Lotus Alumni Are Impacting Search
Lotus Development Corp. changed the business world in the 1980s and '90s. Now its former employees are helping change the search industry.
Lotus Development Corp. changed the business world in the 1980s and '90s. Now its former employees are helping change the search industry.
Over the weekend, I set out to find an extended metaphor to describe the impact of former Lotus employees on the search engine industry.
My odyssey was triggered by a comment from Jim Manzi, the former chairman, president and CEO of Lotus Development Corporation, who is currently a private investor in various technology start-up ventures.
At the Lotus 25th anniversary party, held Saturday night in Cambridge, MA, Manzi told an “alumni staff meeting” of more than 650 former Lotus employees – or “Loti” as we call ourselves – that we were like “stem cells.”
His analogy does seem appropriate. An unusually high percentage of former Lotus employees possess two properties that a rigorous definition of a stem cell requires:
Consider the following examples of Loti who have renewed themselves and gone on to play potent roles in the search engine industry:
There are many, many more examples, including Loti who have renewed themselves and gone on to play potent roles in marketing innovation as well as product innovation. To read their stories, check out the member spotlights at AXLE, the Association of eX-Lotus Employees.
But, would I compare these former Lotus employees to stem cells? The cycles of cell division and the capacity to differentiate doesn’t begin to capture the hard, heroic and heartbreaking story of the Loti. As the director of corporate communications at Lotus from 1986 to 1988, I challenged myself to come up with a more appropriate analogy. I was also a speechwriter for Manzi during that era, and old habits die hard.
My incredibly talented, creative and dynamic colleagues at Lotus were not only innovators in software. They were also innovators in the workplace. Long before Google coined its “do no evil” mantra, Lotus created a set of workforce policies that helped set standards that other industries still try to meet.
In an article entitled, “How Lotus changed the business world,” Hiawatha Bray of The Boston Globe observed last week, “the company provided day-care services to workers with children, and became one of the first major US firms to offer benefits to employees in same-sex relationships.” Lotus also created a philanthropy program and provided funding for Eyes on the Prize, the award-winning television series on America’s Civil Rights Movement.
Lotus also created a set of operating principles that also changed the business world. It is no accident that they were included in the 25th anniversary party program:
The Lotus operating principles helped turn a company that was founded in April 1982 with eight employees and $1 million in venture capital into the biggest independent software firm. They embodied a corporate culture and management style that helped turn employees into entrepreneurs and leaders into legends.
After the company’s fall, these operating principles were among the few valuables that Loti could carry away as they wandered from Cambridge to other cities to found new companies with newer products in the newest industries.
To a poet, their story could be a modern version of the Aeneid, the Latin epic written by Virgil. It tells the legendary saga of Aeneas, who wandered to Carthage after the sack of Troy before going on to found Rome.
I think this extended metaphor comes a lot closer to describing the impact of former Lotus employees on the search engine industry. Manzi, who received his B.A. in Classics from Colgate University before getting his M.A. in International Relations from the Fletcher School, might even agree.
More importantly, it is a tale that those who now work at the Googleplex should hear. But, instead of being written in dactylic hexameter, it would be written in free verse. And instead of beginning, “Arma virumque cano,” the modern translation would start, “Listen with an open mind.”
Greg Jarboe is the president and co-founder of SEO-PR, a search engine optimization and public relations firm. He is also the news search, blog search and public relations correspondent for the Search Engine Watch Blog.
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