The Rule of Win-Win

One of a series of agenda-setting essays in anticipation of BloggerCon 2003.

I started formulating a new rule, I call it The Rule of Win-Win, after listening to Chris Lydon's interview with David Weinberger. I realized that he and I share something important, we both believe in the power of links. And it's not just a philosophy of writing for the Web, it's also a philosophy of business and human relations. And it's elusive and hard to describe. And there are lots of people who don't subscribe to the rule. People who take but don't reciprocate. Somehow, intuitively, this is unweblike. Somehow David and myself have agreed to something, unknowingly, that not everyone else has agreed to. What we have agreed to, I think, is what I'm going to try to explain in this essay.

The Rule of Win-Win says that by choosing to participate in the Web, I can promote my own interests, but I must acknowledge the existence of others and their interests. I don't sacrifice the truth in furthering my cause. In fact, if you accept the Rule of Win-Win, the truth is your first cause, it comes before all others.

In a sense, if you belong to the Win-Win club, you're a sales rep for my stock. When I meet with someone whose feed I want, you get it too. So when I win, you win. When my stock goes up, so does yours. Our interests are aligned.

The purpose of the rule is to create trust and then build on it. I first wrote about this in Que Sera Sera, in 1996: "Nothing will be announced unless it can be shown that someone else will win because of what you're doing. How much happier we would be if instead of crippling each other with fear, we competed to empower each others' creativity."

A great example of this principle, at several levels, came earlier this week when Rogers Cadenhead pointed to Eugene Volokh, who refused to spin on behalf of the President, who he generally supports, because the President had clearly done something unethical. For some reason, when two Web guys who are advocates for different, contradictory causes, interact -- the integrity stands. Let's agree to be truthful first, then represent our causes after that.

Another example. Even though Glenn Reynolds and I have dramatically different politics, I'm in his blogroll, and he's in mine. Why? I can't speak for him (that's the Rule of Links) but he's in my blogroll to reciprocate for the flow he gave me, and because I want to demonstrate that I am open to all points of view, as long as they're respectfully stated. The Win-Win is he gets flow and I get flow, and your win is that you get more points of view.

An example on the other side. I invited Reynolds to speak at my conference, and as a result was tarred by left-leaning bloggers (who are crazy) saying BloggerCon was a right-wing conference. What's going on there? There are a lot of non-weblike people in the weblog world these days. Lots of people who don't play by The Rule of Win-Win.

Another counter-example -- Groove. Ray Ozzie writes an passionate essay about what comes next after email, but doesn't offer a win-win. His idea waits and waits to be adopted. It waits until he figures out that someone else will have to win for it to work. For it to really work, everyone else must win. It may even be, that if his goal is to return money to his investors, that he can't win. Sometimes it seems that way, since the financial hole he's digging is so huge.

A corollary to the Rule, there is no such thing as a Win-Lose. I don't know exactly why, but I've never seen it happen. Microsoft dominates Web browsers, but can't make the browser go anywhere after they own it. Lotus dominates spreadsheets, but fails to make the transition to GUIs. There must be a thousand examples. When you become the only winner, you plant the seeds for your own loss at the same instant.

The simplest example of this rule is the Reciprocal Link. If someone points to you does that create an obligation to point back? Absolutely not. But if you, at some point in the future, find something on the other site worthy of a link, you can say thanks for the link by pointing to it. There's no reason for this ever to stop. Linking is virtually free, and good for you, like Vitamin C.

If the Democratic bloggers could formulate such a rule, it would be that a Democrat would be in the White House in 2005. If the Republicans and Democrats could get together they might agree to have an election in 2004, so that people use their minds and the issues are discussed, that the lesson of the 2000 election, which ended in a tie, was too strong to overlook.

I don't think the formulation for the Rule of Win-Win is finished, but it's important to keep working on it, so I can stand up and say I support it, and so people who don't can attack us, and make it clear who they are. I want to know who I can trust, so we can do cool things together. There can be no sitting on the fence about this, imho.

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