A friend of mine Bill Blair (who worked for the Electric Power Research Institute and loves to track these things) pointed out to me the other day that they now count 3 billion users of the Internet. With Earth’s population at around 6 billion - that means 50% of the planet uses the World Wide Web. In 1969 the first message was sent over ARPAnet -- the world's first multiple-site computer network between UCLA and Stanford Research Center. With a series of inventions that made it possible, in 1989 there were100,000 connections on the Internet. Now half the planet has adopted a process that has only been in existence for 20 years and only 40 years ago was just the start of an idea for information sharing of knowledge between universities. more...

for the full version, click the link to our audio blog ‘faster, faster’ http://www.newworkplaces.com/podcast_blog.html

April, 2007

You know that a problem has reached the extreme when Consumer Reports takes up the mantle. So important is this topic that I thought I would pass it along.

This is a “rant”. I borrow the term from my good friends Charlie and Jim. My rant is based on a frustration. I think most rants are. My particular frustration is my inability to access my blog control panel, leaving me unable to post new blogs. My level of frustration has increased as I experience the game of Customer Service Dodge Ball between my web site host and my blog host. Each is working very hard to evade the ball of responsibility thrown at them to fix my access problem. First prize is a “It’s not my problem/job, we don’t support it” medal. So far the web host is winning with their strategy of flat out “We don’t support it”.

There are two things at issue causing. First, there is they have broken the implied, no, expressed covenant that makes business work. If I pay you for something, what you provide me should work. In the above case, this covenant has not only been broken, but is costing me exponentially more than what I paid for it.

I have always found those dire predictions of how people who work at home are less likely to be promoted extremely mystifying. The current rash of doom and gloom articles has again circulated on the topic. Here is what I don’t get. I mean – if you are a global, or even just a national or regional company or just have another building across town, how do you expect to retain your distributed workforce if you only reward those employees who work with or report to co-workers who sit next to each other?

Work from home, work in another part of the world or work in a building next door – what’s the diff?! It’s all about working remotely via technology. Seems to me companies are shooting themselves in the foot if they only reward are those who are sitting within line of sight. The employees out there on the front lines are often the ones making it happen and are the future of the company.

Maybe it is the old military model. Those out in front are the expendable foot soldiers. While the important generals and lieutenants stay behind directing the show. If the supposition is true, that if you work remotely you won’t be promoted, then it would appear that those employees out on the front lines aren’t being shot by the competition but by friendly fire, in the back by those safe in the corporate office

The big mistake these companies are making is that in this business battle for good employees, when their managers take pot shots at them, they don’t crawl back wounded or die. If they are worth their salt, they will just jump sides. It’s a different world out there folks. Yes – loyalty is dead, especially if it only rewarded for those sitting in the company desk. What you see as expendable collateral, others see as assets.

What are the assets of an accomplished remote worker?
• The ability to work independently.
• A self-starter
• Highly self-motivate
• Good distance communication skills
• Able to collaborate with across multiple platforms
• Technologically savvy

The skill requirements requested on most job postings. Yet the culture that fosters this behavior is not one of out-of-sight, out-of-mind. Just as a child tied to proverbial apron streams does not grow up to be a strong, self-reliant adult, neither does an employee. A boss watching all the time to see if employees are doing their jobs does not foster strong, independent work habits and processes.

Additionally, if you reward those who stay in the office and then, by default, you punish those who are brave enough to leave the nest to explore and work in new places, and you are setting up a culture that is risk adverse. Risk adversity does not foster creativity and innovation. The very things companies are complaining they don’t have anymore. Just like those baby birds and children who, once taught survival techniques, are then gently pushed out of the nest to live, survive on their own and to achieve their own accomplishments, so should companies do with their employees.

Instead of rewarding those safely staying behind company walls, management should be teaching their employees the skills of independence and self-reliance. Encouraging and supporting them to work in any location and rewarding them for their success so that their valuable brand of productivity stays with the company.

I tried to take off the last week of the year. The intent was to do some of things I have had on my list for a while and never found the time (read: made the time) to do. These things were not chores, or unwanted tasks. Well, some of them were – like cleaning out my email inbox. But even in that project was really about taking the time to read the many interesting things I receive, but keep filing away in favor of the more immediate items.

In fact, most of what I had on the list would take large chunks of time – finishing the many books I have started, doing numerous sewing projects, taking a trip down south, antique Fenton glass hunting. As Dec 31st drew closer and the list remained long, I went into deadline mode and decided to prioritize. What was the most valuable outcome of each and which had the best ROI? I can tell I am really in need of a break when I start ranking my leisure time in terms of return on investment.

Yet there it was. Which of the many things should I pick to do and why? I was determined to do at least one item. And decided what I really needed was re-generation. Creative things and new perspectives re-generate me. These I can usually find in art and travel. So on the 2nd to the last day of the year I took a trip to the De Young Museum in San Francisco. Renovated in 2005, I had not seen the new structure. I give it high marks. My number one criteria being that the architecture support, or the very least does not get in the way of, the art and people viewing it, ala the Getty in LA. The De Young was a very pleasant experience. Thought I still don’t get the Tower.

Luck was with me even more. This was also the 2nd to the last day of a traveling exhibit – The Quilts of Gee’s Bend . So much more than a display of crafts, the Gee’s Bend quilt exhibit is a unique social commentary on life, people and history. Tastefully and subtly related on the plaques by each piece, through old photographs and the quilts themselves - a beautiful story of survival, perseverance and the importance of both individuality and collaboration evolved.

And there, amongst the hangings made of old blue jeans and work shirts, my regeneration was found. The story of Gee’s Bend, Alabama is the story of slavery, share cropping, power, discrimination, neglect, indifference, salvation and self-empowerment. It is a truly universal, yet uniquely American, story of survival and success against all odds and of finding and maintaining personal dignity and purpose in life, even as the entire world has forgotten you.

Gee’s Bend is a town on little bit of land at the crook of a river in Alabama whose community has alternately, by nature or malicious intent, been isolated from the world. And the quilts, made entirely for necessity, have become the punctuation mark for the tale. Most American quilts are made up of small pieces of fabric, sewn together in multiples of the same repetitive patterns, conforming to specific stylization. Not the Gee’s Bend quilts. Like modern art paintings, they contain big swathes of cloth and bold colors. But most importantly, each is the personal expression of the sewer.

As related by one of Gee’s Bend’s “memory keepers”, Mary Lee Bendolph (b. 1935), the philosophy of the community is “Piece by yourself; Quilt together.” During those cold winter nights and times between planting and harvesting the crops, each quilter, on their own, in their own home, created their own individual designs, the top pattern layer. They would then come together and, as a group, all sew together the top, middle and back layers to make the finished quilt.

Most quilting is created of traditional, prescribed patterns and must conform to certain rules of design that developed over generations. Isolated from the outside, Gee’s Bend felt no such demands, and in fact, seems to have consciously resisted the formation of such artificial boundaries. Time and again, the plaques stressed the desire of the community to support individual creativity. Yet collaboration also occurred, driven not by any imposed rules, but solely by the reasonable rationality that many hands working together can accomplish a part of the process better.

“Piece by yourself; Quilt together.” Value, encourage and support the creativity and uniqueness of the individual work; gather together to help complete the individual’s work by utilizing the collective energy of the group for the benefit of the individual and the whole. What a metaphor!

Here is my Aha!
I hear so many companies afraid to let their employees work out of their sight. It appears that they don’t truly value the work of the individual. Nor do they understand that some work, perhaps even most work, has a component of it that needs to be done alone, without the overseer eyes of peers or bosses. And that left alone and supported in their individual expression, the creativity and innovation that is so sorely needed and lacking, as heard in the roaring hue and cry coming from said same companies, evolves.

Alternately, I hear companies wailing for collaboration. Unfortunately, I also see them try to force feed the result through artificial means of space reconfiguration or required usage of collaboration software, usually with no evaluation of the relationship between task, process and outcome. The one way fits all, all of the time, philosophy which sets everyone and the organization as a whole up to fail. Gee’s Bend’s collaboration was not a management philosophy applied in a social context. It was a real result of happenstance and need. In fact, a better social experiment probably couldn’t be devised, let alone implemented. As the variables of time, place, historic incidents and lack of outside influences are impossible to control. Yet there it is. Let us learn from it.

So I have my regeneration. I was given, by way of a powerful yet unrelated example, the substantiation and revitalization, that remote work has an important role to play in the success of companies and society. That implemented with purposeful intent, and supported alike, it can become a valuable tool for corporate survival to let people do work on their own, without constant oversight. For through the years, the self-empowerment given to the individual quilters to express themselves, coupled with the welcoming validation each received by having others accept and take their work and transform it into a finished product, helped them to survive as a community for generations. All of our organizations should be so lucky.

Happy New Year! May you each find ways for individual expression and places that will welcome it into the whole.

I was having a conversation with Liz Guthridge the other day. She and Kathryn McKee have co-authored a new book Leading People Through Disasters; An Action Guide: Preparing for and Dealing with the Human Side of Crises, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2006. (Read my brief review and order the book at the NWP Success! Store. Liz was discussing the impetus for writing the book. Both she and Kathryn have experienced multiple business disasters and have seen the devastating effect such events can have on the business.

Our discussion reminded me some of my own experiences. One of the worst was an incident that happened to one of my clients, the law firm Pettit & Martin, so shocking it hit the national news. With offices in San Jose (my firm had designed the offices) and San Francisco, in 1993, a disgruntled client walked into the SF offices and started shooting. Nine died and six were injured. The firm never recovered from the incident. A firm of approximately 140 people at the time of the shooting, employees and customers where so traumatized by the incident in San Francisco that the entire firm closed its doors two years later.

Note: Below is a link to a good Business Week article about this incident and other workplace violence. The article notes that "Workplace murder is the second-leading cause of death on the job". http://www.keepmedia.com/pubs/BusinessWeek/2001/

Another recollection disaster consequences is a high-tech client that went through the Northern California Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. Located about 10 miles from the epicenter of the quake, one of the company's multiple sites was in a leased, three-story building with an unusual architectural design element. Shaped liked a triangle, one point was devoid of structure on the first floor, creating a recessed building entry and thus cantilevering the 2nd and 3rd floors over the walkway. Additionally, the visual support structure at the tip of that overhanging triangle was a slim column.

The building survived the earthquake. Though by most accounts there was a lot of movement, rolling and swaying (which of course is desirable). As I recall there was also some ceiling buckling and tiles and lights that fell, all which was remedied with code upgrades. The building was inspected, cleaned up and declared ready for occupancy again. But the employees refused to go back. The actual physical experience combined with the perceived sense of the visual design created the feeling, whether real or unreal, that the building was unsafe. The company never occupied the building, had to find new space for all those employees and were on the hook for the remainder of the lease expenses, temporary office space, move expenses and of course, employee productivity loss.