(Credit:
xperthr)
...or just a workaholic?
In a poignant post, Seth Godin explains the difference:
"A workaholic lives on fear. It's fear that drives him to show up all the time. The best defense, apparently, is a good attendance record.
A new class of jobs (and workers) is creating a different sort of worker, though. This is the person who works out of passion and curiosity, not fear.
The passionate worker doesn't show up because she's afraid of getting in trouble, she shows up because it's a hobby that pays. The passionate worker is busy blogging on vacation... because posting that thought and seeing the feedback it generates is actually more fun than sitting on the beach for another hour. The passionate worker tweaks a site design after dinner because, hey, it's a lot more fun than watching TV.
It was hard to imagine someone being passionate about mining coal or scrubbing dishes. But the new face of work, at least for some people, opens up the possibility that work is the thing (much of the time) that you'd most like to do. Designing jobs like that is obviously smart. Finding one is brilliant."
That sounds good and reminds me of the "four-hour work week," as laid out in Tim Ferris' best-selling book: "How to trade a long-haul career for short work bursts and frequent mini-retirements?" Ferris' book is a manifesto for the mobile lifestyle, and a detailed manual for outsourcing your work and disassembling a cohesive, consistent work life into ultra-flexible and ever-changing roles and tasks. This allows him to live a nomadic and excessive private life in many microverses: "I race motorcycles in Europe," "I ski in the Andes," "I scuba dive in Panama," and "I dance tango in Buenos Aires."
A similar concept is the "slash lifestyle," a term to describe the identity concepts of people who are no longer satisfied with just one professional identity and instead mash up professions and hobbies into a hybrid work/life fulfillment that unleashes their true ever-changing self: "Doctor/author," "Mom/consultant," and "Bellydancer/Scientist" are just some of the possible combinations.
Yet slash-lifestyle and passionate worker attitude have some ramifications. There is a dark side to all the Kumbaya freedom of the new passionate entrepreneurial self. More and more A-list bloggers (i.e. Steve Rubel and David Armano) are admitting a certain blogging fatigue. "Blogging is an addiction," a friend (and avid blogger) told me the other day, "it is a passion that can kill you." So does passion not equal happiness? And how do you draw the line? In a Fast Company cover story, Mike Rowe of "Dirty Jobs" offers some good advice: "Never follow your passion but by all means bring it with you."
Mash, Yahoo's way of quietly saying farewell to Yahoo 360, is at first glance a somewhat uninspired attempt to catch up with Facebook. Even the name is boring--Mash. Don't mix it up, by the way, with Mosh, Nokia's mobile networking site (currently in beta) and Mashable, the social-networking blog. Mash (invite-only as of now) looks like a cross between Facebook, MySpace and Netvibes--and it also has a bit of wiki DNA: Anyone you grant permissions to can edit your profile or add modules they think are relevant to your profile. Besides that, nothing new.
To be fair, it may not be a super-innovative move to come up with another social-networking site, but if you were a Yahoo exec, wouldn't you do the same? As one of the burgeoning social networks may potentially emerge as the new Internet, and yes, maybe the new operating system, Yahoo simply can't afford to not jump on the bandwagon and not leverage the viral powers of its broad user base.
As a user though, I have mixed emotions. I have slowly built my LinkedIn network over the years (although all my European friends remain on Xing, formerly OpenBC), jumped on and off Friendster, and just made it onto Facebook, as a very late adopter, and now I should join yet another network? What are the benefits? Besides a few neat features, what makes Mash truly different than the leader of the pack? Can I at least import my Facebook buddy lists? Is there really a market for multiple social networks? Can you, my loyal friends, please stay with me and not emigrate again?
And yet, there is hope: Every new social network is a chance to learn from the mistakes you made on past sites (when your invitation-happiness compromised the quality of your network). It's a chance to reinvent yourself, relaunch your identity, and start a new life. So I guess I will give it a try.
(Credit:
Marginal Revolution)
According to a McKinsey & Company study of US economic activity, "Raising the productivity of employees whose jobs can't be automated is the next big performance challenge." The study argues that "as more companies come to specialize in core activities and outsource the rest, they have greater need for workers who can interact with co-workers, partners, and vendors," supported by highly personalized organizing and communication tools. 40 percent of labor activity, says McKinsey, comes not from making things or from traditional transactions but from what the consultancy calls the "Interaction Economy," which it defines as the "searching, coordinating, and monitoring required to exchange goods or services." This interaction economy emphasizes collaboration, social intelligence, tacit knowledge, and ambiguity, as much as it values workers' ability to make individual decisions quickly and organize tasks and time efficiently -- in a nutshell: it puts a much stronger focus on the non-formalized, individual productivity or "micro-productivity" of employees. McKinsey says that this area of productivity involves the highest-priced labor of the most valued knowledge workers and yet remains the hardest to measure and manage.
It is also the least commoditized part of the economy, for a good reason: it would be counter-productive to decrease the level of entrepreneurial freedom at the micro-level by trying to implement streamlined de rigueur organizing tools. More companies are starting to realize that it might be a better alternative to provide a vast array of tools and leave it up to the workers to tailor them creatively to their specific needs - the human being and not the application as the meta-organizer. "You're not trying to automate the task a human does; you're trying to complement what the human is doing," says James M. Manyika, a senior partner at McKinsey, who co-authored the study, in a recent New York Times article about personal organizing tools and company mash-ups. Micro-productivity applications such as Scrybe or 37 Signals may indeed lead to more productivity gains than big companywide applications such as enterprise resource planning or arcane knowledge management portals, which because of their rigidity too often limit innovation and creativity. And BusinessWeek reports that E*Trade, Siemens, JDS Uniphase, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, and Coldwell Banker Commercial are all using enterprise mashups in some capacity. Just as personal computers released the gridlock of corporate information to employees, personal organizers and mash-ups are empowering the individual worker to effectively engage in the soft yet critical tasks of collaboration, organizing, communications, and interaction -- and let them choose themselves how to best accomplish that.
This is an interesting premise as this new "tacit technology" combines seemingly antagonistic convergent and divergent elements (as so many innovations do these days). The demand for a meta-organizer which combines myriad schedules and calendar applications is contrasted by the demand for personalized and individualistic organizing options that are divergent because they consider the differences in the user's preferences." David Weinberger, author of the book "Everything is Miscellaneous," argues: "What we need is the ability to associate the people and the times and the places of our lives with the broad messy context of our lives." He adds that these new productivity tools are "an early but important step toward giving individuals at companies a better way to manage their increasingly complicated existence."
The recognition of micro-productivity is part of a broader trend -- the renaissance of a human-centered economy that introduces new organizational and business models to re-cast the old Man vs. Machine story. Consumers want it real and human -- post-industrial, excellent, unique, provocative, sentimental, opinionated, boutique, artisan, (eco-) epicurean, handcrafted, hand-wrought, warm, attentive, devoted. And companies are getting it. From user-centered design (Apple, Cisco, HP, etc.), user-generated content (Blogs, Wikis, Slideshare, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Twitter, etc.) to human-powered search (ChaCha, Mahalo), crowdsourcing, GeekSquad (call 1-800-GEEK-SQUAD - of all places, a technology company - and hear how the use of a real human voice and humorous options helps render the company real), to the new social and green responsibilities of the "high-purpose company," and a new quest for "authenticity" -- the human is, once again, back at the center of attention and the economic value chain.
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