Mitchell Baker and the Firefox Paradox

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But for Baker and much of the Mozilla team, it has always been about more than building a better browser. It's the future of work and competition that's at issue. More leaders, Baker contends, are recognizing the ways in which communities can drive organizations. The question is not whether this approach can work, but how best to implement it. "I think the answers will apply outside the software industry," she says. And many observers agree. "Companies tend to treat consumers as having to be manipulated to make money off them," says the University of Washington's Krishnamurthy. "Mozilla's message is that if we all work on this together, and we allow people to express their frustration with the status quo creatively, we can take back control. Any underdog company can feed into that."

Harvard's O'Mahony believes that some companies are already borrowing from Mozilla's playbook by trying to get consumers not merely to swallow marketing pitches and buy products but also to help design products and shape and disseminate pitches. Topps' (NASDAQ:TOPP) Bazooka bubble gum brand, sneaker maker Converse, and MasterCard (NYSE:MA) all have asked the public to come up with videos and other marketing-related efforts; Procter & Gamble (NYSE:PG) and Kraft Foods (NYSE:KFT) have looked to consumers for help with product development. "Mozilla has shown that organizational boundaries can be more permeable and transparent and that you can develop a relationship with a community that takes an interest in how you organize and manage," says O'Mahony. By the same token, she adds, Mozilla also is blazing a trail for not-for-profit organizations that could benefit from behaving more like for-profit businesses.

O'Mahony notes that many entrepreneurs might have trouble following Baker's lead when it comes to openness. "She listens, she debates, she changes her mind, she adapts, she allows herself to be convinced by outsiders," she says. Don't take O'Mahony's word for it. Anyone can have a window into Baker's inner debates via her expansive blog, which is unusually thoughtful and candid. In one entry from last year, Baker mused on how an entrepreneur typically has a broad vision--she calls it a "sense of possibilities"--for a company that prompts a leader to try to exert control over everything that goes on. "My case is very much the opposite," she writes. However, she adds, "there is of course a piece of the Mozilla project where I have a very strong sense of the possibilities and a determination to see things proceed in a way that makes sense to me. That area is the organizational structure of the project. How do we integrate the various constituencies? How do we organize ourselves? How do we provide enough structure to build top quality products and still provide room for individual initiative and serendipity?"

If fretting over the quest to find the ideal organizational structure is Baker's favorite blog topic, her second favorite would be her long-standing effort to master the trapeze. In one entry, she describes trying to nail a maneuver 22 feet up, repeatedly failing until she finally identified the kernel of fear within her that was keeping her from kicking hard into the flip. She faced down the fear and did it right. At such moments, she writes, "…a moment of 'float-i-ness' or seeming lack of gravity appears. At these times it feels like one has all the time in the world. Last night I learned again how a small amount of fear, seemingly too small to matter much, has far greater impact than one might imagine." Here, and elsewhere, Baker seems to be hinting at the source of the resistance to the effort to do something that is fundamentally different than what has been done before. What is stop energy, after all, but a fear of flying?

David H. Freedman is Inc.'s technology columnist.

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David H. Freedman

A Boston-based contributing editor, Freedman is the co-author of A Perfect Mess, which examines the useful role of disorder in daily life, business, and science. His other books include Corps Business: The 30 Management Principles of the U.S. Marines; At Large: The Strange Case of the World's Biggest Internet Invasion (co-authored with Charles C. Mann); and Brainmakers: How Scientists are Moving Beyond Computers to Create a Rival to the Human Brain.

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