The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson is a series of three books: Quicksilver, The Confusion and The System of the World.
These three books together comprise the greatest literary achievement it has been my pleasure to read.
Read them! Read them! Read them!
Work is good. Work gives our lives meaning, and if we choose to work a lot, well, we’re probably happier for it.
Work is important. You would never accept a romantic relationship that was “sort of OK” or stay with a spouse who is “you know, nothing special, but I’m used to him/her”. So why should you accept anything less than true fullfilment on the job?
Work is changing. From long-term commitment and slowly and predictably climbing the career-ladder to a gold watch after 25 years of faithful service to rapid job changes, lateral career moves, free agents and entreprenurism.
And this is all good.
This is basically the point of Richard Reeves’ book Happy Mondays: Putting the Pleasure Back into Work. You’d be hard pressed to find an author more determinedly and forcefully optimistic about the changing work environment, and I think his book is an important and valid contribution to our efforts to construct the future of work.
My long-distance friend Mike Wagner put me onto this book, and I was very glad to read it – especially as a counter-weight to The Corrosion of Character by Richard Sennett, which looks at the exact same phenomena and basically concludes that it’s all bad – as you may have guessed from the title.
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Traci Fenton pointed me to a new magazine called Worthwhile, Work with Purpose, Passion and Profit. Sounds like my kinda publication.
Ron Avitzur was working on a project at Apple, when the project was cancelled and he was fired in 1993. What does a real geek do facing unemployment and the terrible notion of having worked on a project for a year only to see it go to waste? Well, a real geek keeps sneaking into the building, working for free, enlisting various other people and ends up creating a piece of woftware that ships on 20 mio. Apple computers. Here’s Ron’s summation:
I view the events as an experiment in subverting power structures. I had none of the traditional power over others that is inherent to the structure of corporations and bureaucracies. I had neither budget nor headcount. I answered to no one, and no one had to do anything I asked. Dozens of people collaborated spontaneously, motivated by loyalty, friendship, or the love of craftsmanship. We were hackers, creating something for the sheer joy of making it work.
It’s the wonderful, funny story of Ron’s illicit work for free for Apple, of his many scrapes with bureaucracy and security and not least of the generosity of all the people who decided to help, and it demonstrates once and for all that salary isn’t the motivator we think it is. Read the whole story here.
This book had, and still has, me thinking hard. What is life? What is death? Are some lives worth more than others? When is it ethically correct to take innocent human life? I found myself having to reconsider all my previous answers to these questions, and while I still can’t get my mind around the radical new ethic that Singer proposes in the last part of the book (also the most provocative part), I can definitely see that the man and the book has a point. The book WILL make you rethink life & death, it’s very well written, very clearly thought out, very well presented and (astonishingly for a philosophical work) highly readable.
It used to be obvious when a person was alive or dead, but as so often happens, new technology forces us to reevaluate existing ethics. TO mention just a few examples, respirators (invented right here in Copenhagen) allow us to keep people alive who would otherwise have died; we can now freeze eggs, sperm cells and even embryos and revive them later; and the increasing succes rate of organ transplants create an impetus to take organs from a still living body – thus killing the donor.
In Rethinking Life & Death, The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics, philosopher Peter Singer offers a wildly fascinating look at current medical practices in western society, and demonstrates how they already violate our traditional, judeo-christian based ethic of “the sanctity of life”, which states that human life is sacred, and that consequently it is always wrong to kill innocent human beings. At its most extreme, this ethic holds that abortion is murder, euthanasia is murder (even with the patient’s consent), and we can never allow a human to die even in the case of brain death or people in persistent vegetatice states (where the cortex, the seat of consiousness, has been destroyed).
Singer offers countless reasons why the belief that human life is sacrosanct leads to absurd choices, and succesfully demonstrates that even those who promote that view don’t follow it.
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I’m reading some of the new books that I just got from Amazon, and one of them opens with this insight:
It’s impossible to manage or even know what’s going on in the depths of the organization. I mean, each of us can fool ourselves into thinking we’re smart and running a tight ship. But really the best we can do is create a context and hope that things emerge in a positive way, and this is tough because you can’t really see the impact your decisions have on people. So you just kind of hope what you want to happen is happening and the sound confident when telling others.
– Anonymous executive vice president quoted in The Hidden Power of Social Networks.
This is probably a widely shared sentiment, yet some people still think that leadership is just a matter of controlling an organization, setting goals and following up, knowing your metrics and following your strategy. I’m fairly certain that the VP quoted above knows all of these methods and uses them and he still feels in the dark about what really goes on “in the depths of the organization (a wonderful expression that – made me think of the dangerous depths of some wild jungle). The issue is not whether we can or cannot control the organization (though I reamin convinced that it is impossible). The issue is that we shouldn’t even try to. Any organization that is centrally controlled is bound to be highly ineffecient and (what’s worse) absolutely no fun to work in.
So leadership is not about control. Herb Kelleher, former CEO of Southwest Airlines, was asked how he controls his organization. His answer is classic:
Control: Never had it, don’t want it.
If you’re interested in Appreciative Inquiry (AI), the Appreciative Inquiry Handbook by David L. Cooperrider, Diana Whitney and Jacqueline M. Starvos is the book to read, because:
* It’s edited by the foremost AI people on the planet
* It’s relevant to every level of AI user from novice to expert
* It covers both the theory and the practice of AI
* It’s clear, readable and very thorough
* You can read it as a book or use it as the ultimate AI reference
If you don’t know AI already, you should consider looking into it – it’s one of the two most important tools I know of for creating positive organizational change (the other being Open Space Technology).
Almost anybody who works with HR, organizational development, motivation or similar areas has heard of the Pike Place Fish Market. This is basically a fish shop, that one day decided to be world famous. As the owner tells it:
The first step for us at Pike Place Fish was to decide who we wanted to be. In the words of John Yokoyama:?In one of our early Pike Place Fish meetings with Jim (our coach from bizFutures), we began an inquiry into “who do we want to be? We wanted to create a new future for ourselves. One of the young kids working for me said, ?Hey! Let’s be World Famous!? At first I thought, ?World Famous?what a stupid thing to say!? But the more we talked about it, the more we all got excited about being World Famous. So we committed to it. We added ?World Famous? to our logo and had it printed on our shipping boxes.
This got picked up by some consultants, who created the Fish! concept, including a video and a series of books. But now, the Pike Place Fishmongers have told their own story in their own words, in the book Catch!: A Fishmonger’s Guide to Greatness by Cyndi Crother. And their version ain’t bad either.
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From Quitting the Paint Factory, a beautiful essay by Mark Slouka, from the November 2004 issue of Harpers Magazine.
When I was young, my parents read me Aesop’s fable of “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” wherein, as everyone knows, the grasshopper spends the summer making music in the sun while the ant toils with his fellow formicidae. Inevitably, winter comes, as winters will, and the grasshopper, who hasn’t planned ahead and who doesn’t know what a 401K is, has run out of luck. When he shows up at the ants’ door, carrying his fiddle, the ant asks him what he was doing all year: “I was singing, if you please,” the grasshopper replies, or something to that effect. “You were singing?” says the ant. “Well, then, go and sing.” And perhaps because I sensed, even then, that fate would someday find me holding a violin or a manuscript at the door of the ants, my antennae frozen and my hills overdue, I confounded both Aesop and my well-meaning parents, and bore away the wrong moral. That summer, many a wind-blown grasshopper was saved from the pond, and many an anthill inundated under the golden rain of my pee.
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