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Down memory lane we go. The history of Bill Kling's savvy.
You have to understand how Kling operated. Here's an example. Around 2000, he and an ex Amazon guy at Forrester research.
You have to understand how Kling operated. Here's an example. Around 2000, he and an ex Amazon guy at Forrester research.
Back then, only a handful -- fewer than a dozen -- knew any6 about the possibilities of digital content. Kling wasn't one of them. I was. Nobody at MPR knew more about the creative use of the platform for news than me.
But this was dot-com time. People were making a crapton of money starting and selling online companies.
Kling and this guy from Forrester had an idea of getting into the social media biz to leverage MPR content, but that was all he had.
So over the course of a few months, he brought some of his employees in for consultation. I, and they, gave them ideas. Lots of ideas. Great ideas. Again, our ideas.
The underpinning was the belief of thoughtful discussion by the online audience. We were so naive back then. But this was a time to dream.
The final product provided public radio content and online people would get points for contributing in some way to the content. You could cash in points for gift cards.
And http://Gather.com was born. Again, *our* ideas fueled it.
The business side of it was the thing. I expected we'd get a piece of the action. Because everyone was getting rich spinning off ideas. I figured that was the end game here and I wanted mine.
Then the investment structure was unveiled. Shareholders. Kling took shares and he pressured his senior management team to invest in shares. One told me he put in $20,000.
The people whose ideas were used? We got nothing. We were not allowed to buy in. "Maybe in the future," one exec, who's still in the company, told me. I was pissed.
It turned out OK for us, because after a year or so, Gather was an MPR trivia question. Kling was too late to the dot-com party, which by then was saturated with startups obviously set up to sell them to some corporation stupid enough to overpay for startups that don't make $.
But what if the idea had worked and the senior MGMT of MPR had gotten filthy rich(er) with a big payday while the people with the ideas got nothing.
That's the culture that's always been at the top of MPR. Mission driven, for sure, but always looking for the synergy that could lead to a personal payday. That, besides his obvious mission vision, was the Culture of Kling.
In the end, all of those investor managers lost their money. Which should have taught them a lesson and changed the institutional culture. It didn't. //End
