy for execution? Do you outsource development, or does it happen in house, or is it a little bit of both? Do you have an agency of record, do you not?
Do you have a central web team as a hub? And they act as consultants to everyone else and set standards and you’ve got webmasters throughout? Or are they all centrally? There’s a strategy for your organization where that works. So that’s execution.
Then the last piece of formalization of authority which is really huge is about measurement. That does really understand not just analytics and user experience, but the business measurement.
How much are you spending on digital? What’s the return on investment? It’s shocking that many organizations have no idea about how much they spend on their digital channel. It’s just appalling.
Jonathan: Someone was telling me recently that their KPIs were like bounce rates on the home page and that type of thing. Sort of, stuff you can find in the analytics package. So what do you do and where should they be, is my question.
Lisa: Well, obviously you should talk about key success factors and key performance indicators as well. I find the measurement piece of it is the last one that comes, because the rest of it’s so out of control.
Jonathan: Right.
Lisa: So obviously, I call what you just described backwards analytics. I’ll go into an organization and they’ll say, this is the most important page because it gets the most hits. And you’re just kind of like… So, therefore, our organization should have the most money. Or, we should own the web. I’m not kidding. These are big, mature companies. They come at it like this.
The real litmus test for me is, can you state an objective related to a digital initiative?
What type of business change or process are you trying to drive and impact? What kind of quantitative impact, where you’re going to measure, and then implement the thing and see if you’re successful? So, those performance indicators are very unique and specific to an organization.
Jonathan: Sure.
Lisa: I’m sure there’s some general rules we can come up with, if we sat down and thought about it. But as a general rule, people aren’t thinking about that in a very mature way. I think that the measurement piece of it, unfortunately, is the one that comes after the governance and execution. But there’s so much noise about, where’s the web team in the organization? Where is it housed? And even more noise about who decides stuff.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Lisa: There’s so much noise about that; that the idea of talking about measurement in a sophisticated way usually gets pushed to the wayside. And that’s too bad; because I think, particularly if people who are working in the digital arena and usually have hold of the analytics software. They could use analytics data to build a business case of why the digital team needs to be staffed differently. There are all kinds of ways that that could be used.
Jonathan: Yeah, right. But there is no other way to do it really, because otherwise you’re always going back to…
Lisa: Subjective.
Jonathan: …we need to do this right. Well, I think if there’s no business case behind it, it’s related to a real KPI to do the actual business itself. Then you just sound like people with obsessive compulsive disorder saying, it has to be done this way. We’re web geeks, and it has to be done our way.
Lisa: Or you get, depending on who’s driving, whether it’s IT folks and less and less they drive the car.
Jonathan: Right.
Lisa: And more marketing-communications focused people.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Lisa: I love marketing and communications focused people. But they’re not really analytics driven, except when it relates to sales numbers. So, just this idea that it can get very subjective over in that corner, is a cultural thing. And people in marketing-communications, public affairs; they have to react to events that happen so quickly. So there’s some of that, you’ve got to fly by the seat of your pants.
Jonathan: Sure.
Lisa: When you have that dynamic kind of driving the web, the idea of measuring or having a mature sense of measurement doesn’t always rise to the top. Of course, marketing people know how to measure. It’s just, what are you measuring and why, and in particular the operational efficiencies. A marketing communication person may be focused on the external dynamic of digital, but they might completely miss the fact that you could save millions per year by creating an operational efficiency for the intranet, via the intranet internally.
Jonathan: By wasting like Gerry McGovern would say, by wasting people’s time less.
Lisa: Yes, exactly. And so, it’s very fascinating. I am a big proponent of the standalone web team because I really feel that I’m saying web and digital almost interchangeably now, but I think that that competency is not unique in that over special so give us a crown but unique in that it’s this sense of synthesis of technology and communication skills. And so, if you talk to a pure play marketing person, that doesn’t mean they know web, and if you talk to someone who knows to roll out and install search engine software, it doesn’t mean they understand search. There’s this ground in the middle where I really think there’s a role for professionalization of digital key staff, and I would really like to participate in and see a push in that area so that these teams can stand alone in all of their left and right brain grandeur.
Jonathan: I’ve got two things that I want to talk to you before we finish. One of them is, about where the content strategy can be a starter drug to some of the stuff you’re talking about, and the second one is, what the career choice is right now for web professionals. I wonder if we can try and mix that together. There’s been a lot attention about content strategy in the last couple of years. One of the reasons for that is people realize, for example, in social media it doesn’t really get you very far if you don’t have a plan for creating publishing and governing content. Where do you see the relationship between what people are calling content strategy and the corporate web strategy and governance that you’ve been talking about?
Lisa: I’ve thought about this a lot because I have been thinking about the talk for the Content Strategy Forum in September and thinking about, well, how do these two relate? Content governance, in particular, is something that’s not particularly new in that the sense of having what we’re all calling content strategy is fairly old. I think it’s great that it’s getting a lot of visibility right now, but it’s not… and this is where I get smacked on the head again, it’s not the key driver, right?
Jonathan: The driver? OK.
Lisa: So, having an effective content strategy and having an effective approach to content governance is key, but probably solving that problem isn’t… you can probably solve that problem outside of the context of fixing your corporate web governance strategy. I think you could potentially use it as sort of a poster child of how things go well if you have rules and regulations, but it’s probably not going to reach out unless you impact corporate policy or that sort of thing. That said, depending on the resources, you could escalate these concerns if you wanted to.
Jonathan: I think it’s a very clear demonstration of what’s broken.
Lisa: Yeah.
Jonathan: When we haven’t got a content strategy, that’s not because people are stupid or incompetent or any of those things. And so, why is it? It’s something you can point to and that people can really understand, I think.
Lisa: I think that’s a good way of putting it. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I think that’s true. I think you could say, here is an example of an impact of not having good decision marking about content. What they might then say is then fix that.
Jonathan: Right.
Lisa: It may not necessarily lead to them saying – well we have this bigger governance problem. And so, what we really need are the technologists to come out of the window, the IT side to come out and say, do you realize that we spent $18 million over the last three years on redundant technologies. Now that might get them to pay attention.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Lisa: If you could somehow quantify the money you spend with what happens from a dollar perspective or effectiveness or how it’s raising risk for the organization, which you can do. We’ve done that with clients. You use examples of redundant or contradictory content on a website and put it down in front of an executive, it horrified them. And that’s got them to go, oh, wait, we’ve got to fix this, right?
Jonathan: Which is what your eBook does as well?
Lisa: What? horrifies people? [laughs]
Jonathan: No, no. It says, the cartoon guy says, hang around. Don’t leave my website. You haven’t gone to all of my 8 content silos.
Lisa: Right.
Jonathan: You could characterize that as a content strategy problem in terms of the impact of it on, say, a customer or some business metric. The cause is unknown. If I show you a website with a content problem, you don’t know the cause until you have time with the organization, right?
Lisa: That’s right. And so, I think that’s really where the analytics come in as well and where there is power for people who work with these tools and with the content which is being able to quantify that.
Jonathan: Yes.
Lisa: And presenting that to executives… That’s going to get them to pay attention because that’s what their job is. Their job isn’t to be really specific about content and get emotional about content.
Jonathan: No.
Lisa: Their job is to protect the organization, make sure that you’re maximizing, meeting your mission, maximizing profit if you’re for profit, getting more members if you’re non-profit and more donations, and let’s stay out of the courthouse. And that’s what they’re paid so much money to do.
Jonathan: So we’ve got to speak in that language.
Lisa: That’s right.
Jonathan: This is my final work style question. How can the person who is a web professional, like a web manager or writer or something, start to address some of the issues you’ve been talking about here without becoming a management consultant, if that is possible?
Lisa: I think we just alluded to one of them. Here’s the thing. When you’re in the trenches, it’s a really different story than when you’re sitting outside like I am. I have been in the trenches. I sort of cut my teeth on Cisco.com for four years, and it made a huge difference, so I have some perspective of what it’s like to be in that. I think the thing that you have to realize is that it’s going to be very difficult to change the corporate dynamic, so kind of taking the rose colored glasses off and really understanding what’s going on in your organization, it’s clearer. The second thing that I always say to people all the time is get a sponsor.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Lisa: There’s someone in your organization who’s more senior in your organization than you who can listen to you and also start to coach you about how to interact in the organization. So, tactically content strategy, there are lots of books now written about content strategy and approaches that people can take. This really isn’t about making an effective content strategy. We know that that can get done. The problem is once you have it, can you implement it?
Jonathan: Yeah.
Lisa: And so, the challenge of implementation is a management challenge; it’s not a technical, tactical or editorial challenge. As I mentioned, I’ve seen a lot of good information architect wireframes, content strategies that can’t be implemented because of political dynamics. I would say the thing you need to do is get someone to help you understand how to do basic management things and how to negotiate internally. Make a business case and impact the organization at that level. That’s what it’s going to take. I always say in meetings, I always feel like I’m talking to a subset of people. Some people will always want to be individual contributors, and there’s nothing wrong with that. You can be a very strategic senior individual and contributor. You can be the best content strategist on the planet. It doesn’t mean that you can get someone to fund your project, right?
Jonathan: Yeah.
Lisa: If you’re the type of person that wants to get people to fund things, you might need to think about moving into management which means you might have to step away from your fundamental love of what you do. That’s a real career decision for people, and it’s not for everyone. So, I think really understanding where you are in that mix and who you want to be. I also say we’re always criticizing management and senior executives.
Jonathan: Yes, we are.
Lisa: Knowing so little about digital. We know so little about management.
Jonathan: Right.
Lisa: And how an organization gets run and the budgeting mechanisms and all of those other things. So, get an education.
Jonathan: Yeah. Fantastic! I think that’s fantastic advice. Great! I’ve got one closing question for you which is you were featured in the New York Times, and they said you’re an entrepreneur who stays calm when traveling through meditation. Did you have any tips for people, especially if they’re traveling?
Lisa: Oh, for meditating or for staying calm?
Jonathan: I think, staying…whichever you think.
Lisa: Yeah. I have had a meditation practice for many years, and it really came about because I don’t like to fly.
Jonathan: OK.
Lisa: I’ve since changed because I fly so much. And so, I found bringing the practice into the airport sort of helped to calm me down. I think as far as folks who work in the digital arena and just talking about that kind of softer, more holistic side of myself is I feel like, and this might be kind of a little on the outside, but I feel that those of us who work in the digital arena have a huge opportunity to impact change in the world.
Jonathan: Right.
Lisa: And that we really shouldn’t underestimate the impact of the work that we do, whether or not it’s creating a great intranet that makes people’s work day easier or enables them to actually telecommute so they can be home with their family or be on airplanes less or actually solve problems, either locally or globally in your community that you weren’t able to solve otherwise. And so, one of the things that I hope, as I talk about web professionals maturing and learning more about management, is that we bring some of the hope and possibility of what this technology can bring to the world into us into the management structure as we grow as professionals. And so, that was really part of what that article was about for me was making sure that as you’re moving in your travels, making sure that you keep your value system with you and that becomes part of your work as well because the World Wide Web really was a gift to us.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Lisa: And so, I really hope we do good things with it. That’s kind of not directly about meditation but kind of where I am in that space with that.
Jonathan: Fantastic, fantastic! Well, Lisa, thank you so much for your time today.
Lisa: Thank you.
Jonathan: I really appreciate it. I think this is a really, really interesting topic, and people are going to be desperate to hear what you have to say in September, and you’ll be mobbed afterwards, I’m sure.
Lisa: Yeah, I’m desperate to see what I’m going to say, too. I’m working on a new talk, so I think it’s going to be good.
Jonathan: Thank you very much.
Lisa: Thanks.
That was episode 9 of the CS Forum podcast, featuring Lisa Welchman. You can subscribe to future episodes at csforum.eu. Don’t forget to register for the conference by the 18 July, using code PODCAST09 to save £50 off standard rates.
