Entrevista con Mitchell Baker, de Mozilla

Mitchell Baker, una mujer que está al frente de Mozilla Corporation, es entrevistada en The McKinsey Quarterly. Me ha encantado leer sus contestaciones, porque muestra que es posible otra forma de comprender un negocio. Una curiosa mezcla de orgullo, innovación, ética, utopía… Me ha encantado la entrevista, de verdad. La reproduzco con algunos comentarios y algunos subrayados en los propios textos, pero merece la pena que la leáis al compleo.

La introducción deja bien a las claras de qué va buena parte de la conversación:

Mitchell Baker, chairman and former chief executive officer of Mozilla Corporation, has devoted the past ten years to leading an effort that relies extensively on people outside her company—not just for creative ideas, but also to develop products and make decisions. The result: Mozilla’s Firefox browser, with 150 million users, has become a rival of Microsoft’s market-leading Internet Explorer.

Atraer personas involucradas con unos valores y con unas formas de hacer las cosas. Buscar la participación y generar los espacios en los que pueda darse. Interesante la observación que realiza acudiendo a valores:

Our mission is about keeping the Internet safe and open, but also about building participation. We do that by setting up frameworks where people can get involved in a very decentralized fashion. These frameworks embody our values and our goals and get embedded in other people’s minds. We attract people who care about those things, and they go off and participate in the mission in a very decentralized way.

En este sentido la mezcla de personal propio y voluntarios resulta un esquema realmente atractivo y diferente de lo habitual. Para quienes estamos acostumbrados a ver empresas «de toda la vida» es alucinante que alguien pueda plantear un modelo empresarial de esta forma:

The Quarterly: How much of Firefox’s success depends on people you employ as opposed to the broader group of volunteers?

Mitchell Baker: I’d say we need both to be successful. If you took away our employees, we’d be a good open-source project but nothing like a force on the Internet. If you took away the volunteers and everyone else, we would die. On Firefox, for example, 40 percent of the code is not from employees—and that’s after a recent batch of hires from our volunteer community over the past year. We had 25 employees two years ago and now have more than 120.

Es decir, que el modelo mixto funciona: personal propio y voluntariado. Pero parece que esto sólo es posible si se mantiene encendida una luz que apunta más allá del «negocio». Esta circunstancia la explica Mitchell Baker de forma sencilla:

I think that for the people who have kept Mozilla alive, the desire to maintain an open and participatory Internet has been very important. The Internet is hidden to human beings except for this piece of software we call the browser.

Y curiosamente juega con el concepto de la propiedad, que comentábamos aquí en el post anterior. Ella comenta que la gente que está desarrollando Firefox siente el producto como propio. Entra en juego, pues, el orgullo:

Second, our product makes a giant difference in the lives of our volunteers, and they take ownership of it. I don’t know if you could build this degree of motivation for something that really didn’t change people’s lives, something that they weren’t emotionally committed to. But the number of people who feel that Firefox is partly theirs is very high.

Un verdadero chorro de agua fresca lo que explica esta mujer. Formas alternativas a las tradicionales. Qué gozada.