Over the last few months I have written a number of posts using the term “work culture.â€� I was using the term without even realizing that it doesn’t really yet exist in modern lexicon.

Wikipedia has entries for organizational culture and corporate culture, the later dealing with traditional enterprises and their hierarchical structures. However, I feel that work culture is something very unique from either of the above.

Work culture is the environment that empowers an individual(s) to produce and receive.

Work culture is not – any longer – corporate. Consider the creative class and the folks operating in the edgeeconomy: do they exist in a corporate culture? I say no. For example, over the last several years Heights Media Group has existed as completely agile entity. We’ve worked at client offices in downtown Manhattan and from coffee shops in rural New Hampshire. We’ve been the lead on some major projects, and teamed up with partner companies on others. In some cases we have created for ourselves and in other cases we have produced for others. However, there has been one constant – a profound disassociation with the need for hierarchy or anything corporate.

Heights Media Group has been managed in a truly participatory manner; freelancers co-exist with employees and with owners. The people who contribute to this blog may well be responsible for some of our best strategy work. We’ve hired specialists to do their thing and we almost always default to their expert opinion. The projects where we have been most deeply engulfed are the ones where we are actually owners with equity. Overall our work culture has focused on creation rather than the redistribution or protection of information. We leveraged technology to maximize our participatory culture. I see this as a very different mindset from the corporate culture that would define a law firm or investment bank. While many workers may still be entrenched in corporate culture, the tides are shifting for all.

Work culture is also differentiated organizational culture, which is more of blanket phrase for any group of persons with objectives. In work culture, an ‘exchange’ is always involved (often compensation for goods and services). Whereas organizational culture could apply universally to most any entity, a work-focused culture is different due to the receipt of payment for production and or creation. While traditionally, this exchange has most often been monetary compensation, today it could also be equity, personal reputation, social benefit (peer production) or something else that has yet to be invented but has value to someone or some group of persons.

I’m reminded of a great passage in Atlas Shrugged. Perhaps it’s a bit dated due to the emphasis on ‘money,’ but it nevertheless remains a powerful passage:

Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

“When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears not all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor–your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle

Thank you Umair Haque!

I have been writing and talking about the fundamental shifts we are seeing in work culture for quite some time. A couple examples are here and here. I even have dedicated a category of this blog to the phenomenon I call “tech’nomics,â€� or the intersection/impact that technology has on the economy. So it is exciting to see well-known influencers in the space agreeing with Umair and adding to the conversation. It’s especially exciting since we’re building Workstreamr to be a player in this new world.

AVC recently stated:

What Umair is suggesting is that technology, particularly Internet technology, has changed that equation fundamentally. That the transaction and other costs are declining rapidly and the “nature of the firm” must change as well.

…And I agree completely with that thinking. To me, the idea that Microsoft should purchase Yahoo! in order to build a better infrastructure for online advertising (and profit from that) is just old school thinking. What should happen is the exact opposite. Yahoo! should break itself up into a number of smaller firms that can be more agile, more nimble, and more connected to the market.

I couldn’t agree more.

Look for a related post later today on the Workstreamr Blog.

 

One of the issues Workstreamr is tackling is the notion that ‘email is dumb.’

So why is email dumb?

Generally, there is no database attached to email. Even if there is, email is still essentially dumb text sent from one person to another. Email is dumb in the sense that the content of a particular message is subject to the interpretation of the person receiving it. While you know things such as a) who sent the email  b) the date and time it was sent, really the crux of the message is not necessarily clear. People are notoriously poor communicators and in today’s multi tasking environment, particularly poor readers.

While the dumbness of email doesn’t matter much when email is being used for social communications, the lack of ‘intelligence’ in email really starts to matter when we’re talking about work. Deadlines. Action items. All critical to the success of a project – and our careers.

How many times have you emailed someone only to learn a week later that they ‘overlooked’ something you had asked them to do? How many times have you searched in vain, even with advanced systems like Gmail, to figure out what was assigned to you? Or how about when an email chain contains multiple changes to a deliverable’s due dates? Who changed the date and why again?

Email is not intelligent in that it lacks the ability to recognize and translate grouped text into action items. Microsoft Outlook, or iCal offer a slightly more intelligent approach. When you receive an iCal invite you clearly are being asked to a) attend something and b) respond. Those are two calls-to-action that might be missed in an email or IM such as “Jones Meeting at 4pm.  You available?â€� Tumblr.com takes an interesting approach to how it renders text, but from a more visual standpoint. [Here is my Tumblelog]. Tumblr is a blogging platform but unlike any other in that you have multiple types of posts you can use; they are posts with very specific formats. For example, if you wanted to blog a quote, Tumblr lets you simply select its “Quote Post.â€� All you do is add text and Tumblr formats it all for you, rendering proper quote conventions in a aesthetically pleasing manner. These variations on types of posts, or ‘typed-posts’ are a very powerful concept on a number of levels.

Shortly we’ll reveal more about how Workstreamr is tackling this ‘dumb communications’ problem. For the time being, it’s simply important to recognize the limitations of email. Newer, and more innovative tools are a step in the right direction for producing much more intelligent workflows.

*You can now register for the Workstreamr Beta! If you haven’t done so already, you should do it now.

 

I’m planning to present at BarCampNYC3 talking about the office of the future.

It’s my proposition that the office and work culture will be in a transition by 2013. Overtime, office environments will look almost nothing like the traditional office environments of today. One of the forces driving these changes is the benefit from open knowledge sharing. Institutions, it seems, continue to discover increases in value (ROI) from opening-up closed environments. I foresee this trend eventually seeping into office culture.

For example, instead of hiring a jack-of-all-trades who is ‘okay’ at a lot of things, why not take that salary and instead hire several specialists who work with your firm for two months each? [Some may be familiar with the theory of weak ties]. I also love the idea of co-working largely because the inherent sociality allows for the injection of new ideas leading to innovations and better quality end-products. But, making work more open and social doesn’t necessarily mean working in the physical presence of large groups. Having a Twitter client open and attending several meetings throughout the week can be just as “socialâ€� as one person working in the same room as twenty others.

Consider some examples from private institutions that have embraced a more social and open approach and subsequently increased both popularity and ROI. TED, which used to be an exclusive conference available only to the elite ticket-buyers has allowed the world free access to its speakers and resources via its website. MIT has open-sourced many of its courses. Platforms like Google and Facebook have opened themselves to outside developers. Even newspapers such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have plenty of content available for free (yes, people actually used to pay for papers!).

The idea of increasing ROI by making traditionally closed institutions more ‘open’ and ‘social’ is a trend currently observed among the more technologically progressive. However, since enterprise innovations tend to lag behind other sectors in adoption, it stands to reason these same trends will ultimately permeate into offices, fundamentally changing work culture as we now know it.

Update: for a copy of the handout from my BarCamp presentation, please go here