I was greatly inspired by this short blog post about a keynote that Clay Shirky gave recently. It argues, at the example of a failed product, that there is a distinction between Work (with Capital W) and work (with litte w).
"(Capital-W) Work is what we have considered for years: your boss tells you to do something, you do it, and you get paid. By contrast, (little-w) work is motivated by inherent interest and generally unpaid. Think of the difference between an Encyclopedia Britannica editor doing Work, and a Wikipedia editor doing work during spare hours. Big Work drives the economy; little work drives the Internet. Big Work builds skyscrapers; little work generates a half million fanfiction stories about Harry Potter."
This relates greatly to my impression that people are more and more willing to invest hours, energy, even money, into meaningful work, activities they are passionate about. We labeled this whole movement Hippies 2.0 and the emerging industry building around it "Passion Industry". I would agree with Shirky that rather than technological innovation, we need to focus on emotional innovation.
'Clay argued that user testing techniques developed over the past 25 years for Work no longer apply for work. We shouldn't be asking, "Can you complete the task?" but rather "Are you motivated to do it in the first place?"'
The potential for innovative work environments and value-driven organizations is enormous. Instead of building bigger, better tools, structures and processes, we need to rethink the basics of how we want to work and focus on human motivation.
Ps: The picture comes from Swiss Miss' office in Brooklyn, which inspired me as being a great example for a "work" environment (with little w ;-).
