Ross Douthat Things A World Without Work Is Fine. It’s Not.

Ross Douthat sees a world just ahead where blue collar work is steadily on the decline:

[…] the decline of work isn’t actually some wild Marxist scenario. It’s a basic reality of 21st-century American life, one that predates the financial crash and promises to continue apace even as normal economic growth returns. This decline isn’t unemployment in the usual sense, where people look for work and can’t find it. It’s a kind of post-employment, in which people drop out of the work force and find ways to live, more or less permanently, without a steady job. So instead of spreading from the top down, leisure time — wanted or unwanted — is expanding from the bottom up. Long hours are increasingly the province of the rich.

Of course, nobody is hailing this trend as the sign of civilizational progress. Instead, the decline in blue-collar work is often portrayed in near-apocalyptic terms — on the left as the economy’s failure to supply good-paying jobs, and on the right as a depressing sign that government dependency is killing the American work ethic.

But it’s worth linking today’s trends to the older dream of a post-work utopia, because there are ways in which the decline in work-force participation is actually being made possible by material progress.

Douthat’s arguments are macro-economic, and conveniently blur the details, particularly the micro-economic troubles of specific people who had assumed they’d have continued employment when they joined the workforce in the past, or as the graduate high school, today. The social safety net that a prosperous society could — in principle — provide is often absent. As a result, people scramble to make ends meet with multiple part-time jobs, at the mercy of employers who are optimizing for margins, not employee convenience.

So in the final analysis, his argument boils down to a ‘maybe someday’ scenario. Yes, we may have a future where people that might have once worked 40 hours a week on an assembly line, cleaning floors in office buildings, or pumping gas are instead working 20 hours a week at a community center in exchange for their basic needs. But today, people who run through their savings and unemployment benefits while trying to find work can hit a wall, and afterward, their finances and options might be permanently damaged.

Douthat makes this seem like the workless are opting out of work, philosophically:

There is a certain air of irresponsibility to giving up on employment altogether, of course. But while pundits who tap on keyboards for a living like to extol the inherent dignity of labor, we aren’t the ones stocking shelves at Walmart or hunting wearily, week after week, for a job that probably pays less than our last one did. One could make the case that the right to not have a boss is actually the hardest won of modern freedoms: should it really trouble us if more people in a rich society end up exercising it?

This is the subtlest form of blaming the victim: choosing one aspect of victimhood that seems positive, and arguing that those who comment on the sad state of the victim are trying to deny them that positive aspect. So if I make the case that in a healthy and supportive society, all those that want work should be able to find it, Douthat wonders why I would deny the workless the joy of having no boss.

24 February 2013 11 Permalink

Stress, Trust, And Meditation

The biggest single problem in most workplaces is stress. Stress can be caused by a hundred different factors — like fearfulness, feeling overwhelmed, lack of autonomy, aggression — but it likewise can be reduced significantly by a number of well understood techniques. 

The most important single thing that management can do to increase the well-being of the workforce is to stem factors leading to stress. As perhaps the most important example, we should agree to a complete end to any attempts to control people’s behavior through fear, such as threats about being fired, demoted, or forced to take on unwanted tasks. 

The single best thing management can do is to foster trust in the workplace. John Helliwell’s research shows that workers are willing to make considerable economic tradeoffs to work in companies where there are higher levels of trust (see What to do about the disengaged workforce). His work showed that ‘a firm managing to provide better jobs (as measured by some package of the non-financial job characteristics connected to higher levels of life satisfaction) would be able to reap rewards in some combination of dimensions: lower quit rates, lower monitoring costs, easier (and hence less expensive) hiring, and more effective effort from employees at all wage levels.’

But companies can also attack stress head on, and help workers cope. One promising area is meditation, which starts with a bad rap, but offers a great deal in stress reduction, as Mirabai Bush relates in a piece about her company’s efforts in teaching meditation within the corporate setting:

Teaching Meditation Techniques to Organizations - Mirabai Bush via the NYTimes.com

At first, resistance was everywhere, but so were the possibilities. A litigation lawyer thought that if he became more compassionate toward the opposition in his cases, he couldn’t be a zealous advocate for clients. But he found that being calm, clear and compassionate gave him better insights and better timing.

An environmental leader thought that if others knew he practiced meditation, they wouldn’t take him seriously — and would write him off as a tree-hugger without scientific rigor. Instead, he found that he became more resilient, and less overwhelmed by climate-change predictions, and that he collaborated better with colleagues.

Magazine editors thought that they would miss deadlines; in fact, they learned to focus on priorities and work better in teams to meet the deadlines in new ways. Data-driven Google engineers questioned the value of developing capacities that can’t be quantified, but many of them learned better ways to communicate. One engineer told me his wife had noticed a change in the way he listened to her. She asked him: “What happened to you?”

[…] Neuroscientists have confirmed much of what we were experiencing: that meditation improves attention, reduces stress hormones, increases appreciation and compassion for others and helps us recover faster from negative information.

Personally, this work has made me feel more connected to the world. Watching the responses of so many people — from an economics professor to Army soldiers — I’ve come to believe that it’s a basic human need to be calm and clear, to be aware of ourselves and others, to be kind and collaborative, to be fully present in each moment.

When you take away the residue of stress, even if nothing else in a person’s work setting is changed, things slow down. There is time to think, time to reflect before acting. 

As T.S. Eliot styled it, we can be ‘at the still point of the turning world’, and then get back into the dance of work, but breathing a bit deeper, and seeing a bit farther.

6 January 2013 18 Permalink

Do Meetings Make Us Stupid?

Meetings really do decrease our cognitive abilities.

Attending meetings lowers IQ, makes you stupid - Rebecca Smith

Meetings make people stupid because they impair their ability to think for themselves, scientists have found.

The performance of people in IQ tests after meetings is significantly lower than if they are left on their own, with women more likely to perform worse than men.

Researchers at the Virginia Tech Crilion Research institute in the US said people’s performance dropped when they were judged against their peers.

Read Montague, who led the study, said: “You may joke about how committee meetings make you feel brain-dead, but our findings suggest that they may make you act brain-dead as well.

“We started with individuals who were matched for their IQ. Yet when we placed them in small groups, ranked their performance on cognitive tasks against their peers, and broadcast those rankings to them, we saw dramatic drops in the ability of some study subjects to solve problems. The social feedback had a significant effect.”

Students from two universities with an average IQ of 126 were subsequently pitted against each other, and told how they were performing in comparison to the others after answering each question.

Researchers found that most people performed worse when they were ranked against their peers, suggesting the social situation itself affected how well they completed the IQ tests.

[…]

The study raises questions over how intelligence is measured and whether it is fixed, experts said.

Co-author Steven Quartz, professor of philosophy in the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, said: “This study tells us the idea that IQ is something we can reliably measure in isolation without considering how it interacts with social context is essentially flawed.

“Furthermore, this suggests that the idea of a division between social and cognitive processing in the brain is really pretty artificial. The two deeply interact with each other.”

There is a growing body of evidence for social cognition, showing how tightly our reasoning is linked to social context and interactions. Obviously, learning what makes us more productive is primary, but seeing proof that some behaviors have negative impacts on our reasoning — like small-group competition of the sort that can occur in meetings — means that we should be reorganizing work to minimize those effects.

Source: independent.ie

27 November 2012 17 Permalink

Future Work Skills 2020

futurist-foresight:

The Institute for the Future released a report on future work skills that will be needed by 2020. They are:

• Sense-making.
• Social intelligence.
• Novel and adaptive thinking.
• Cross-cultural competency.
• Computational thinking.
• New-media literacy.
• Transdisciplinarity.
• Design mind-set.
• Cognitive load management.
• Virtual collaboration.

(Gigaom gives a quick breakdown)

The graphic below from that report highlights areas of focus:

25 May 2012 123 futurist-foresight Permalink

Getting To Trust: Better Swift Than Deep

Venessa Miemis is trying to get a group of ‘change agents’ to collaborate, and is finding it hard going:

Venessa Miemis, How Will We Collaborate if We Can’t Trust Each Other?

The next few years are going to be defined by a culture of learning and interactivity that involves more trust, and so naturally, more risk. If we’re going to go beyond just sharing links with each other to actually *helping* each other, working together, experimenting, prototyping, and adapting to changing circumstances, *we* have to first change in order to make that possible.

I’m in the process of experimenting with this firsthand, bringing people together into an online collaboratory space, and I’ll admit – it’s not easy. We’ve got a group of ‘change agents’ who want to do things together, to form ad-hoc teams around short-term projects, make something cool happen and improve our world and our lives — but how to begin?

Each of us is a free agent, delicately riding the edge of chaos and uncertainty as we try to pave our own path. Each of us likes the sound of a peer-to-peer culture, a transition from scarcity to abundance, a move from a transactional economy to a relational economy (ht jerry michalski), and a redefinition of value and wealth. Each of us sees the promise of a new way of working, living, and Being.

And yet there is still fear.

Are you gonna steal my idea? Are you gonna follow through with your commitments? Are you gonna take the credit? Am I gonna get screwed — yet again?

My question to you is: How do we transcend this, surrender, and take the next leap of faith?

(ponder it)

Assuming you are curious enough about the possibility to find out how it could work, what is the critical component that’ll inspire you to jump?

For me, it all comes down to trust.

Not just blind trust in everyone else, but trust in myself and a commitment to move past fear and into action. Lead by example and see who wants to come with me. Become aware of who I’m connected to and choosing carefully with whom I want to build things. Take small risks together so we can gain momentum. Start having some Collective Epic Wins.

I think Venessa is trying to do something that’s very hard: she’s trying to get a group to form a collective, with a shared set of principles and shared goals. And she’s right. To get there you have to build deep trust: a polite way to say that the folks in the collective have to sort out the politics involved. In general that can take months, even when the participants share a great deal in common in education, background, and temperament.

But why form a collective? As she points out, it’s risky. If you want to build things, you can define a small project to test some ideas, and form a Hollywood-style project team to accomplish it. Instead of trying to collaborate on a big, wholly integrated vision of the future — where everything has to be discussed and agreed on before the first thing gets done — just cooperate on something fast, small, and low risk.

The way of the future is cooperation, not collaboration.

Among other reasons cooperation merely requires swift trust, a well-researched human universal. People are capable in some circumstances of relaxing their general desire to establish deep trust — that time-consuming, political practice —and will simply adopt a role in a project, and suspend their disbelief about other’s motives, etc. This is a way to get folks to suspend their innate concerns about trust and control. In these contexts, people start with the presumption that the others in the project are professionals and that everyone will focus on doing their jobs as best as the can. A lot of communication is needed to keep it all working, but much less than in deep trust organizations, like the conventional enterprise.

This is how freelancers generally work, and it’s the way that cities work.

But Venessa and her friends are involved in forming a collective, and there is no short cut for them. They will need to build deep trust, and establish processes and practices, and politics to manage them.

My recommendation to Venessa was and still is to take the short cut, though. Define some constrained projects, with more modest goals and defined time frames, and work on them with a few others. It might lead to deep trust, but even if it doesn’t you can still be working, making headway, and maybe some money, too.

Me, I’m trying to work on a few interesting projects with some smart people, but I am not pushing them into one group and trying to create a way that all of us can be involved in everything. I’m going to work with Teresa DiCairano of Intervista on ‘ambient innovation’, which is our term for social, bottom-up innovation. I’m going to work with Claude Théoret of Nexalogy exploring the science underlying social networks, and trying to make that more accessible to the average person. And I am going to push ahead with my analysis in work media — the use of streaming social media tools in the enterprise — and I will be pulling a few others into that project with me, too. But these will be three discrete projects, with non-overlapping groups of participants. I am not making everything, everything.

I am trying to remain liquid, loosely connected to others, heading the same general direction. I am specifically not trying to solidify relationships — build deep trust — before getting something done with others.

So, my general recommendation is that people should favor loose connectives — social networks with less tight ties — that rely only on swift trust. If and when you establish deep trust with individuals, perhaps during short-term, swift trust-based projects, then perhaps your can form a collective, where the principles shared common, long-term purpose.

But such collectives are not a higher form of human solidarity that we should aspire to, and are not what we have to build in order to get big things done. On the contrary. An increasing proportion of professional work is being performed by freelancers, who live in a short-term project based economy. Why should I have to agree on a long term strategic vision about the future of work media just to work with other researchers on the state of that industry, for example? Or to take the example of the city, all the stores on Main Street do not have to agree to not compete with each other, or to pool their profits, or even to paint their storefronts the same color.

The costs of deep trust are too high, in general, for what they return. This is one reason that work is changing so quickly. Companies are loosening their hold on employees, providing them more autonomy, relaxing the requirements for deep trust: becoming more like cities and less like traditional armies, with everyone is made to march in step, and pointed in the same direction, all the time.

9 January 2012 101 Permalink

New York Now Allows Benefit Corporations

New York has passed legislation to allow the formation of a new sort of corporation — a Benefit Corporation, or B Corp:

Kyle Westaway, New Legal Structures for ‘Social Entrepreneurs’

 The Benefit Corporation is a new class of corporation with a corporate purpose to create public benefit, a broader fiduciary duty and is transparent about its overall social and environmental performance.

By definition, it must operate for the general public benefit – defined as a material positive impact on society and the environment. Every benefit corporation is required to publish an assessment using an independent, third-party assessment tool. To create a material positive benefit, a benefit corporation operates in a manner that not only creates value for the company’s shareholders, but also its community, environment, employees and suppliers.

The structure also calls for a high level of transparency and accountability. Within 120 days after the end of each fiscal year, a benefit corporation is required to publish a “Benefit Report,” which states how it performed that year on a social and environmental axis.

The press release, received by email:

NY Law Creates New Kind of Corporation

Spurs Investment to Create High Quality Jobs and

Use Business to Solve Social Problems

State Legislators from Wall Street Sponsored the Bill

Albany, NY: At midnight last night a law was enacted creating benefit corporations, a new class of corporations required to create benefit for society as well as shareholders.  Unlike traditional corporations, benefit corporations are required to create a material positive impact on society and the environment; consider how decisions affect employees, community and the environment; and publicly report their social and environmental performance using established third-party standards. 

Continuing a national trend of strong bi-partisan support for benefit corporation legislation, the New York bill (S79-A and A4692-A), sponsored by Senators Daniel Squadron (D-25) and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-64) and co-sponsored by William Larkin (R, C-39), passed both houses of the New York legislature unanimously.

“Political leaders like Speaker Silver, and Senators Squadron and Larkin understand that New York needs to attract businesses whose core purpose is to create more high quality jobs and to improve the quality of life in communities across the state,” said Andrew Kassoy, co founder of B Lab, the nonprofit organization that drafted the model legislation.  “The benefit corporation bill will unlock billions of dollars in impact investment capital and enable entrepreneurs across the state to start businesses that solve some of society’s greatest challenges.”

“Benefit corporations will mean New York is open for business in an important new way. Benefit corporations will unlock billions of dollars in new investments in New York while empowering companies to do well and do good,” said Senator Squadron. “By offering this opportunity to entrepreneurs and investors, New York will bring new businesses into the state, new investors into the market and a new socially-minded approach for our entrepreneurs.”

“By bringing benefit corporations to New York, we are showing that profit and social responsibility are not mutually exclusive,” said Speaker Silver.  “This law will continue our efforts to strengthen and diversify our economy while ensuring that New York remains a national leader in progressive policies that help our environment, protect consumers and bolster the rights of working men and women.”

“I am very happy to see that this bill has finally become law.  It will enable businesses to grow without the infringement of state government, and will help New York become a more business friendly state,” added Senator Larkin.

The new law addresses a long time concern among entrepreneurs who need to raise growth capital but fear losing control of the social or environmental mission of their business. These entrepreneurs and other shareholders of benefit corporations now have additional rights to hold directors accountable for failure to create a material positive impact on society, to consider the impact of decisions on employees, community, and the environment, or to inform the public about the company’s overall social and environmental impact as assessed against a credible, independent third party standard.

New York is the seventh state to pass benefit corporation legislation, joining Maryland, Vermont, New Jersey, Virginia, Hawaii, and most recently, California.  The legislation has enjoyed broad bi-partisan support nationally, with a vote tally of 892 ayes and 62 nays, and the signatures of both Republican and Democratic governors. The New York bill had significant support from business (partial list below), including Eileen Fisher, City Light Capital, and UncommonGoods; and from more than 2,600 New York citizens, all interested in creating better choices for the growing number of entrepreneurs and investors who seek to create businesses that create both social and shareholder value.

“The passage of benefit corporation legislation is an important and much needed step forward to grow our New York state economy and create more jobs which can also provide greater social and environmental benefit,” says David Levine, co-founder of the American Sustainable Business Council whose members’ organizations represent over 100,000 businesses. “At a time when the country is looking for solutions to build the economy, New York is helping to lead the way with an innovative and sustainable business strategy.”

I am going to be actively looking for B corps in New York, and finding out why their founders opted for that path.

13 December 2011 25 underpaidgenius Permalink