Vote for ‘Cloudworker’ Among Plantronics Contest Finalists!

October 30, 2008 By

Dear readers:

For the first time, I am asking a specific favor of you. My contribution, ‘cloudworker’, to the Plantronics contest to invent a new term for ‘telecommuter’ has made it to the top 10 finalists list from over 500 entries. The winner will be chosen by popular vote at: www.plantronics.com/telewho

You can vote once a day between Oct 30 and Nov 7. I honestly do think ‘cloudworker’ is the best of the lot.

My request, please bookmark the link above and vote as many of the days over the next week as you can, and please email your contacts/post this to facebook etc. to get me some word-of-mouth votes

Here is some boilerplate text you can use in your emails/re-blogs/Facebook profiles etc.

[Read more…]

Cloudworker Economics

October 29, 2008 By

I started my exploration of the changing nature of careers with a micro-level view of its archetypal figure, the cloudworker. In this second part in the series, let’s take a look at how the cloudworker fits within the economy. The main argument of this article is that the dominant distinction in labor economics, unemployed vs. employed, is slowly getting displaced by a more fundamental one: default vs. exceptional career paths. Think of it as an emerging long tail in the space of career “design patterns” where there are a huge number of sui generis career (and lifestyle) designs. My contention is that this new watershed is primarily being created by technological forces, not economic, demographic or cultural ones, and that this has important consequences. So within my model, the cloudworker is primarily characterized by a technology-enabled my-size-fits-me career. The economic antithesis of the cloudworker is the organization man. Both organization man and cloudworker will co-exist in the future, but the latter, until recently characterized only by negative definition (“not an organization man”) will drive the economy. Here is a picture of where the notion of cloudworker fits, among related conceptual models. The x-axis represents level of dependence on technology for economic production, and the y-axis represents the degree to which the worker is tethered, financially, to a single institution. In this map, ‘cloudworker’ differs from others in being a technology-dependent definition.

Cloudworkers on the My Size Fits Me Map

Cloudworkers on the My Size Fits Me Map

[Read more…]

The Cloudworker’s Creed

October 23, 2008 By

In which we offer up a lyrically-hyperlinked (and determinedly purple) paean to the Future of Work. Even as economic storm clouds gather, a grimly pragmatic worker archetype is floating in on that other sort of cloud, which just came off beta status. Advance apologies to readers on a low-fat diet. Sometimes I just want to cook adjective-loaded long sentences.

The telecommuter is dead; meet the cloudworker (I made up the term for a contest). Commuting being an artifact of the work-life style of the Organization Man, the term telecommuter absolutely deserves to be retired in favor of one that captures the richness of what is actually going on. The cloudworker is the prototypical information worker of tomorrow. He overachieves or coasts remotely, collaborates or backstabs virtually, and delivers his gold or garbage to a shifting long-tail micro-market defined only by his own talents or lack thereof. The cloudworker manages personal microbrand equity and network social capital rather than a career. Over a lifetime, through recessions and bubbles, he navigates fluidly back and forth between traditional paycheck employment, slash-work and full, untethered-to-health-insurance free agency.

Cloudworker

Cloudworker

To paraphrase William Gibson, the cloudworker is already here; he is just unevenly distributed in the workforce.

[Read more…]

Mastering the Hype Cycle by Fenn and Raskino

October 16, 2008 By

You know you’ve got an interesting idea on your hands if it helps you build a fairly compelling case that the Amish are more sophisticated meta-innovators than Fortune 100 CEOs. Mastering the Hype Cycle by Jackie Fenn and Mark Raskino of Gartner, manages to do that about a third of the way through. Now, the Hype Cycle (the Wikipedia entry is pretty decent) is one of those intuitive and obvious-seeming ideas that makes you wonder (with 20-20 hindsight), did that actually have to be invented? (answer: yes it did). It’s been Powerpoint fodder for a few years now, and I’ve used the thing myself, to justify proposals. You can think of it as the older, bigger, badder brother of Godin’s Dip. If you aren’t familiar with it, it is a data-validated curve that looks like the picture below, and captures the typical pattern of hype associated with an innovation as it diffuses through the economy:

Hype Cycle (from Wikipedia, Creative Commons license)

Hype Cycle (from Wikipedia, Creative Commons license)

[Read more…]

The Headcount Myth and the Value of Overbooking

October 7, 2008 By

Fourth quarter, when a young information worker’s thoughts turn lightly to thoughts of headcount. I’ve argued before that the idea that headcount (a.k.a HC in managerese) measures information worker bandwidth is a myth. The interplay of strengths and the ambiguity of definition of information work conspire to make it so. Headcount persists as a fixture in resourcing discussions because it signals relative priorities (and because we haven’t found anything better). So far. Here I’ll argue for a far better way to optimally use human bandwidth: true overbooking via continuous planning, coupled with strategic quitting. First, let’s understand why headcount is a dumb measure of resource capacity and bandwidth, using one of my famous drawings. This one shows how 3 different workers (assume they are equally valuable) might react to 3 different loading conditions, and how much they can drive themselves before it becomes too much and their capacity “overflows.” Think of capacity overflow as “brain muscle failure.”

The Headcount Myth

The Headcount Myth

[Read more…]

The 10 Immutable Laws of Nanoeconomics

October 1, 2008 By

I am about to go all Hammurabi on you and deliver unto you a 10-law summary model of the economy that is taking shape around you at a frenetic pace today: the nanoneconomy. I call it that because its fundamental behavior is determined by the behavior of the human individual rather than the firm (the practical unit of analysis in microeconomics). Many of the dominant themes of this blog — virtual geography (aka globalization) the future of economics, the changing nature of work, and the role of the individual in the economy, all came together for me last week as I pondered the lessons of the political-economy (I love that archaic term) train wreck that is the US Congress’ bailout plan for Wall Street (and Main Street, we are being told). Let me transcribe my tablets for you. For fun, I am calling these laws immutable, but I hope some of you treat this as a mutable blog-meme discussion of the economy, and propose your own amendments.

[Read more…]

A Generational War (Guest Post on Enterprise 2.0 Blog)

September 29, 2008 By

I just posted a piece titled Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: A Generational War as my first guest post on the Enterprise 2.0 blog. Go check it out. Post your comments here if you like, since the E2.0 folks don’t have open comments. Here’s an excerpt:

You’d think Knowledge Management (KM), that venerable IT-based social engineering discipline which came up with evocative phrases like “community of practice,” “expertise locater,” and “knowledge capture,” would be in the vanguard of the 2.0 revolution. You’d be wrong. Inside organizations and at industry fora today, every other conversation around social media (SM) and Enterprise 2.0 seems to turn into a thinly-veiled skirmish within an industry-wide KM-SM shadow war. I suppose I must be a little dense, because it took not one, not two, but three separate incidents before I realized there was a war on. Here’s what’s going on: KM and SM look very similar on the surface, but are actually radically different at multiple levels, both cultural and technical, and are locked in an undeclared cultural war for the soul of Enterprise 2.0. And the most hilarious part is that most of the combatants don’t even realize they are in a war. They think they are loosely-aligned and working towards the same ends, with some minor differences of emphasis. So let me tell you about this war and how it is shaping up. Hint: I have credible neutral “war correspondent” status because I was born in 1974.

Check out the rest of the piece. I admit I am being deliberately provocative in this piece to a certain extent. Given how long my pieces tend to be, I need some spice to engage a new set of readers!

Crowdsourcing and The Wisdom of the Crowds

September 25, 2008 By

When my review copy of Jeff Howe’s Crowdsourcing arrived in the mail, I figured I’d use the opportunity to finally finish my half-read copy of James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds (2004) and do a two-in-one review. It took a good deal longer to write than I expected, mainly because I kept getting distracted by other connections I wanted to explore, which threatened to turn this post into an extended and discursive riff on all sorts of other subjects. I finally firmly trimmed off the wayward thoughts and put them into other post drafts, so luckily for you, this is a relatively focused two-for-one book review.

[Read more…]

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

September 18, 2008 By

[This detailed, chapter-by-chapter précis of Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions is a guest post by George Gibson, a colleague of mine at Xerox. George originally posted it on our internal blogs as a series, and I found it so much fun to read, I asked if I could repost it on ribbonfarm. So here you go.]

Chapter 1: The Truth About Relativity

This was clearly the most interesting of the books from my summer reading list. Let me be clear that though I don’t buy all of the points Dan tries to make, I find them all interesting and worthy of thought. With any luck we can begin a real discussion of his ideas and observations in the commentary. That means I’ll attempt (not always successfully) to keep my opinion out of the body of this piece, and reserve that for any commentary that might develop. The real point here is to get you interested enough to read the book yourself.

[Read more…]

How to Measure Information Work

September 11, 2008 By

Continuing my exploration of information overload, in this piece, I’ll further develop the argument that it is not the real problem, but a mis-framing of a different problem (call it X) that has nothing to do with “overload” of any sort. Most people who start their thinking with the “information overload” frame look outward at the information coming at them. One aspect of the real problem is terrible feedback control systems for looking inward at your work. On the feedback side of things, we measure capacity for work with the wrong metric (headcount, or in shorthand managerese, “HC”). I’ll explain why HC is terrible at the end of this piece (and I’ve also written a separate article on HC).

So, can you measure information work? Yes. Here is a graph, based on real data, showing the real cumulative quantity of information work in my life during two years and some months of my life, between January 2004 and about March 2006.

Quantity of work over one year

Figure 1: Quantity of work over one year

[Read more…]