Robert Paterson's Weblog

What Marissa Mayer can do to make it right

The wonderful Hugh McLeod does it again and shows one side of the story that many people will respond to because it's true. It is easier to work at an office than to work at home with the kids close by.

MM's desire is to get her staff to work better together. She fears that when so many are not face to face, that they cannot. I think that she is partly right here but also wrong.

In this post I am not going to knock her. I deeply sympathazie. I am going to offer an exciting work out for her real problem. And a workout for any who wish to have a successful workforce in the future.

We do need lots of time face to face to get really close. But the office culture does not accomplish this - as it is today.  

At the office you are encouraged to leave every part of you outside that is not part of the task at hand. You are mainly in your cubicle with your head down and your earphones on. You attend endless pointless meetings that are all about control and status - not yours. You are stressed by the gap that opens up between this world and your other life. The Cable guy is a reality. Your kids in daycare are a reality. Your commute is a reality. The fact that you have to have a more expensive house, is a reality. The fact that you have to dress for work and eat outside for work is a reality.

You are not fully present at the office.

Nor do you know your colleagues that well. You don't share their lives. You have few opportunities to hang out. Most people eat at their desk alone and spend less than 20 minutes doing this. You may be in teams. But you were ordered to be in this team. You owe nothing to the others in the team. It is like softball at kindergarten. You don't know your boss either - who spends so much of her time reminding you that she is your boss. You often know more than she does too!

How the office is set up as a culture - as  factory with you doing piece work with a foreman - is not the setting for collaboration.

But, because most organizations spend no time, thought or effort on culture, working at home can be no better. 

Most people who work at home have had no experience in not being a supervised factory worker. This all starts at school where the teacher sets the schedule and the work. If you have worked in an office, you have been cultured to work like this too. I am sure that MM is correct in her observation that many of her home workers are not very productive. 

But this is not their fault. It is the culture. 

Real freelancers are measured and valued by results. They are hired to pull something off. How they do it, is their business not the client's. But home workers in a traditional organization are measured on how much effort they put in, in time and in the how. They are in effect still in a factory culture.

The issue for Yahoo and others is not who works at home or not but culture. That is the CEO's job.

You cannot have collaboration or innovation from domesticated pets. They have to act out because they have been made into small children. 

Wolves are free and are collaborators who innovate all the time.  They are wild. They are not domesticated. They live or die by their wits and their ability to work together and innovate and learn.

They also hang out all the time with each other. They know everything about each other.

Real Freelancers do this too. They hire each other for gigs. They hang out on Twitter and Facebook with each other all day and night. They visit each other. They fly across the world to spend days, night, weeks and even months with each other. They don't do 9 - 5 and run.

If they get no work, they starve. If they do bad work, they starve.

The alpha in a project is the one who got the gig. Or the one who knows the most for that gig. There is a hierarchy but it is a real one. There is one at the bottom too. And he or she is there to learn. In time they grow to be core members or leaders in their own gigs.

The pack goes hunting. The gig is the prize. The pack feeds on the gig.

The pack get gigs because they do a good job. They give the client the result that the client wants They are not hired to spend time or to fit into a work protocol. They are hired to get hard things done in a set time.

So if I was MM I would do this.

I would start to move Yahoo's culture in this direction. I would set up an inner core that had responsibility for key results and fucntions. Some I would keep inside traditionally - you don't outsource your core processing etc. But all other work I would shift to networks. At the core of each would be a set of Facilitators. They would surround themselves with circles of packs of freelancers. There would be a gradient. The inner circle would get work most of the time. As the rings moved out to the periphery, less. But the core would keep a close eye on the edge for that will be where the novel will emerge. 

The packs/teams would self organize. Yahoo would not set them up. They would hire on the basis of the task and the capability. It would be up to the team leader to hire the team. She would pay them from the contract.

Yahoo would set up the world's best closed social network so all can be in constant ouch with each other. Skype have open screens in all their offices. A person in Redmond can look up and talk to a co worker in Estonia as if she was next to him. The entire network would be able to talk to each other and help with problems. The full power of the full crowd would be available.

Periodically Yahoo would organize and pay for face to face events that would last for several days and nights where many teams would get together and hang out. Just as tribes used to do. These would mainly be powows where partying and doing fun things with each other would be central. Alcohol, dancing and food would be vital. People will get layed.

The point is to build real relationships in face time to lubricate the virtual.

The cost of this would be payed from the fact that Yahoo's office costs would be cut by millions. So would their salary and benefit costs.

But they also would set up a Yahoo Freelancer health insurance plan that would give their freelancers access to a group. They do as much to empower the group as possible. 

Yahoo then will have to do that most vital of things. Yahoo have to  know what it is that they want to do. Process no longer needs to be measured. Results have to be measured.With an online workforce this is easy to do.

The core inner circle skill will be facilitation and project scoping. The core executive skill will be in keeping ther network healthy and in noticing important movement that will show them where to focus on next. They will have to be skilled Hackers!

Now Yahoo have a Darwinian ecology of a workforce. Talent rises to the top naturally. Good new teams enter naturally. Now Yahoo can hire from a pool of 7 billion people. This would be exciting and worthy of a turn around.

So why not? What do you have to lose?

PS In my old life I was SVP HR for a company with 45,000 employees whwre my focus was culture and for the last 20 years have been writing about the network - my book You Don't Need a Job: The Rise of the Network is here. 

Related articles

What will replace the Job? The Networked Artisan!

What is an education for in a "Post Job" world?

Yahoo Responds to Controversy Over Work-at-Home Ban

Marissa Mayer Is Wrong: Working From Home Can Make You More Productive - Derek Thompson - The Atlantic

Hacker/Navigator? The Missing Role in Organizations?

The meaning of jobs? Why they don't do good things for you?

Hugh McLeod says it all in one panel

I explain it here in You Don't Need a Job

Why they became so important - why they are now going away - why this is good for you - what is coming and how you can do well.

Hugh sums up the risks and the choices in a recent post of his:

"What is heart­brea­king about his story is it reminds me of something that has always haun­ted and terri­fied me since I first ente­red the wor­king world: the idea of get­ting to the ine­vi­ta­ble end of your life, and in spite of all that talent, pas­sion and energy spent wor­king insane hours for deca­des, you don’t have a mea­ning­ful and las­ting body of work to be proud of, money or no money.

And that can easily hap­pen, when, early on in the game, you decide to take the easy money. When you let your path be defi­ned by short cuts, short-term needs and the out­ward assu­ran­ces of social status.

When you do things just because they look good on paper, just because they impress your peers…

This is not a rant against the adver­ti­sing busi­ness; it’s a great choice for some folk, I per­so­nally got a TERRIFIC edu­ca­tion out of it.

No, this is a rant against somethiong MUCH lar­ger, i.e. a rant against not “follo­wing your bliss”, to quote Joseph Camp­bell.

Luc­kily, there’s no law saying that you have to make the afo­re­men­tio­ned short-cut deci­sion. There’s another deci­sion you can make.

The ques­tion is, will you make that deci­sion? Will you actually follow your bliss?

Only you can ans­wer that."

 

Want Good Health? - Give up the Job and Go for a Network

Hugh McLeod say it all in this Cube Grenade which part of a collection that you can buy - I bought one for my son. It is the central message I think of our time and of my book You Don't Need a Job - You Need a Network

But I also think that Hugh's message could also say there is "No health in medicine but only in your network too".

Culture is the issue.

For most of us live in a industrial world where every part of our culture conspires to weaken our health. Going to a job reduces our physical activity, keeps us inside, weakens our social ties, makes us lose sleep and to only eat food that bad for us. We are surrounded by signals and forces. 

The advice to have better health is to sleep more, take more exercise, eat better food, have a better social network, take more time for ourselves. This is good advice. But so long as each of us fully live in the Job world, this becomes very very hard or even impossible advice to follow.

It seems that so long as the Job is the centre of our lives, we are up against it. So what to do? We cannot change all the modern culture. How can we help ourselves?

This article in the NYT shows the result of living in another culture on the tiny Greek Island of Ikaria where the focus is life itself. What I find especially interesting is that the control group live on another small Greek Island, Samos, not far away, who share the mainstream culture and so all its problems. What this says to me is that, if we can pull together small supporting "tribes" or "Islands" of the alternative, then we can set ourselves on course to live much happier and more healthy and longer lives. We don't have to wait for all to join us.

We can work to create our own Ikarias.

My Xmas book - You Don't Need Medicine to Make you Healthy - will explore this in detail.

So here then is a lengthy snip from the NYT - I encourage you to read it all.

"If you pay careful attention to the way Ikarians have lived their lives, it appears that a dozen subtly powerful, mutually enhancing and pervasive factors are at work. It’s easy to get enough rest if no one else wakes up early and the village goes dead during afternoon naptime. It helps that the cheapest, most accessible foods are also the most healthful — and that your ancestors have spent centuries developing ways to make them taste good. It’s hard to get through the day in Ikaria without walking up 20 hills. You’re not likely to ever feel the existential pain of not belonging or even the simple stress of arriving late. Your community makes sure you’ll always have something to eat, but peer pressure will get you to contribute something too. You’re going to grow a garden, because that’s what your parents did, and that’s what your neighbors are doing. You’re less likely to be a victim of crime because everyone at once is a busybody and feels as if he’s being watched. At day’s end, you’ll share a cup of the seasonal herbal tea with your neighbor because that’s what he’s serving. Several glasses of wine may follow the tea, but you’ll drink them in the company of good friends. On Sunday, you’ll attend church, and you’ll fast on Orthodox feast days. Even if you’re antisocial, you’ll never be entirely alone. Your neighbors will cajole you out of your house for the village festival to eat your portion of goat meat.

Every one of these factors can be tied to longevity. That’s what the $70 billion diet industry and $20 billion health-club industry do in their efforts to persuade us that if we eat the right food or do the right workout, we’ll be healthier, lose weight and live longer. But these strategies rarely work. Not because they’re wrong-minded: it’s a good idea for people to do any of these healthful activities. The problem is, it’s difficult to change individual behaviors when community behaviors stay the same. In the United States, you can’t go to a movie, walk through the airport or buy cough medicine without being routed through a gantlet of candy bars, salty snacks and sugar-sweetened beverages. The processed-food industry spends more than $4 billion a year tempting us to eat. How do you combat that? Discipline is a good thing, but discipline is a muscle that fatigues. Sooner or later, most people cave in to relentless temptation.

As our access to calories has increased, we’ve decreased the amount of physical activity in our lives. In 1970, about 40 percent of all children in the U.S. walked to school; now fewer than 12 percent do. Our grandparents, without exercising, burned up about five times as many calories a day in physical activity as we do. At the same time, access to food has exploded.

Despite the island’s relative isolation, its tortuous roads and the fierce independence of its inhabitants, the American food culture, among other forces, is beginning to take root in Ikaria. Village markets are now selling potato chips and soda, which in my experience is replacing tea as the drink of choice among younger Ikarians. As the island’s ancient traditions give way before globalization, the gap between Ikarian life spans and those of the rest of the world seems to be gradually disappearing, as the next generations of old people become less likely to live quite so long.

The big aha for me, having studied populations of the long-lived for nearly a decade, is how the factors that encourage longevity reinforce one another over the long term. For people to adopt a healthful lifestyle, I have become convinced, they need to live in an ecosystem, so to speak, that makes it possible. As soon as you take culture, belonging, purpose or religion out of the picture, the foundation for long healthy lives collapses. The power of such an environment lies in the mutually reinforcing relationships among lots of small nudges and default choices. There’s no silver bullet to keep death and the diseases of old age at bay. If there’s anything close to a secret, it’s silver buckshot."

My favorite Hugh Cards - what are yours?

Hugh wonders today about what will be left of him in 100 years. He hopes that it may be his cartoons - I think he may well be right.

Here is the one I use for my business card. I love handing it out and seeing the reaction. I feel that it embodies my view of life and what I do. The right clients feel that as well.

Here is the one that I would like to have the guts to use.  It sums up what I know to be true also.

What is your favorite card? Let's let Hugh know how much his work means to us.

If you don't have a Hugh card and want one - here is the link to Streetcards where they are on view and on slae

Hugh Mcleod - Aaaaagh!

Wouldn't you want to put this on your table?
Hugh takes my breath away - what a genius and what heart

What a weekend - Hugh says it all

You know who you are

xoxoxo