photo credit: Mountain/Ash
They may not talk about it much, but deep down, every entrepreneur, freelancer and consultant confronts it at some point: loneliness.
When you’re out on the road speaking, or writing code from the confines of your home office, or slaving away with earphones in at the coffee shop, you can’t deny the fact that you’re isolated. You’re making it on your own, and as great as that is, part of you kind of craves human interaction other than the kind that comes from communicating with a client or speaking to a room full of accountants.
Corporate America with its miles of cube farms isn’t necessarily the antidote to this disease. You can feel just as isolated in a room full of 250 peers with similar name badges as you do by yourself on your sofa. So it’s not just that you want people around, it’s that you want the right kind of people around.
You want friendly water cooler banter. You want the practical joke or the staff birthday to celebrate. You want the brainstorming session, the creativity maelstrom or the high-level meeting where the real decisions get made.
Is there a way to take the good without the bad? Or are you just left with the facts of the corporate or the entrepreneurial life when it comes to finding community during your day job?
One concept that has taken root in many cities is that of coworking, where entrepreneurs and visionaries find refuge, solace and community under one roof. But is it a perfect solution? Or should someone who wants regular interaction and even friendship start applying for jobs at larger companies?
Tell us: what’s been your experience with coworking? Anyone out there been a part of one? Or, how do you make friends and influence people as an entrepreneur? Or as someone who’s part of a larger company?
photo credit: Jacob Bøtter
Recently I stumbled across an older article at HBR.org about cultural transformation within a company through fun and laughter:
We’re a company—maybe like yours—where having fun was long viewed with suspicion. Sure, a lot of start-ups and Silicon Valley companies have wild and crazy cultures, with pillow fights around the foosball table the order of the day. But ours is a traditional, Midwestern manufacturing company, one that didn’t even allow employees to have coffee at their desks until 1989. Although we pride ourselves on our technological innovation, we make industrial signs and other identification products, not PalmPilots or rainbow-colored iMacs. We are an old-line company that has always taken business very seriously—again, maybe like yours.
So perhaps it comes as a surprise that, for the past seven years, we’ve made fun an integral part of the culture at Brady Corporation—not simply as an end in itself but for serious business reasons. We’ve found that getting people to loosen up and enjoy themselves has numerous benefits. It can break down jealously guarded turf boundaries. It can foster an esprit de corps throughout the company and greater camaraderie on teams. It can start the conversations that spark innovation and increase the likelihood that unpleasant tasks will be accomplished. It can help convey important corporate messages to employees in memorable ways. It can relieve stress—and, heaven knows, we can all benefit from that.
And it made me want to ask you, our readers about your work environment: is your company environment fun? Do you laugh a lot at work? Is fun encouraged, or are you sneaking laughs with coworkers behind the bosses’ backs?
photo credit: sylvar
I once heard organizational guru Peter Walsh http://www.peterwalshdesign.com/ say, “When everything is important, nothing is important.â€
He was counseling a woman who had lost control of her possessions. All of her things were out on her front yard, and she somehow laid hands on her deceased father’s wallet which had been crammed in the back of a drawer. It was full of pictures of her and her siblings, as well as handwritten notes and other mementos. Bursting into tears, she begged to be allowed to keep it, even though she was in a boot camp of sorts to save her home from clutter.
Walsh reminded her that she had not even known the wallet was there for over 20 years. It made no sense to hold onto it. “But,†she cried, “this is so important! Please!†Gently he pointed out to her that she had not treated this item any differently than she had treated anything else in her house, from random domino pieces chewed up by dogs to moth-worn scarves from her kids’ childhoods 40 years ago. That’s when he laid it on the line. “When everything is important, nothing is important.â€
Unlike any other related advice, this stuck with me from the beginning. We so rationalize our attachments that often we lose our ideals to the idea that everything is important. I’ve had multiple experiences over the years where I felt pressure to push someone else’s goals, priorities, or even values up the totem pole in the interest of my own pereceived success.
There is no end to the parade of people who need you to believe that what THEY want from you is important. The question becomes, what is important to YOU? Which of the things you have filed away and stuffed into drawers – literal or metaphorical – are truly important to YOU?
photo credit: juanpol
Making its way through the business blogs this week is a discussion of an article Umair Haque wrote for HarvardBusiness.org blog musing about how Apple could produce its devices in the USA under fair labor conditions and how much more it would cost them and cost the consumer:
how much would it cost to produce a “Good iPod”? One not produced in a sweatshop, but under decent labour conditions. Like, for example, one produced in the USA — hardly a paragon of labour standards, but a starting point.
That’s what I calculated. The Sloan Foundation data estimate just $4 of an iPod’s cost is the final assembly in China. Using average Chinese hourly compensation costs, that’s about 2.7 hours of labour. I then used American hourly compensation costs to adjust for what that final assembly might cost in the States.
The results are surprising. An American made iPod Classic costs just 23% more than a Chinese made iPod Classic: $58 more, to be precise.
A 23% increase in price would almost certainly deter a subset of consumers, but one has to assume that the fair labor practices would attract a different subset, and one that would potentially exhibit loyalty to Apple as it demonstrates the values these consumers espouse. In the end, would it even out? Who knows. It’s a meaningful thought exercise, though, and moreover, it’s the kind of question American businesses should be asking in order to aid the recovery our own economy and workforce.
Hague goes on to say:
If goods cost what they should, we would consume what we could authentically afford, instead of overconsuming what we couldn’t. If their prices reflected real human costs, perhaps yesterday’s unsustainably large macro imbalances wouldn’t have built up in the first place. And that, from an economic point of view, would be good for everyone.
I couldn’t agree more.
But how about you? Does this seem like an unnecessary step, or is it a change Apple should be exploring immediately? What is your take?
