Feudalism 2.0 In The World Of Analysis

Forrester recently announced a new blogging policy for it’s analysts, which basically blocks them from writing personal blogs that overlap Forrester’s coverage areas, as reported by Carter Lusher at SageCircle. He points out that Forrester has had a pretty aggressive policy on analyst freedoms in the past:

This move – if true – is very consistent with Forrester’s efforts to manage its analyst workforce to Forrester’s maximum benefit. In a letter to Mass. Gov. Patrick last year (see note 1), CEO Colony expressed his support for non-competes that favored the employer because  “… non-competes ultimately help new and established companies alike to retain the talent they’ve invested in, further nurtured and who have become star employees due to their rewarding tenure and success. …” (emphasis added).

He seems to be referring to Charlene Li, Jeremiah Owyang, and Peter Kim, who rose in the public eye because of outside blogging and other writing and then left the firm to capitalize on that market value, presumably because Forrester didn’t want to compensate them as well as the outside world does.

By blocking other analysts from a similar pattern of up and out, Colony & Co are blocking a very obvious sort of brain drain.

But is it fair to the analysts, who are blocked from becoming stars? Or stated another way, are the ideas in your head owned by your employer? Are the skills and cognitive apparatus that structures your thinking — and which you developed over a lifetime of childhood, education, previous employment, and late night ruminating — an asset that is explicitly owned and under the control of your employer? Can you have an insight off the clock, and share it with others? Can you have a personal voice about the direction of technology, or how society and business are impacted by it, if you are employed by an analyst firm?

Forrester says no. Their official line is couched in a ‘what’s good for the customer’ argument:

Hi Carter,

Regarding Forrester analyst blogs: We believe we can best serve our clients in their professional roles by aggregating our intellectual property in one place – at Forrester.com.  Make no mistake: Forrester is committed to social media, and the number of our analyst bloggers is increasing, not decreasing. Analysts will still have the ability to blog outside of Forrester on topics not related to their coverage areas.

Hope this helps.

Best, Karyl 

Karyl Levinson | Vice President, Corporate Communications | Forrester Research, Inc.

Note that it is Forrester’s intellectual property: the analysts do not have a proprietary interest in the thoughts in their own heads, aside from whatever is rendered in their employment contracts, which probably state that Forrester owns everything in their heads right down to the neurons, and maybe has a claim on those, too.

Beth Harte weighs in, and takes the side of the company.

Josh Bernoff offers reasoning that I think is spot on and respectable:

What people need to understand is that Forrester is an intellectual property company, and the opinions of our analysts are our product. Blogging is an extension of the other work we do — doing research, writing reports, working with clients, and giving speeches, for example. As Sting said, ‘Poets, priests and politicians/Have words to thank for their positions.’ Analysts, too.

Josh and Cliff Condon, Forrester’s VP of Social Media were very clear to point out that Forrester analysts will be able to blog on the Forrester blog and can still have their own personal blogs and Twitter accounts. They just can’t blog or tweet about analysis that they are being paid by Forrester to work on for paying clients. Based on feedback from their “time-starved” clients, merging all analysts under one blog roof helps to give them one “go to” location. Sounds fair to me.

While some folks vehemently disagree, I am in total agreement. As a former Forrester client, I agree with their decision. Here’s why:

Value.

Clients pay Forrester A LOT of money to access their research, pragmatic advice and thought leadership. The value lies in that you cannot access this information elsewhere—that is why businesses are willing to pay a premium. If I could access Forrester analysts and their opinions, thought leadership, etc. elsewhere, for free, why would I bother paying? Or, if I was paying Forrester in the tens of thousands of dollars and then realized I could have accessed the information (in some format) for free, I’d be ticked off.  Why would Forrester reduce the value of what they offer by allowing analysts to cover it at no charge?

Let’s see: Forrester is paid a lot for the research, so is the price what makes it valuable? No, it should be it’s utility, right? But Beth seems to argue that Forrester is keeping the price high by stopping the analysts from giving it away for free. That means Forrester is cornering the market to keep the price high: it is an artificial scarcity, at the best.

But wait: there is a wide world of other analysts outside of Forrester writing blogs. Doesn’t that drive down the price already?

So maybe Forrester’s goal isn’t keeping customers happy about paying for analysis, after all.

Social Media Isn’t Free.

People have some odd notion that social media is free and that organizations should give away their thought leadership for free too. Wrong. There needs to a cap because at a certain point once people have had their fill, demand will diminish. Or, in another term people readily understand: Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free. This point goes back to value.

The bloggers in question were not trying to give away Forrester’s thought leadership away: in fact, they may have believed that they were advancing it. I know that my opinion of Forrester went up when Kim, Li, and Owyang were there. It didn’t seem like Forrester’s demand went down. Until those three left, at least.

Personal Brand Parity.

As most folks know, I am not a proponent of personal branding. Why? Because I think if people truly understood branding and what goes into managing a brand, they would run far and fast away from it. It’s not work for the marketing weak or weary. The one thing that people aren’t talking about is personal brand parity. And it’s already happening. Everyone is an expert in marketing, social media, communications, PR, etc… When everyone is saying the same thing there is nothing different from the viewpoint of a potential hiring company, client, etc. Why would Forrester allow their analysts to be diluted by parity?

So, people shouldn’t market themselves because it’s hard? Hmmm.

Brand parity — as far as I can grasp it — means that if others parrot what Forrester analysts are saying then Forrester will lose clients? But competitors already can get access to Forrester reports and analysis, right? They all look at each other’s stuff. So allowing Forrester analysts to blog independently would only increase that slightly, if at all. And even if it is true, shouldn’t Forrester be able to differentiate itself from competitors?

Intangibility.

Services don’t exist until they are consumed. As a result most service-oriented businesses can’t offer a sample of the specific service they offer. With their blog, Forrester can. It makes smart marketing sense then to have all of their different analysts offer a “sample” of what clients can expect when they select Forrester as their analyst service. Again, why spread that around where it might get diluted and devalued?

I don’t buy that spreading it around leads to devaluation, but this heads in the direction that Forrester is really pushing. They simply want all of the concepts, ideas, insights, and explanations that their analysts produce to be on the Forrester blog, so Forrester can have an indisputable claim of ownership to it.An employee has no private life — unless it is about food, or long distance running. This makes it almost impossible for the analysts to carve out a conceptual niche for themselves so they could someday want away with something they could own, free and clear.

What Harte, Bernoff, and Levinson don’t say explicitly is that Forrester wants to make it difficult, if not impossible, for analysts to leave the company, and set up shop as a competitor, which is specifically what Li and Owyang have done, and to a certain extent, what Kim hads done at Dachis Group. And this is just another of the tactics they are employing to tie the analysts up.  If you believe that Forrester owns people’s professional intelligence and knowledge, their voice and reasoning, then you’ll likely think they should do whatever it legally can do in service of that goal. If you beleive that analysts — like other people — should have legal claim to their own minds, you’ll likely disagree.

Imagine the scenario where a doctor perfects a new operation technique while working at a particular hospital, which later attempt to prevent him from performing that surgery anywhere else.

Forrester’s managers argue that they absolute control over ideas in their analysts’ heads is for the good of the customer, that this material that the analysts would divulge has high value, and that clients would value the analysts and the insights less if posted anywehere but on Forrester’s website. But it is not price that makes advice valuable: it is its utility. Creating scarcity — patents and intellectual property laws, for example — is a legal trick to drive prices up without increasing usefulness.

We have had a strange world grow up around us, where commonplace business processes can be patented. I forget the guy’s name who dreamed up the fast food technique of offering people a piece of pie or a larger drink instead of giving them back the change on their original order, but it’s patented, owned exclusively by him, and that’s loopy.

Our society has swung so far over to the ownership of everything that could possibly be imagined as an asset that intangibles — like an analyst’s understanding of the world of tech — can in essence be owned by an employer, in a bizarro sort of intellectual peonage. Yes, they are well-compensated, have health club memberships, and every other thursday massages, for all I know, but it’s still feudalism 2.0.

Update on Tuesday, February 9, 2010 at 10:01AM by Stowe Boyd  

Dennis Howlett has a post about this same Forrester mess, and mentions what I forgot to:

Contrast this with Redmonk and James Governor in particular. Redmonk is a sell side crew that largely advocates from within the developer community. There is nothing wrong with that. James often complains his firm is not taken seriously but even given its small size it grew organically by 15% last year. Recession is supposed to hit the small fish first but….? Take seriously? I won’t take words out of James’ mouth but I bet they would not be ‘ZD Net family friendly.’

Redmonk - and largely through James, is ridiculously active on Twitter - the place where its constituents meet. A good percentage of what James says is barely ’safe for work’ or even relevant to any work. It’s definitely not stuff I could directly quote on the pages of ZDNet. But…and this is THE point…it works. Clients benefit and developers love the firm. In other words, the Redmonk model of personal brand promotion combined with rock solid analysis/support for developers is proven as a business model. Can that be transmuted to the likes of Forrester or Gartner?

Yes, Redmonk practices an open research model, where all their thinking is publicly abvailable, and clients pay for their private insights behind closed doors and to support their open research as well. That is a truly new model.