67 Million in Revenues, 20 Million In Expenses, 74 Million in Savings, 100 Employees, and Over 120 Million Users

It sounds impossible to me as well. But these really are the numbers from Mozilla, the open source project that started at Netscape, was morphed into a non-profit foundation, and most recently, the Mozilla Corporation – a taxable entity owned by the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker has led this organization throughout its crazy history, as she worked at Netscape on “the project” (as they still call it), and – even after she was laid-off by AOL (which bought Netscape), she worked for free to transform the project into a non-profit organization. It is no accident that Mitchell is so widely praised for her courage and creativity as a leader. Check out these stories in INC and Time. 

Mozilla is most famous for its Firefox Browser, which has about 20% market share in the U.S., 30% in Europe and Australia, and 15% in South America, Africa, and Asia.  The browser is now translated into 44 languages. Although Mozilla only has about 100 employees, their open source model means that they have thousands of people who develop the product and tens of thousand who test it. Some of the people do it for free, because they admire the product, are part of the community, believe so strongly in the model of decentralized participation, Some are also paid by other organizations – like Google and Yahoo!  --  that have an interest in having a browser that is an alternative to  Microsoft Explorer.

In any event, I was inspired to write this post by a kind “annual report” that Mitchell put up on her blog. Check it out and think about what Mozilla is doing, and all the lessons that the company has to offer. Some that occur to me include:

1. As working becomes increasingly distributed and mediated through technology, they provide an extreme case of product development done by people who rarely if ever meet face-to-face. Yet they are able to enforce very strong norms of cooperation and mutual respect – - and commitment to quality that exceeds most “normal” organizations.

2. There is pretty much complete transparency about what they are developing and even what they are thinking about developing -- there has to be because, otherwise, the people who do most of the work won’t have any idea what to do.

3. But it isn’t a purely “wisdom of crowds” situation. There is massive decentralized participation in developing and testing, but a small and extremely knowledgeable set of people have authority over what goes into the final version – although if the community doesn’t like what they do, the feedback is swift and intense. This leads me to wonder about how other, more traditional, organizations  need to strike a balance  between inviting  a wide range of people with diverse ideas into the tent versus deciding which ideas to  implement versus discard.   At some point, a decision needs to be made somehow. Sometimes the "market" decides, but  having a few strong-willed and smart people who make final decisions appears to be a hallmark of the innovation process -- Steve Jobs being exhibit one here. 

4. Trying to match-up the very fact that Mozilla exists –- let alone prospers –- with traditional economic perspectives that emphasize pure self-interest isn’t easy to do. You end-up bringing in soft concepts like pride, identity, passion for the product, intrinsic rewards and so on. Creative economists can and have attached described these as aspects of self-interest, but to me, it stretches the concept so much that it becomes nearly useless. As one of my mentors used to say in graduate school, if a concept is broad enough to cover everything, then it means nothing. Indeed, I believe that according to many of our existing behavioral science theories, Mozilla should not exist, let alone flourish!

Finally, Mitchell would be the first to say that there is much more to organization than just her – indeed, we’ve worked folks at Mozilla in the d.school including COO John Lilly and legendary open source marketer Asa Dotzler, and of course, there are the tens of thousands of people in the community who develop and test the product. But Mitchell still strikes me as an intriguing alternative model for leadership, as her vision is so different from tradition approaches – which I think is why she has been the right person to steer Mozilla through such deeply weird times. She also writes her own blog, which is fantastic. And that is her on the trapeze to the left -- another sign of courage and resolve!

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