There was a report today in the SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS that Hewlett-Packard’s CIO is leading a change in the telecommuting practices of the IT team.  Telecommuting is coming to an end, for the most part.  IT people are going to start having to show up at an HP office for most of the work week.  CIO Randall Mott indicated that this will help less experienced staff learn to work more effectively.

One staff person was quoted as saying the only reason she worked for HP was because she could telecommute.  [She wouldn’t identify herself.  Well, at least that was smart.]  The article also reported what is most likely a suburban corporate legend:  one guy phoned into a meeting while riding on his tractor.  [Well, I hope it’s a legend.]  From what I understand, these folks are not freelancers or in-between-job contractors — they are employees with standard work weeks and compensation packages.  The whole enchilada.

Beyond the fact that HP’s shift in practice should help some employees remember what a job is, it should enable staff, the company and shareholders to profit from a bunch of benefits:  teamwork, exposure to the company persona, the ability for employees to influence and strengthen corporate values, higher productivity, office high jinks.  And maybe we’ll have a test case for how telecommuting should be done in 2006.  We may have come full circle given the speed and reach of  technology.  It’s worthwhile to verify that this speed and reach are not just funding someone’s swanky shower curtain at the expense of a full-time salary and ultimately, shareholder value.

Yet HP’s shift on telecommuting may turn out to be a gigantic lesson in something even bigger:  assimilation.  Great companies, like great countries, produce and perform measurably, clear about the ingredients essential to their raison d’etre, pouring them into the Kool-Aid.  In HP’s case, maybe it’s bringing people back into shared office space to re-learn The HP Way, collaborate and even duke it out.  After all, the company is coming out of a period in which many agree it lost that way.  For another organization, it might be something different.  Essentially, great companies decide which factors foster appropriate assimilation around a common set of goals and practices.  They make assimilation enticing, giving employees reasons for deciding to come to work that reach beyond "me" while still satisfying "my" ambitions and desires. 

When I studied in Italy, the professors taught us local customs, dress standards and the importance of at least trying to speak Italian.  Most of us jumped in, but some students never bought it.  They agreed to study for a year in a foreign country and then did everything they could to turn it into what they wanted it to be, never thinking about what they could contribute, only what they could take.  They were just missing the point. 

The comments of the attorney representing one of the convicted felons out of the Enron trial today indicates that the defense teams really believe in the innocence of the defendants.  Sure, it could be courthouse-step posturing, and as someone once said, the prisons are full of people who swear they’re innocent.  But in the past few years, the dirty white collars bring a whole new dimension to the question of guilt and innocence or right and wrong — because many of the convicted, and us, may no longer know the difference between them. 

Here’s a theory:  the path to power and finally achieving it may require a drive that obliterates the distractions of accountability.  A blindness.  Power and financial dominance — and all the things that go with them — require such a focus and on their own are so valuable and important in business and our society, every other priority pales in comparison.

This is no longer infuriating.  It’s just sad.  I feel great sadness when I read and hear the rationalizations and justifications and look forward to more accounts of understanding, contrition and perspective about what is really important in this world.  And over the long term, I want to hear what someone has learned from his fall from grace and what he will do with that knowledge.

To be civilized means to be civil — to be real and clear about how our own actions, and inaction, contribute to the blurring of boundaries that end up hurting someone, somewhere.  As much as this is a nation of laws, it still comes down to each person facing the consequences of behavior — atoning for the negative while reinforcing the positive.  It’s not just about black-letter law.  Every exec of an under-performing company who rationalizes his or her way into thinking that a $30 million salary is justified — every board and every HR consultant who spins a salary of that magnitude as something of value to shareholders — is lying not just to the world but to themselves.  This is what is so sad:  they don’t even know it.  And while the rest of us might not know it, either, I believe we can learn it all over again.  We just have to get real.

By marketing, I mean corporate marketing, selling, promoting and advertising.  Not grocery shopping.  Tomorrow, page one of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL features a story by Deborah Ball on the cleaning habits of women in Italy.  Fun facts about the cleaning obsession over there — and interesting lessons in marketing for companies everywhere.  We learn how consumer products companies must "turn their products and marketing inside out" to persuade Italian women to try new product innovations.  These companies are lucky.  Professional services and business-to-business often don’t have the results of new service introductions delivered to them quite so measurably — but on the B2B side, we can take a page from the try-try-again customer focus in consumer products.

I’ve been uncomfortable with the phrase, "disruptive technology," ever since it erupted on business radar in the late 1990s. 

It was coined to cover a significant, legitimate body of research.  Yet the choice of words seemed to validate a standing skepticism about and resistance to anything new.  I suppose every innovator is a newcomer and must cut teeth on rawhide, but if we’re using words like disruptive, it’s no wonder the world has one eyebrow raised permanently toward the technology sector.

Listen to the people who are mainstreaming technology into business:  Esther Dyson, John Chambers, John Doerr, Stratton Sclavos, Jonathan Schwartz, John Hennessy .  The only thing being displaced — and rightfully so — are legacy systems that have outlived their original investment.  What’s actually happening is evolution.  Of process, of productivity, of human interaction.  The Internet is ushering in a new phase of maturity, and its potential to contribute is beyond vast.

Retail stores haven’t vanished from the landscape.  There are movie theaters.  Kids go to school.  People write letters.  We have wonderful new tools that can help solve the problems of tired merchandising, salacious themes, low math scores, empty content marked by bad grammar:  use the Web to test merchandise, look at movie trailers, research projects, read great blogs.  A higher standard of productivity and performance is within the grasp of the retailers and the producers and the teachers and the writers.  Because technology is generating access and expanding reach, not preserving infrastructure for the sake of protecting power.

On the flip side:  some of the tech wizards still need to assimilate.  Their cocoon was far from the mainstream, so when they get a pulpit, they lose perspective.  They need not sacrifice conviction to gain a foothold.  They just need to adjust.  The purpose of technology is not to feed the geek inside but to fuel the enterprise — and the system — outside.

In our age, romance has come to be defined purely in the context of the valentine.  This eclipses the lesson of the literature teacher on the essential definition of romance as that which pursues the ideal, be it art, music, true love or commerce.  In the 19th century meaning, romance connotes the best to be achieved — not the baubles to be purchased.

Professionals charged with crafting and promoting the corporate message often are pressured to focus on the ever-loving sell.  It would be terrific if, in 2006, we could prompt the sale with an arrow from the heart [couldn’t resist] of the executive suite.  Unlike that unfortunate incident within the advertising world last fall.  In that case, the arrow came from a different part of the anatomy.

The assertions by an obsolete ex-matador about the role of one gender [OK, mine] in the business of advertising revealed not so much the out-of-step thought process of a dinosaur as the emptiness of a supposed industry leader’s heart.  It was a creative malfunction in a sect that wants us to believe a wardrobe malfunction is entertainment.  There are more of these types, from both genders, in business than we might realize.

Advertising is about selling, but it was built around the concept of injecting  memorable content into product and service descriptions.  What is most distressing about The Toronto Incident is this person’s priority.  Seems to be it is determining who gets the power position in shaping content — not the content itself.  Very revealing.  In choosing not to make a landmark statement about what constitutes the best in advertising but to ramble and rant about the superiority of one group over another, he exposed his own predilection to play in the dirt.  Forget meaningful competitive differentiation sprung from product or service differences.  This guy — a heralded advertising genius — showed the world the dark side of the marketing machine.  To him and many others like him, the romantic ideal doesn’t matter.

Charles Isherwood in THE NEW YORK TIMES and Matthew Gurewitsch in THE WALL STREET JOURNAL both wrote excellent articles about Barbara Cook, the singer, in December 2005.  They observed a master class Ms Cook was teaching at Juilliard.  In the business of Broadway, there is no better seller of a song than Ms Cook — because she reaches beyond her knowledge of musicality to enact and deliver the purpose of the song in its theatrical moment.  Isherwood wrote the following.

"Ms. Cook, who gives several master classes a year around the country, opened the session with a brief, informal speech emphasizing that the key to good singing is making a real investment of feeling in each note. ‘Your own humanity,’ she said, ‘is your pathway to artistry.’ … Using a vivid metaphor that acknowledged the scariness of the enterprise, she explained, ‘We have to find the courage to take off our emotional clothes.’ … When performers first step onstage, they may be looking for validation, for approbation in the form of nourishing applause. But the lesson Ms. Cook came to teach was that artists achieve their peak when they learn to stop proving themselves and simply, to borrow the Shakespearean phrase, let be. It’s their humanity we respond to in the end, their ability to strip away the self-consciousness that locks us inside ourselves, and reveal the stuff that really boils in our souls."

An example of business leadership from an unlikely source?  Hey, Broadway is big business.  And like any effective leader, Ms Cook understands the ideal and seeks to serve it truthfully and authentically — in her own voice and from her own perspective.  She takes the common human experience and differentiates it through personal definition and delivery.  The audience buys the message.  And, I’ll bet, the cast album.