Trust in the Age of Twitter

January 30, 2009 By

One of the most interesting problems around today is modeling trust levels in a relationship. The NY Times today has an article on the ettiquete of “unfriending” on Facebook for instance. Facebook has a binary 0/1 solution. eCommerce sites have a narrow, transactional rating model that works well enough in a limited context in the aggregate. Requests for references ask the blunt question: would you hire this person again? But all these approaches are blunt instruments. We need better approaches for the age of Twitter. Here’s my first stab. What do you think?

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Enculturation Recapitulates Civilization

January 23, 2009 By

When I was a kid, we lived in a big, drafty bungalow-style house, verandas, mango trees and all. The dining room floor was some sort of dull red matte-like surface. It worked perfectly as a chalkboard. I would frequently cover the entire floor with chalk drawings. It strikes me that the way I drew back then was rather caveman-like. Atavistic mixes of symbols, metaphors and icons. Here’s a scene I drew frequently. Not quite a buffalo hunt.

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The Cloudworker, Layoffs and The Disposable American

January 18, 2009 By

(warning, this post is much longer than usual, so here is a PDF version)

It has been bitterly cold here in the Washington, DC metro area for the last two days. Experiencing cold as ‘bitter’ is as much a cultural and emotional reaction as it is a physical one. This is my first winter in the DC area, which likes to think of itself as the ‘South,’ creating expectations for itself that nature unsympathetically shatters. An appropriate setting for trying to write a sober article on cloudworkers, their relation to layoffs and Louis Uchitelle’s 2006 book, The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences. If the cold is bitter today, my attitude towards one of my pet subjects, the future of work, is bittersweet. On the one hand, I am receiving a steady trickle of news of layoffs affecting friends around the world. On the other hand, my own modest efforts at punditry on the subject of work are heading in cheerful, hopeful directions. My friends at cloudworker.org, just announced the results of their December contest. Here is my favorite entry, by Second Prize winner Dave Raymond, a musician who chose to represent his cloudworking lifestyle with this stark picture of being on the road.

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His note on the picture: “I have no desk, I have no office, I have no schedule, I have no home.  I have a small family that is far away, and a few friends that I see rarely. I travel the United States all year, and collect inspiration to make the next reason to continue traveling.” Terse and unaffected romanticism worthy of the landscape that inspired Walt Whitman and Jack Kerouac, and ideally representing the paradox of cloudworking: individualism that is at once radical and socially situated. The picture is a perfect American cloudworker backdrop: Big Sky, green grass and a hint of modernity in the electric cables. Perfectly proportioned.

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Allenism, Taylorism and the Day I Rode the Thundercloud

January 7, 2009 By

Today, January 7th, was a brutal bitch of a day, and it was a great day. Every grim reality of the cloudworker lifestyle, the dark side of everything from mobility and laptops to eating on the run and elite car-rental status, hit me with full force. Both my New Year’s resolutions were hammered by gale-force winds. The business of life hit many potholes, and the game of work threatened to fall apart on me. But I not only survived, I actually made it a better-than-average day. I made it all work. Truly, it was the day I rode the thundercloud (I stole the phrase from a really old Reader’s Digest article I read as a kid).

And that’s why as my first post of 2009, I will offer up a meditation on the life-work of David Allen, he of Getting Things Done (GTD) fame, and his new book, Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and Business of Life. I’ll tell you all about the role of Allen in the emerging landscape of the future of work.

Here’s the short, illustrated version. In 1911, Frederick Taylor invented the management model of Taylorism, which became the operating system of the The Cathedral, where the Organization Man was born, with William Whyte becoming his biographer. Six Sigma is the last hurrah of Taylorism. Ninety years later, In 2001, David Allen, with Getting Things Done, created Allenism. A model of work that is well on its way to becoming the operating system for the antithesis of the Cathedral, The Bazaar, home of the Cloudworker, whose biographer is undoubtedly Dan Pink (I just came up with the word, Dan’s written three books about cloudworkers). Eric S. Raymond, who wrote The Cathedral and the Bazaar about the open source movement, billed himself an accidental revolutionary. I am more modest. I’ll call myself the accidental wannabe-word-coiner, and hope that ‘cloudworker’ at least merits a footnote in the history of work. Anyway, here’s my picture explanation of Allenism vs. Taylorism:

You doubt that GTD is the future of work? The original GTD book has been seeing increasing sales every year since publication and is currently at an astronomical #53 on Amazon. With MIAW, a tipping point has been reached. The future of work is now here.

But to understand it, we have to zoom down from these century-level dynamics, what Allen would call the 50,000 foot level, to the runway level: 8:00 AM, the morning of 1/7/09, Wednesday, hump day, when the thundercloud hit me.

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How to Make New Year’s Calibrations

December 15, 2008 By

You read that right. Calibrations, not resolutions. Until you know a) exactly where you are, b) where you are already going, b) with how much momentum, c) and how much discretionary steering authority, resolutions are just rituals. For New Year’s party drunkards. You, of course, are a paragon of follow-through, but forward this to all those friends of yours who clearly need help. It’s an illustrated five-step program. If you start right now, you might actually be ready to make real resolutions by first-drink-time on December 31st.

Step 1: Calibrate PERSPECTIVE

Resolutions are supposed to be significant, even lofty, life-course-changing intentions. The only way you’ll know what counts as significant for you is to look back as far as you can, until your memories vanish into the foggy cloud of babyhood. For me, that means late 1974 foggily, late 1975 practically.

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Future-of-Work Mini-X-Prizes at Cloudworker.org

December 1, 2008 By

The easiest way to predict the future, as Alan Kay said, is to invent it. Some friends of mine, over at a stealth design/innovation startup called WilsonCoLab, decided to start a site dedicated exclusively to this task at www.cloudworker.org, which beta-launched today with a neat contest (seriously flattering to have a word you coined taken this seriously!). Cool logo, eh?

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The Ideology of the Organization Man

November 23, 2008 By

Recap: Last time I introduced William Whyte’s 1956 classic, The Organization Man within a modern context, and we got as far as Chapter 1. We saw that Whyte set himself the project of describing, carefully if unsympathetically, the collectivist, anti-individualist ‘social ethic’ that provided the foundations for modern corporations. In this post, I will cover Chapters 2-5 (Part 1 of the 7-part, 29-chapter book).

Here’s a short version of the argument in Part 1, titled the Ideology of the Organization Man. Intellectual culture and practical concerns conspired, between 1940-1960, to create a pseudo-scientific socialist culture within the capitalist corporation. What began as an instrument to co-opt unionism ultimately swallowed middle management, and the organization man was born. Where the previous century, 1840-1940 had been dominated by colorful figures from the top and bottom — robber barons and fiery unionists — post WW II American culture was defined and dominated by the middle layers. Whyte argues that this layer managed to suck the soul out of leadership and grassroots passion alike. Like the labor union culture, and unlike the robber-baron culture, it was group-oriented. Unlike the labor unions though, it was not primarily about unity against oppression or about worker rights. It was primarily about a corporate deification of the values of community: belongingness and togetherness. A belief in cooperation and consensus for their own sake.

Let’s do the longer version, and as we do so, keep this deja vu question in mind: are ‘social’ media falling victim to the same collectivist dangers today?

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The Organization Man by William Whyte: Introduction

November 18, 2008 By

William Whyte‘s 1956 classic, The Organization Man is far too embedded culturally to be ‘reviewed’ today, even as a classic. The book can only be read within its context, and reconstructed for 2008. It is also much too dense and nuanced to dispose off in a single post, like I do most books. So I am going to start my first-ever multi-part series devoted to a single book; the book that began the study of worker archetypes, 52 years ago. If you want to follow along, make sure you buy the 2002 reissue edition, with a great foreword by Fortune Magazine executive editor, Joseph Nocera. Since I have to do a bit of setup, in this first part, I’ll only get as far as Chapter 1. In future parts, I’ll try to do 3-4 chapters at once.

Let’s start by reviewing the cultural impact of the original. The best-known artifact of course, is Apple’s famous 1984 commercial (YouTube video here), which owes as much to Whyte as to Orwell for its arresting imagery.

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Spanning Silos by David Aaker

November 14, 2008 By

The full title of this book, Spanning Silos: The New CMO Imperative, might lead you to believe that it is a very narrow take on a particular organizational issue (silos) within one enterprise function (marketing). You’d be wrong. This is a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing book; a book about foundational issues in organization theory masquerading as a specialist read for marketers. I have previously written about silos (see The Silo Reconsidered), so this was definitely not a blank-slate subject for me. I was prepared to be underwhelmed, but to my pleasant surprise, I thoroughly enjoyed the book. It is a quick and easy read, but surprisingly substantial.

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Is There a Cloudworker Culture?

November 9, 2008 By

When one of my regular readers IM’ed me, “I hope you write about cloudworker culture next,” I almost panicked. All I had in my head at the time was a dark three-word post: “there isn’t one,” accompanying a sort of desperately humorous image: Alberto Giacometti’s famous sculpture Chariot, holding a Starbucks coffee cup and a Blackberry at her hip. The original sculpture suggests a sort of sombre existential loneliness. Add Starbucks and the Blackberry, and the gravitas of the original degenerates to an anxious farce. A tragic farce, because the figure is still lonely. My modest photoshop skills turned out to be up to the task, so here is the mashed-up image I started with, in my head.

Mashup elements courtesy MOMA, Starbucks and RIM

Cloudworker by Rao (2008); Mashup elements courtesy MOMA, Starbucks and RIM

Immersed in the farcical post-existential loneliness of the Cloud, the cloudworker’s cultural life just might be no more than an impoverished buzz of emoticons. The highlights of his cultural life might be fleeting, unsatisfying encounters with co-cloudworker strangers whose gaze he holds for a second longer than necessary at Starbucks, but does not engage. A condition worse than that of Chuck Palahniuk’s hero in Fight Club, who at least found connection and community by beating other men to a pulp.

If the Giacometti sculpture is too high-brow for you, consider a more popular literary image: Mark Twain’s unforgettable King and Duke characters in Huckleberry Finn, drifting down the Mississippi. Rulers of a Micro-Balkan virtual kingdom on a raft. Farce once again.

But then I figured I was being too dark, and did come up with a bunch of ideas that suggest that a cloudworker culture is emerging. I figured I’d let you ponder the question for yourself before sharing my answer.

So what do you think? Is there a cloudworker culture, or are all us cloudworkers doomed to the socially and culturally empty life suggested by my art mashup?