As you may know, Phil and I started a consulting practice in January. Throughout my years of blogging here, I have made it a practice to update readers on how changes in professional life may affect the writing that I (and now we) do on the blog. I don’t believe there is any such thing as “objective” analysis. Analysis is all about perspective, and perspective is derived from your point of view—where you stand, and so on. If we are going to be fortunate enough to continue earning your trust, then it’s important for you to understand our perspective so that you can anticipate and account for any limitations that are inherent in it. As it turns out, running a consulting business creates both some complex ethical challenges as well as some exciting opportunities for the blog. Now that Phil and I have had some time to understand the landscape better, this seems like a good time to give you an update.
One of the compliments of e-Literate that I treasure most of all is when people tell me that our writing is “fair.” Often this praise comes attached to some acknowledgement that maintaining “fairness” can be a challenge in certain employment circumstances. A common one I get is, “I can’t believe how you managed to stay so fair and independent when you were working for Oracle [or Cengage].” The truth is that maintaining some distance in those situations wasn’t so difficult, in part because in both cases I had great managers who protected me from internal pressures. Also, there was only a subset of issues I wrote about that Oracle or Cengage even cared about. It was fairly easy to anticipate what the conflicts of interest might be and how I would have to deal with them. Being a consultant is much more complex. Just about any university or company that we write about could be a future client. Some of them may be past or present clients. This is further complicated by the fact that we are also now categorized as analysts by many vendors and therefore receive a kind of courtship from them. For example, when I worked for Oracle, I could not accept an offer for somebody to pay for my travel. Either Oracle paid or I didn’t go. But it’s increasingly common practice for companies to pay for analysts expenses to visit conferences, and now that Larry Ellison isn’t writing the checks, that travel reimbursement can mean the difference between us going and not going.
Phil and I end up talking about ethics a lot, both in our blogging and in our consulting. We’re still learning as we go, but here are a few of the rules that we apply to handle conflicts of interest:
- When we first engage with clients, we let them know that we will not blog on e-Literate about the area that we are consulting on with them, either during or for some period after. (We may, in the future, blog about it on the MindWires site, where our relationship to the client and the work are less murky and where people are explicitly coming to learn about what we do commercially.)
- If we blog about a current customer—not the area that we are consulting on, but maybe some other aspect of the company—we disclose in the post that they are a client of MindWires Consulting.
- If a company pays for our expenses to go to their event, we do not bother to disclose that in any blog post, but we will disclose if we are paid for our time or paid speaker fees.
But the bottom line is that there is no set of rules that will guarantee freedom from conflict of interest, or even reliable guidance on when to disclose. For example, what if we’re blogging about a university that isn’t a client now but was recently? Or a company that we’re talking to about potentially becoming a client? At the end of the day, Phil and I are going to have to rely on our own judgment on a case by case basis as the best tool we have for staying transparent and fair. You deserve to know that as your read our work and decide for yourselves how to weigh and filter our analysis.
As always, we welcome your feedback, now and as we go forward.