Making the private public and the corporate world

Is the same intuition that makes one want to separate public from private tied to what makes good corporate citizens?

When I first joined Facebook some time back it was because there was chatter about it at my workplace (somehow my personal world pushed me into MySpace but not Facebook). As an IT professional I made an account for wholly professional and not personal reasons. I found it humorous to see that most everyone I met from my personal world was on Facebook for exactly the same reason: their job. I felt like I was at a store where everyone was a "secret shopper". Where were the real customers?

This was probably caused by a short lived wave that swept the marketing world a year or two ago when corporations woke up to the social networking world and my connection to Facebook is now more personal than professional. Because of my initial interest, I have been very conscious of the distinctions of professional and personal worlds and how they blur in such communities. Our intuitions of what is public or private are challenged by social networking, while it seems the youth of today is untroubled by having such distinctions.

Some of my thinking on public versus private was solidified recently when I had the pleasure of hearing Fred Wilson speak. What became immediately apparent is that his life is public. Social technology has been good to him and in turn he's good to it by living his life equally in the digital and physical world. He is even willing to have his location available to family and some co-workers at any time from an application on his smart phone.

One of the first slides Fred displayed during his talk was of Napoleon Bonaparte saying, "I can no longer obey; I have tasted command, and I cannot give it up." Fred explained that this was what being in the venture capital world was like and that he knew he was no longer suited to be in a large corporation. He basically framed his advice to the corporation he was speaking to as, "I'm an outsider using these tools in an outside world, so some but not all of it will be useful to you," which was the perfect way to handle the politics of the situation (maybe he's not such an outsider).

What Fred was saying about himself is that he is used to being in control and would not be comfortable with the division of power in the corporate world. The other thing about Fred is that he is completely public with his private world. Check out his blog or twitter posts to get an idea.

So is it possible that the same intuition that makes one want to separate public from private is tied to what makes some people good corporate citizens? In some ways being subordinate is removing your personal feelings from your professional life. I still have to do what my boss asks me to do whether I personally agree or not. In fact most interactions in the corporate world involve compromise and one saves face partly by hiding the extent to which you are compromising. In your personal world you might complain in private about how right you thought you were, but you would hardly be able to work with others if you made your personal world public.

The youth of today seem to largely ignore the public and private distinction. Does this mean they are all Napoleons who will never be good corporate citizens? Will they be able to survive in the work world when the time comes?

But, maybe this is pushing it too far. One could say that business casual dress is making the personal public. When everyone wore suits the only way to be personal was with the tie, but now there's a myriad of acceptable clothes in the workplace which all reveal personal choice in the professional arena. Most people would no longer argue that one can be equally subordinate in a pair of jeans or a pair of dress pants (though the personal choice of one or the other might be telling).

In the end it might be that the inclination to be a good corporate citizen bundles a lot of concepts together. Some of them are essential to being a good corporate citizen (like being agreeable and following orders) and some are seemingly tied, but inessential (like casual dress and posting personal data online).

Recently I have become more public with my private world and feel two conflicting pressures from my professional life. The one is that I work in IT and understanding the social aspect of computing is essential, but the other is that I work at a corporation and negotiating the personal social world in a professional context is dangerous. So in this way, I am testing whether one can remain a good corporate citizen and share my personal world online, but the real test will be when the next generation free of personal private and professional public distinction enters the work place.