Why Kerika?

I often get asked what "Kerika" means, and why I chose it as the name for the company.

Well, as far as I know, Kerika doesn't mean anything -- at least not in English. As I mentioned in my last post, the original Kerika logo was a drawing of two flowers. Some rather insecure men thought this was too effiminate a symbol (!!), so I decided to come up with a company name that had some "hard" sounds in it: like a "K" or "G" that could help balance the logo.

My first choice was the word "Kalista". I was working with Polopoly in Stockholm at the time I decided to form the company (I used to be on their board of directors), and they had a receptionist named Kalista. I liked the sound, but unfortunately I couldn't get the domain name; turned out Kalista is a fairly popular Greek name.

Back in the US I tried playing with various anagrams of my family's names. My wife's name is Rika, and my daughter's name is Erika, following a pattern we had set earlier by naming my son Arjun (get it?)

One of the anagrams that came up was Kerika. The domain name was available, and when I tried a quick search on Google it didn't seem to have any negative connotations, although I can't be completely sure of that: it may have some meaning in Malay or Indonesian.

In marketing terms, what I did was use a word that I could "fill with meaning" because, at least in English, "Kerika" had no meaning to start with. This approach can work well when you are going to produce a product that is unlike anything that came before: you want a clean break with the past in terms of the branding and messaging so that you can position your new creation with encumbrances.

Ted Rall

Here is a cartoon by Ted Rall that's worth checking out.

Flower Power

Our original logo was a pair of intertwinned flowers (you can see it at the bottom of our "Legal Stuff" page); we now use a slightly different version as well: a single, larger flower in the same color schema of organge and yellow.

Flowers are an unusual logo in the software business: most people opt for something that is more electronic or industrial looking. We deliberately went in the opposite direction, because our product philosophy was based upon an "organic" approach to managing ideas and projects rather than a industrial or military philosophy.

Traditional project management and collaboration tools are founded on a command-and-control philosophy. There is a strong emphasis on hierarchical control of resources and tasks: roles are fixed; strategies are fixed; tactics are fixed. The goal is get the entire team marching inexorably in one pre-determined direction, even if that means marching right off a cliff. Microsoft Project epitomizes this heavy-handed approach.

At Kerika, we look at ideas as having a life of their own: they spring up serendipitously, and they evolve and branch off in unexpected directions. Just like plants.

We are not interested in controlling people and pigeon-holing their ideas; we want to facilitate the creative process, particularly when this takes place within a distributed team.

Besides, I really like the flowers.

Crazy Talk

Welcome to the Kerika blog. And keep your fingers crossed: this is my first attempt at writing a public blog, even if it isn't my first attempt at pontificating online.

Back in the late 90s, when I was with Morgan Stanley in New York, I was asked to become an internal evangelist for the Internet. The fellow who was CIO told me: "I have a feeling the Internet is going to be big. Some folks understand what this is all about, but some don't. I just don't want it to be said that the Internet came along on my watch and we missed the boat. So go out there and make sure everyone gets on board with this whole Internet thing."

That started me off on one of my more frustrating assignments: I had no idea how to evangelize something that I saw as being blindingly obvious in the first place. After stumbling through the process for a while, I decided to create an Intranet site where I would post a small essay every day. These little missives would highlight how other companies -- mostly big companies, the kind one might expect to be stodgy and regressive -- were getting on board with this "whole Internet thing", thereby suggesting -- ever so politely -- that maybe it was OK for a large, traditional investment bank to get with the program as well.

That was a lot of fun. I found out there were all these folks in the bank, flying below the radar in the sense that they weren't senior poobahs, who were very interested in how the firm could embrace E-Business. My little essays found a receptive audience among people I had never met, and that was very rewarding and encouraging: suddenly I didn't feel like I was pushing that rock up the hill all by myself.

I didn't know it at the time, because we didn't really have any name for the process of writing a series of short online essays with links to supporting materials, but I was blogging...