Handling Things

I think that this whole issue was handled completely wrong. Jason should have sent an email to the company first and foremost, and if they didn't do anything about it THEN it would be ok to put it out there publicly.

You have to give the company the chance to right their wrong. It very well could have been an overlooked detail and again it could have been exactly what Jason claimed. However, Jason didn't give them a chance to make it right before attempting to drag their names through the mud.

Heck, even one of the managers at 37s wrote on their comments section that when they have customers complain, they encourage them to send them emails and not post on some site out in the middle of the ether. That is basically what Jason did, instead of complaining about the site to GS he complained about it on his own site where the GS staff had to go and find it. Hypocrasy much?

I think the error here is in remarks like these:

From Croft: "You’d like to think these kinds of companies would be supportive of one another, especially in times like this."

There's an underlying assumption here of some sort of community - or even family - with commensurate obligations. In the eyes of some, Fried has somehow breached a sort of familial allowance, making him the bad guy in their eyes. In the way most people wouldn't generally go first to the police if their teenage cousin stole something from them (but instead work it out among the family), Fried shouldn't have publicly mentioned that GS wronged them, but should have kept it in the family and out of the sight of outsiders.

Except, of course, there's no family here. "Small, web-centric companies" isn't a community, it's just a commonality.

To continue the example above, here's no obligation upon you to cover for some stranger or even acquaintance's theft of your belongings. If you opt to announce where other people can hear you, "Alright, you stole this thing of mine; I want you to bring it back," instead of going to the cops, you've hardly the bully who's handling it wrong - you're being generous.

From Dimon: "I think the problem is still the perception that the GS team is made up of fundamentally bad people, and I assure you that’s not the case."

The fallacy here, that actions are innocent and harmless unless they're carried out by "fundamentally bad people", is very common and just as harmful. A company (or association, or government, or any organization) doesn't have to be staffed by escapees from Mordor to do harmful and abusive things - nor even outright unethical things.

People defending GS from criticism on the grounds that they're obviously not monsters (for heaven's sake!) miss the point that it doesn't take monsters to hurt other people, even in relatively elaborate ways. Human beings rationalize, human beings justify, and human beings miss the forest for the trees.

Put these two attitudes together, and we get the response that Fried should have kept things in the family; after all, those GS kids obviously didn't hurt anyone with their peccadilloes.

I posted this in the last thread, but the connection here is more clear:

Paul writes in his startup FAQ:

"The one book we encourage startup founders to read is Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. It's critically important for anyone in business."

If you read that you get that one of the central points is: don't put people on the defensive. Guy Kawasaki in Art of the Start has a paragraph labeled "Wait When You Hate":

"Although you should always answer e-mail in under twenty-four hours, there is one case where you should wait at least twenty-four hours before responding: when you're angry, offended or argumentative. E-mail written when you're in these moods tends to exacerbate problems, so delay your response."

One of the salient points that seems to be getting lost here is that the damage, at least as perceived by Jason (and to a large extent acknowledged by GS), was done in a very public way. So, simply fixing the problem going forward - as everyone acknowledges GS did, quickly and effectively - only addresses half the issue from the "wronged" party's perspective.

If you buy Jason's point, this pretty much had to be handled in a loud, public way. On some level, of course, there's no undoing what's done. Certainly a good number of 37s customers who got a bad impression from having their complaints "ignored" by 37s aren't going to notice this blog-spat, and their negative impressions will remain. That's life. But by bringing this to light publicly, and making an issue out of it, at least some of those people will have their impressions corrected, which is only fair.

All that said, could the phrasing have been a little more nuanced and less accusatory? Of course. Was Jason right to assume evil rather than genuine ignorance or lack of perspective? Probably not. (Though it might be reasonable to ask at what point ignorance, when it's so overwhelmingly in your favor, becomes negligence).

But the notion of "37s should have just talked to GS privately, which would have resulted in the same fixes" misses a good part of Jason's argument, which is that a public "offense" (for lack of a better word) ought to be addressed publicly.

Jeff Croft is the only reasonable adult in the whole thing