How Much Does Workplace Culture Reduce Productivity?

What if businesses started measuring the work you do based on the product you create not the hours they see you working. Jason Fried makes a good point, people don't work at work any more. Getting work done means being productive, being creative and that requires focus and thought; but the work place is filled with distractions like meetings, ringing phones, management and socializing. People are seeing this and we're starting to see a change in work behavior. Tim Ferris encourages strategies similar to Jason to increase productivity in the Four Hour Work Week; on the top of the list: get rid of distractions.

Some workers still need a lot more structure than entrepreneurial life can provide but with the advent of software, video chat and other interactive tools I think we're going to start seeing work life moving away from the office and into an online space.

Entrepreneurship 3.0

Today's mashup consists of a talk on innovation by Charles Leadbeater and an idea I read in "The Four Hour Workweek," by Timothy Ferris. We live in a world where innovation is just as likely to come about from a professional amateur (someone who is passionate about their "hobby") as it is to come from an innovation or R&D department. Just watch Klunkerz (a doucmentary about the origins of mountainbiking) to get an idea of how this happens. The mountain bike was created out of a real need by a bunch of guys who loved biking in the woods out in Marin, not by the R&D division of Trek.

So how is the approach to business evolving, well I think there is a shift in how a business interacts with the market place and all of it's users/consumers. An entrepreneur can provide people with a platform, tools and some rules and then orchestrate a conversation that stimulates creativity; it doesn't seem like a new idea but it's disruptive to the conventional work place. It's a bit analagous to the open source movement because when passionate people are empowered they are extrememly productive. Even less conventional is allowing the consumer to create content linking the community of users with the company and in essence creating a two way relationship between business and consumer. It's a concept that has made Threadless, Etsy and the Apple iPhone application store a huge success. This is a business model that I think is going to continue becoming increasingly popular.