It’s an old web tale: if you work at Apple’s headquarters, One Infinite Loop in Cupertino, California, you may find yourself in the lift one day with Steve Jobs, Apple’s billionaire CEO. It’s reputedly one of Jobs’s tendencies to say to any unlucky lift passenger, ‘What do you do for me?’ If he’s not happy with the answer, it’s out the door you go. As the story goes, this is called ‘getting Steved’.

What is it that you do?

While most people don’t work at Apple, and supposedly tyrannical CEOs like Steve Jobs aren’t the norm, ‘What do you do?’ is a question any intranet manager should be able to answer, and answer with more than, ‘I’m the intranet manager’.

What does your work entail? What benefit does the intranet (which you work on developing) bring to your organisation? How do you measure the intranet’s effectiveness, and thus its value to the organisation?

If you can’t articulate these points, or the best you can think of right now is, ‘The intranet helps communication and knowledge flow in the organisation’ or something similarly hazy, it’s time to sit down and get thinking about a ‘elevator pitch’ for you and your intranet. This means the creation of a short, to-the-point explanation about your work, which can be useful in a variety of ways and situations, not just elevators.

[CM Briefing 2009-22 by Alex Manchester, read the full article]