BUSINESS RESEARCH

Transcript Coding

By
Gurjeet Singh (S183F0014)
Submitted To:-
Dr. Kalindi Maheshwari
Key Words: Change, Creativity, Leadership, Success, Failure

Literature Review:
1. The 8 step process of leading change: From the article, author
conveys the 8 steps which lead to important changes in organisation.
The process of these steps is to first to make the urgency of change,
then make a guiding coalition of people who trust each other and who
are respected in organisation, then develop a vision from them and
strategy for change. According to the author, it’s important to talk
about the change and to address any query regarding change. Look
for the various details which are needed to be in the favour of the
change and also reward people making change happen and quickly
remove barriers. Start with the projects which are sure shot and don’t
require help from strong critics of change. For every success find out
what went right and what can be improved.
2. A Comparison of Leadership Theories in an Organizational
Environment: In this article author discusses about 3 types of
leadership theories namely: Situational leadership, Path-Goal
Leadership, Leader-Member theory.
3. Instrumental Leadership: The Nuts and Bolts of Leadership: This
article briefly discuss about transactional and transformational
leadership and discusses in detail about the instrumental leadership,
which is the gap between the two previously mentioned.
Craig Newmark
Founder, craigslist
Livingston: How did craigslist get started?
Newmark: It’s now been over 11 years. I don’t know exactly when I
started craigslist. I do know that in ’94 I was at Charles Schwab and I was
working with computer security and some other stuff. But my real
contribution there was evangelizing the Internet—telling people that’s
how the equity brokerage business would work someday. I saw a lot of
people helping other people out, and I figured, “Well, I should do
something.”

In early ’95—I don’t know when—I started sending out notices about cool
events—what I thought were cool events—to friends. It may have been
10 to 12 people, CC list, using Pine, and that worked out pretty well.
These were usually arts and technology events, like the Anon Salon or
Joe’s Digital Diner. More people wanted to be added to the list. They were
calling it “Craig’s List.” Over time, they suggested other kinds of things,
like jobs or stuff for sale.

In the middle of ’95, the CC listing broke and I had to give the thing a
formal name and use a listserv. Somebody offered Majordomo and I was
going to call it “SFEvents,” but the people who were calling it craigslist
said, “Keep calling it that. It will signify that it will be personal and
quirky.” They were right. That’s a microcosm of our whole history: people
would suggest things to me, and then I would figure out what seemed to
make sense—what a lot of people were asking for—and then I’d do it.
Even now, with a whole company behind it, we listen.

We do stuff, we follow through, and then we listen more. What we do is

almost 100 percent based on what people ask us to do. The biggest
entrepreneurial lesson I’ve learned has been that you really do need to
follow your instincts. I trusted some people who my instincts were telling
me were untrustworthy, and in some cases they proved to be very
untrustworthy. But that’s fixed now. I got lucky in that I realized
relatively early that I’m not a good manager.

Jim Buckmaster is CEO and he does a great job and that’s why my title is
currently “Customer Service Rep and Founder.” Sometimes I exploit that
George Costanza magic I have and I act in a glamorous figurehead role,
where I’ll do public speaking or whatever. But I spend 40 hours a week or
more doing customer service. I was doing that minutes ago. I’ll be doing
so again in minutes.

The biggest single project I have now is dealing with misbehaving

apartment brokers—rental brokers in New York City. The biggest
problems are different forms of bait and switch, where they post an ad for
an apartment in the no-fee section, but they actually charge a sizable fee
for renting it. The standard is 15 percent of a year’s rent, which can easily
be $3,000 or $4,000. That’s a lot of money. So we can handle some
forms of that. The bigger forms will require better forms of reporting,
which I’m starting to think about, but which might not happen until later.

Livingston: Take me back to 1995. Craigslist began as an email list, but at

some point you decided to put it online. How did you program it?

Newmark: Sometime in late ’95 I realized that, “Hey, I have a lot of this
email sitting in folders.” At this point, I think I’m operating on a Solaris
system and I’m using Pine. I have email in several categories and I can
write Perl code, which turns the email logs into web pages. So I had
instant publishing. Everything has grown since that. I was, in fact, using
Pine as my database tool until late ’99, at which point we switched to
MySQL. Through the first years, probably through ’98, it was mostly
Solaris, although there was a period of maybe a year with Linux. But we
used something in the UNIX/Linux family all the time. We used Apache
relatively early. Perl, now more mod_perl. And MySQL since ’99. Now
we’re running it on over 120 Linux servers—small, cheap machines. We’re
primarily Linux on the desktop, with some Mac and some Windows. We do
worry about liability issues relating to the use of Windows, since it’s pretty
insecure. We don’t have much sensitive data, but we have to regard
Windows as a source of compromise.

Livingston: When you put craigslist on a website, did you get a positive
response pretty quickly?

Newmark: Our traffic has always been slow but sure. We’re the tortoise,
not the hare. Now and then we’ll get a surge of growth, but it’s been slow
but steady.

Livingston: Were you just running craigslist at night out of your home?

Newmark: It depends on what part of my life it was. But even when I was
contracting, I would work an arrangement with the people I was working
for. Now
and then, I would look at my email and get stuff done. I would put in a
half hour. For example, I would be doing my contracting work, I’d get
stuff done, then I would take a half hour off to do craigslist, and then I
would get back to work.

Livingston: This was run out of your apartment?

Newmark: Mostly.

Livingston: Did you need other people’s help?

Newmark: At the end of ’97, we were getting about one million page
views a month. At that point, Microsoft Sidewalk—or their PR people—
approached me about running banner ads. I had decided to not do them,
because they’d slow the site down and they were kind of dumb. Banner
ads are, more often than not, kind of dumb. More importantly, I thought
about my own values and I was thinking, “Hey, how much money do I
need?” I was already doing well as a contractor. So I figured I would just
not do that. At that point, I got the first inkling of what I now call my
“moral compass.” I better understood it later—particularly since the
presidential elections, because then I realized that people were claiming a
moral high ground who actually didn’t practice what they preached, and
it’s about time for people of goodwill to reassert their idea of what’s right
and what’s wrong.

Livingston: Once you decided that the site was good the way it was and
you didn’t need any more money, you stuck to that?

Newmark: Yes, and expanded on it. In the ’98/’99 timeframe, we took a

good look at the morality of charging for something. We asked people,
“Hey, what do you think we should charge for, if anything?” And they
said, “The principle is: charge people who would otherwise be paying
more money for less effective ads.” They specifically said, “It’s cool to
charge for job ads and to charge landlords or apartment brokers.” Beyond
that, there was some mix of opinion, but we stuck with that.

Livingston: Did you come up with the policy on your own?

Newmark: Primarily the community dictated the policy. And they weren’t
shy about sending the feedback in. I’m mixing together a couple years
worth of feedback—’98/’99 and beyond, but primarily those years. In the
end of ’97, I was approached by some volunteers, and they said, “Hey,
let’s run craigslist and see if we can run a nonprofit.” To make a long,
painful story short, that effort failed. I kind of knew it was failing,
probably midway through 1998, but I was in denial. A couple of our
biggest job posters tookme out for lunch and said, “Hey, this isn’t
working. Get real and make this more serious.” It took me a couple
months, but I got out of denial, made craigslist into a real company—got
off to an OK start. But again, it wasn’t until Jim became management that
we got good.

Livingston: When you say you made it into a real company, do you mean
incorporating it?

Newmark: That was part of it, but the real thing was me going full-time
and getting full-time people in all the areas we needed, including billing,
customer service, technology.

Livingston: So you were still doing contract work while running craigslist?

Newmark: For a few months at the end of ’98 through like a month or so
of ’99, I actually joined a startup, but left it because I had to get serious
about craigslist.

Livingston: You joined another startup?

Newmark: Remember, in the conventional sense, we were never a

startup. In the conventional sense, a startup is a company, maybe with
great ideas, that becomes a serious corporation. It usually takes serious
investment, has a strategy, and they want to make a lot of money. We’ve
done something very different. I’ve stepped away from a huge amount of
money, and I’m following through. In ’99, we made this real. I did make
some more mistakes, but by 2000, with Jim handling a lot of stuff, we’ve
made only the occasional mistake since.

Coding:

Colour What it Represents

• “But my real contribution there was
evangelizing the Internet—telling people
that’s how the equity brokerage business
Innovation
would work someday. I saw a lot of
people helping other people out, and I
figured, “Well, I should do something.” “

Company’s Value • That’s a microcosm of our whole

history: people would suggest things to
me, and then I would figure out what
 seemed to make sense—what a lot of
people were asking for—and then I’d do it.
Even now, with a whole company behind it,
we listen.

Violet • The biggest entrepreneurial lesson I’ve

learned has been that you really do need
to follow your instincts. I trusted some
people who my instincts were telling me
were untrustworthy, and in some cases
they proved to be very untrustworthy.

• Now and then, I would look at my email

and get stuff done. I would put in a half
Work Towards
hour. For example, I would be doing my
Company’s Path contracting work, I’d get stuff done,
then I would take a half hour off to do
craigslist, and then I would get back to
work.

• I thought about my own values and I

was thinking, “Hey, how much money do I
need?” I was already doing well as a
contractor. So I figured I would just not do
that. At that point, I got the first inkling of
what I now call my “moral compass.” I
better understood it later—particularly since
the presidential elections, because then I
Challenges/ realized that people were claiming a moral
Obstacles faced high ground who actually didn’t practice
what they preached, and it’s about time for
people of goodwill to reassert their idea of
what’s right and what’s wrong.
• I’ve stepped away from a huge amount
of money, and I’m following through. In ’99,
we made this real. I did make some more
mistakes, but by 2000, with Jim handling a
lot of stuff, we’ve made only the occasional
mistake since.

Analysis:
From the interview above the main objective of Newmark’s life’s work was
clarified as well as the he briefly explained the obstacles and the problems
that he have faced in order to make his vision a reality.
References:

1.Sarros, J. C., Cooper, B. K., & Santora, J. C. (2008). Building a Climate for
Innovation Through Transformational Leadership and Organizational Culture.
Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies,15(2), 145-158.
doi:10.1177/1548051808324100

2.Cote, R. (2017). A Comparison of Leadership Theories in an Organizational

Environment. International Journal of Business Administration,8(5), 28.
doi:10.5430/ijba.v8n5p28

3. Kotter, J. P. (2009). What Leaders Really Do. Discovering Leadership,35-

43. doi:10.1007/978-1-137-24203-7_4