Why Blog?

I have a simple team; there’s just three of us in the core office.  I count a much larger number as part of our TAC, and there are folks I communicate with regularly who are working to develop some of our spin-offs.  But all these other folks have a ‘arms-length’ relationship to LiftPort.  My core team is Jeremy, Griffin, and I.  

So how do I run this team?  I have looked back at the best elements of the LPG 1.0, when there were 14 of us and we had good days and bad days and were collaborating on building the “biggest thing, ever!”  And those were fun, exciting times of significant accomplishment.  So I look at that and asked myself which part of that first company was I going to bring forward into the next iteration.  There are many aspects, our work-ethic, commitment and values, Formal Mondays’ and cook-outs, will all be highlighted in the new company.  But there’s also the dreaded blog…

You see, even though we had more than 700 postings in the old company, writing the blog was never very popular amongst the team.  They posted reluctantly; they posted infrequently.  I reasoned with the team, I cajoled, I argued, and occasionally I held their paychecks at ransom until they posted…  And some of those posts were brilliant.  Some were historically significant.  Some were goofy and charming and naive and visionary.  (I THINK we have the complete achieve, if we can, we will repost them as part of the museum.  I’ll try.)  But these posts were our history, the history of the project, and represent the first-person accounts of the people where were actively trying to make the world a better place.
That first team didn’t succeed.  There are lessons to be learned in that failure.  Reading those posts brought tears to my eyes, a couple years ago, while I was grieving about what transpired.  I have tried to learn those lessons and apply them to LPG 3.0.
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So where does that leave us?  The new team must blog.  It’s a job requirement – a minimum of once/week.  (Certainly, more is encouraged!)  But still the question remains, why bother?  “because I said so” wasn’t much of an answer when I was a kid, so I am not about to inflict that answer on these interns.  In my mind, the ‘why’ is really simple.  We blog, because we are pioneers.  We tell our stories in the same way that diary’s help us understand the holocaust, that letters between statesmen help us understand the founding of the United States, and that letters from the battlefield help us understand the cost of war.  My team blogs because we are pioneers building a powerful tool; a tool which will change the world, and all the solar system, and the standard of living of all our brothers and sisters.  I think this is an important story.

Michael Laine,
​President, LiftPort Group