Work 2.0 – The empty cubicle
Work 1.0 – Cubicled animals
Companies are something set up by an entrepreneur with passion and most of the time run with a strict hierarchy in mind. There is one boss and several sub managers that each have their own responsibilities. As workdrone you have your own subset of tasks to work in an ‘oiled’ machine.
Top management decides which direction the company will go and what you have to do. They choose the direction that is most profitable for them and you as workdrone has to do the tasks or you can’t make a living. The whole society is run by these kind of systems of bosses and managers.
This has the side effect that work is a necessary evil. You have to spend certain hours on a task and it is governed by many strict rules. The work drone has to be controlled. Many people work towards their free hours where they can spend their well earned money and have some fun. The opposite of work is leisure.
Work 2.0 – The cages disappear
But what if work depended on passion? What if you could decide what to do and follow what you were attracted for when you first decided to do your job. Why not give the workdrone complete freedom to pursue their ambitions?
By setting up what the worker wants to work on you create a workforce that gets to work with more passion. But why let the worker work in an office on standard hours? Why couldn’t (s)he choose his/her own hours? Why don’t people trust their workforce? We want passionate thinkers, not drones….
The opposite of work should be idleness… Working should be something fun which you could combine with your personal life. What if it was fun? What would happen to our productivity? What would happen to our society
Want to know what could happen when we set loose those boundries on work? A Brazilian company Semco has done it and makes a revenue of 160 million a year.
Read more about how this company has done it in the Seven-day Weekend by Ricardo Semler.
Related:
Hilco Said,
March 20, 2007 @ 1:14
Hi Jur,
Wanted to drop a line, both to remind you of the Peer Pitch on April 1st in Amsterdam (still interested?) and to forward you something up your alley:
I came across a new service: Coghead (in beta). It lets you built the software for your organization yourself (yay!). You don’t need programming knowledge (even yay-er) and it looks pretty (and usable) enough to me. Check it (register for betatesting) at http://www.coghead.com.
It could be very handy for any business2.0. In that regard, on of the ‘testimonial’ links on their site might also be of interest: http://money.cnn.com/2006/09/15/technology/disruptors_coghead.biz2/
JurMo.us » Top down vs Bottom up Said,
April 2, 2007 @ 22:25
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