February 2007

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This is our personal note welcoming you to the February 2007 issue of Future of Work Agenda and setting our theme for the month. This month we take you on a mental exploration of some basic technologies we all take for granted. But how we use them has a huge impact on our work, our relationships, and our understandings of the world around us.

We're pleased to point you to Future of Work member Russ Eckel's new blog, generations@work. And we've got a number of events and appearances ahead of us in the next several months.

In January we wrote about the nature of collaboration - and in particular collaboration among distributed workers and teams. Now we're ready to tackle the tools themselves - but again we humbly acknowledge that the topic is way too big for us to do justice to. So bear with us; this time we're going to think out loud with you about three primary kinds of tools - voice, text, and video.

We're pleased to share with you some insightful comments from Brad Jackson and Margaret King about our January article "Does Distance Matter?"

This section provides you with brief summaries of several recent notes we've already posted on the Future of Work weblog. In each case we also include a live link to the original post on the blog. And we encourage you to become a regular reader of the blog, where we are posting notes, case studies, and links to other important websites on a regular basis.

We end each issue of Future of Work Agenda with a personal perspective - our chance to comment on issues and developments in the world of work that we find important and interesting. This is our "editorial" page, where we enjoy offering our opinions and predictions about what's happening (or should be happening) in the world of work and beyond.

From Jim and Charlie

They say March is the cruelest month, but right now it feels like February wins the prize. That's mostly because of global "climate change." It's been snowing like blazes in the Midwest and finally turned cold in the northeast, but it's staying mild and dry in northern California. It actually snowed recently in Dallas and Tucson, Albuquerque had eleven inches of snow in one day, there are flowers blooming in the European alps, and it was recently warmer in Philadelphia than in San Francisco. Weather gone wild!

All we can do is keep our heads down and trudge along slowly through the muck towards the future of work. We continue to be busy doing fundamental research in Western Michigan (in the middle of all that snow) on the economic feasibility of establishing a series of remote work centers to help attract and retain talented knowledge workers to a regional economy that's been suffering the loss of way too many manufacturing jobs.

And we're also just beginning a research project looking at the "retirement plans" of federal government workers. We put "retirement" in quotes because one of our core hypotheses is that the majority of those folks won't just stop working when they hit their sixties. Our inquiry will revolve around what they do plan do to, and where they intend to do it from. Will they stay in their current residential neighborhoods, or move south and west, where the weather is supposed to be nicer? We'll let you know what we find out.

As far as this issue of the newsletter goes, our focus for the month is on the tools and technologies that let us communicate and collaborate when we're not together - and on our continual question about why more people don't take advantage of those technologies that make severe reductions in commute times and cost not only possible but intelligent.

Our feature article, "How do We Communicate with Thee? Counting the Ways" examines how we use voice, text, and video to connect with each other. But, as usual, we're more interested in how those technologies affect our communication and relationships than we are in the tools themselves. We focus in on those three communications media in some depth, leaving for a future article a more extensive look at the enterprise platforms and tools that support distributed project teams in a more comprehensive fashion.

We also want to call your attention to the Reader Response section this month, where Brad Jackson and Margaret King offer some salient and very thoughtful comments on our January article "Does Distance Matter?"

And then in our rant, "Coping with Carbon," we wax philosophical about how easy it would be to double our President's new goal of reducing oil consumption by 20% in ten years. Give us a break! The country could do it next week if we'd only embrace distributed work and quit all this ridiculous back and forthing that everyone is currently doing every day. Yes, we know some jobs don't exactly lend themselves to working remotely, but for crying out loud just stop and think about how many do.

We're going to keep harping on that theme until either we succeed or someone convinces us we're wrong - and so far, after more than fifteen years of talking about it, we're pretty darn sure we're right.

And as always, of course, we're also pleased to bring you our regular Announcements and the Best of the Blog section summarizing some of our most recent posts on the Future of Work blog. We continue to believe that you'll find ideas and information here that you just can't get anywhere else.

So, on to the rest of the newsletter. Enjoy! And please let us know what you think.

Announcements

Russ Eckel Has a Brand New Blog

Future of Work member Russ Eckel recently launched a provocative new blog called Generations@Work. Russ is a trained sociologist who has done some excellent organizational development work over the years.

His new blog is, however, focused on one of our favorite topics - the sea change in the workforce, driven by the impending "retirement" of the Baby Boomers and the "takeover" of the workplace by Gen-exers, Gen-yers, Millennials, and whatever comes next (those are our terms, not necessarily Russ's). Be sure to visit the Generations@Work, and add your own comments and insights.

WDC and Future of Work Activities

Jim and Charlie will be in western Michigan once again the week of February 5. We'll be continuing our research work for the WIRED project, where we're helping the region's economic developers and educators transform the seven-county region from a manufacturing-based economy to an "innovation" economy.

Our corporate Future of Work members will gather in San Francisco in early March for our semi-annual Members Roundtable. We're very pleased that the Roundtable will feature a presentation on Workplace Performance by Michael O'Neill of Herman Miller, as well as a panel on managing distributed workers led by Professors Sara Beckman of UC Berkeley and Terri Griffith of Santa Clara University. Accenture will be hosting the Roundtable.

As previously announced, Jim will once again be a keynote speaker at the Human Resources Leadership Program, hosted by Santa Clara University. He'll be speaking on "The Future of Work" on March 28, 2007.

Jim and Charlie will be presenting at WestFac, the Facilities Management Show/West, in Anaheim, California, at 8:30 AM on Thursday, March 1. Special thanks to Future of Work member Diane Coles of SCAN Health, who is on the Board of IFMA Irvine County, and encouraged us to participate in the WestFac conference. Our topic is "Corporate Agility."

Jim and Charlie will be describing the highlights of the WIRED project research at a panel discussion at the CoreNet Global Summit in Denver, April 29-May 2.

We'll also be featured speakers at the IFMA Industries Forum 2007 being held in Atlanta, Georgia, May 2-4. Our topic there will also be "Corporate Agility," which of course is the title of our new book, due to be published in May 2007 by the American Management Association.

Future of Work Continues to Seek New Members

Future of Work offers several levels of membership that depend on your status and needs: Individual and Small Business, Corporate, and Implementation Partners. We also offer special discounts to nonprofit, educational, and public sector organizations.

These membership programs are described in more detail on the Future of Work website, or feel free to contact us directly for more information about fees and benefits.

All Future of Work members are now listed on the Future of Work website, in the About Us/Members section. We encourage all our readers to consider joining the community.

Please visit our website and apply for membership today.

Feature Article: How Do We Communicate with Thee? Counting The Ways

Jim Ware and Charlie Grantham

In January we wrote about the nature of collaboration - and in particular collaboration among distributed workers and teams ("Does Distance Matter?" - online here and downloadable .pdf here). As we said then, we began that article intending to focus on collaborative technologies, but we couldn't talk about the tools without first sorting out the various forms and contexts of human interaction

Now we're ready to tackle the tools themselves - but again we humbly acknowledge that the topic is way too big for us to do justice to. So bear with us; this time we're going to think out loud with you about three primary kinds of tools - voice, text, and video.

All of our comments, by the way, are about working together at a distance. There are of course some tools - whiteboards, projectors, flip charts, and so on - that are designed to support people working together in face-to-face mode. But that's not our focus here. Indeed, most of the so-called collaborative tools are intended in one way or another to re-create the sense of being together when in fact we're miles apart. Maybe we'd be better off simply acknowledging we're often not in the same place or working on the same things at the same time and stop trying to create an artificial reality of same time/same place. But we plow forward nevertheless.

Marshall McLuhan (one of our all-time heroes) said it best: "The Medium is the Message" (actually we just heard recently that he originally titled his book The Medium is the Massage but a typesetter inadvertently replaced the "a" with an "e." That's an interesting side story, but in fact both "message" and "massage" work for us).

Our point is simple: it really does matter what medium you use to communicate. Verbal communication (real-time telephone conversation and voice messages) is a much richer and even a multi-dimensional form of conveying meaning. The literal meaning of your words is amplified and filtered by your tone of voice and even the pace at which you speak. None of that comes through in a written message. Of course, video conveys even more than voice alone: body language and facial expressions can either amplify or negate the content of what you are saying.

So let's talk about them one at a time.

Voice

Clearly, the telephone is by far the most widespread, and the most commonly used, collaborative tool we've got. A telephone connected to the global network (and virtually all of them are) puts you in almost instant touch with several billion individuals (of course, you have to know their number, and it helps to speak the same language).

Telephones are remarkable in many ways. Not only do they transmit all languages accurately (not a trivial reality, when you think about it), but they also convey sound accurately enough that each speaker's voice has a distinctive sound. And with today's extensive fiber optic networks spanning the globe, there are virtually no delays in transmission, even when the call participants are literally 10,000 or more miles apart.

Today of course POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) has been supplemented by all kinds of special-purpose add-ons, like three-way calling, conference calling, caller ID, voice messaging, and so on and so on, ad infinitum. And both of us have fixed-cost long distance calling (thanks of course to the Internet and firms like Vonage and Skype, which have at long last introduced real, live competition into the telecommunications industry).

But what we're really interested in is how people use these services, what they like about them, and what they don't like.

Our own observation is that the majority of people (including the two of us) still rely very, very heavily on plain old telephone service. It's easy, it's (usually) reliable, and now that almost everyone we need to communicate with has some form of voice mail, it's also very convenient to leave messages when you can't reach someone "live."

And therein lies a very important aspect of this 21st-century always-connected world we now inhabit. We're finding that we and many of you who we interact with regularly actually prefer to send and receive voice messages rather than deal with people "live" (for many interactions, not all of them by any means).

Interestingly, Jim had a conversation about this very topic with a close friend at a dinner party a few weeks ago. He and Jim actually agreed that "asynchronous" interactions via email and even voice messaging are often in many ways more satisfying and even more productive than real-time conversations.

The reality, like it or not, is that most of us have so many things going on in parallel in our work (and our lives) that it's actually helpful to have even just a few minutes to figure out how to respond to a request or a question from someone else. That is, it's nice (and even a relief) to have a few moments under our own control to think about how to respond to someone's question or demand (rather than having to figure out what to say while the other person is sitting there waiting for a response). Thus we end up actually preferring to respond to messages (whether voice or text) rather than having to think on our feet and converse with someone in real time.

If our lives were simpler and closer to being "single track" we might be a whole lot more comfortable (and competent) with immediate, real-time conversation. But given the reality of multi-tasking that is our common condition these days, participating in many simultaneous but asynchronous "conversations" may be the only way to survive (as a case in point, as we compose this article, we're periodically jumping back to email and replying to messages that have absolutely nothing to do with our topic here. And naturally we've been interrupted by several phone calls along the way too).

For a slightly expanded thought piece on this specific aspect of communication, see Jim's January 16th blog post, "Is Continuous Partial Attention Addictive?"

But there's a down side to relying on voice messages too. Especially in larger organizations that have broadcast voice mail systems, you can end up spending a huge amount of time listening and responding to voice messages. And unless your system can translate voice messages to text, you have to deal with them in real time, and more or less in sequence. At least with email you can usually scan through the Subject lines (and usually the first few lines of text) of a dozen or so messages on your PC screen at the same time.

But we digress. Much of what we've just said about voice communication applies to written text messages as well. Let's go there next.

Text

Actually, given the speed and reach of the Internet, along with the rise of Instant Messaging, a very high percentage of our written communications these days are "almost live" too.

But, as we noted above, the key word there is the "almost." Even "instant" messages and chat rooms allow us a bit more time to think through our responses and comments than does a real-time phone conversation.

And when you are composing an email or an instant message you also have the "luxury" of rereading what you've said, rewriting it, or even choosing not to reply (or at least delaying your response). Text messages really do give each of us a great deal more control over our communications than telephone conversations.

The other innate advantage of email is that you can "broadcast" the same message to a virtually unlimited number of people. And of course the downside of that feature is the "Reply to All" feature that (in combination with human nature and the "CYA" mentality) virtually guarantees that your Inbox will be flooded with unnecessary "cc's."

The deeper problem with those millions of emails flying around in cyberspace is that each one of them places a time demand (to read and respond) on each one of its recipients - and many of those demands actually distract the recipient and detract from the work of the organization.

One of our earliest newsletter articles (way back in 2003) was called "Is email a killer app or an app to kill?" In it we dealt with our love-hate relationship with this powerful tool that connects us with friends and colleagues so easily and cheaply - but also pulls us all too often into conversations with little or even negative value. And it seems to produce about 10 emails for every one we initiate.

Finally, the strength of voice (conveying emotion along with content) is one of the great weaknesses of written text. In our attempts to include emotion in our written messages we often get all wrapped up in words that, like it or not, are ambiguous, or are easily misunderstood (or at least misinterpreted). And how many of us have frantically attempted to recall a message composed and sent in haste or carelessness? Or, worse, hit "Reply to All" instead of just sending that response to the one trusted confidante on the team?

Clearly, text has tremendous advantages for expressing and sharing complex messages and ideas. This newsletter is an obvious example; there's no way we could create the ideas we compose here without writing them down (and rewriting them - don't ever kid yourselves into thinking you are reading our first drafts!). But as we've tried to suggest, text, like voice, is a two-edged sword.

Enough said. On to that richest of all media, video.

Video

Video obviously adds images, body language, and a much stronger sense of "being there" to audio communication. It's a much "richer" and more multidimensional form of interaction, and is capable of conveying far more meaning than a telephone call.

The underlying question we've been asking for some time, however, given that clear superiority, is why video conferencing still hasn't become "mainstream." Yes, it's getting wider and wider use, especially in larger global enterprises, but it certainly has not been embraced by the masses.

We can remember seeing the early picturephone at demonstrations at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry back in the 50's (yes, we're that old). Of course we were fascinated, and it was great fun to see ourselves on a small screen. But the quality was poor and the cost was certainly prohibitive.

Fast forward to 2007. Video conferencing is still "on the verge" of taking off. How come? Well, for one thing there are still cost and quality issues. You can purchase very high-quality systems from firms like Hewlett Packard (the Halo Collaboration Studio) and Cisco Systems (the TelePresence system) that really do create a powerful sense of actually being there.

But those systems will cost you somewhere between $250,000 and $500,000 - and that's for one installation (clearly you need at least two of them to have an actual conference). There are some businesses and situations where that cost is a bargain because it reduces executive travel around the world, and it enables more frequent meetings that simply wouldn't take place without the technology capability. However, the demand for that level of capability is relatively small today.

At the other end of the scale anyone can purchase an inexpensive web cam for well under $100 and use any one of several free web-based video conferencing systems (like Skype, Yahoo Voice, and many others). But you get what you pay for. In our experience these low-end systems produce small pictures, jumpy movement (they typically transmit at far below the thirty frames per second rate of broadcast television, and that rate is what we've all come to expect in video transmission).

So for many of us the cost/quality ratio remains a barrier (those of you in larger organizations tend to be less cost-conscious, and you generally have access to higher quality video systems). In addition, we believe there is also a simple convenience/familiarity barrier to overcome as well.

For example, both of us have video cams, and we even have access to a fairly powerful collaborative tool from Marratech that gives us not only video and voice over the Internet, but also a shared whiteboard and even desktop application sharing that lets us do real-time editing and document creation. Yet we don't use it very often. And that's what is making us particularly curious about video. We've got it, the quality is reasonable and the cost is minimal, yet we still don't use it very often.

How come? As we've thought about it and discussed it (mostly by telephone!), it seems to us that when people know each other well video just doesn't add enough to the meaning of the conversation to make the hassle worthwhile. Whether it makes sense or not, we still use the traditional telephone a lot more than PC-based VoIP (even though both of us do have Skype). Other folks call us by phone, so it's a habit and a convenience as much as anything else.

There has also been one recent development in the video world that is worth noting. All of our comments so far have been about real-time video conferencing. But the past year has seen the explosion of web-based services like YouTube that enable just about anyone to record and upload video of all kinds - including personal messages. And there are some video email services out there too, although again they aren't very widely used - yet.

We believe that YouTube may well get all of us more accustomed to short, personal, (and decidedly non-professional) video messages. Pay close attention to YouTube; it's not just a social phenomenon. Look for it to influence commercial marketing, product development, and other business processes more than any of us can imagine today.

Putting it All Together

So what does all this tell us? Mostly "different strokes for different folks" - and different situations.

Voice remains the most common and most useful collaborative tool, whether it's by traditional telephone or VoIP, and whether it's real-time or delayed, as in voice messages and voice mail.

Text is widely used for more complex messages that require careful forethought, and for broadcasting to many people at the same time. And it's become our predominant mode of communication when we're "interacting" with others asynchronously. We think email has become a preferred mode of communication largely because it enables people to work "simultaneously" with as many others as they can handle, no matter where in the world they are at any given time. In fact, the location-independence of both cell phones and email are among their most powerful (and often forgotten) features.

Video remains the stepchild of the information age. We see it slowly growing in usage, and do expect it to become both higher quality and lower cost as technology continues to improve and high-speed bandwidth becomes even more ubiquitous. And, as noted, web-based video recordings are transforming many areas of our social and business lives.

Thus, we all have an incredible array of choices for basic communication/collaboration tools. And since most of us have access to virtually all of these tools, the remaining question is how and why do we choose them moment by moment? Here's where our social psych and sociology training takes over and leads us to explore individual work styles and preferences. There's no question that some of us instinctively pick up the telephone or headset when we want to connect with someone else, while others reach for the keyboard.

So What?

Given all this, we've got a few concluding thoughts.

First, we do have lots of choices - more than most of us realize. The most important thing for you to do is ask the fundamental question, What's the best medium for this message?

Second, we think it's time for all of us to develop some kind of etiquette about distance communication - realizing that we're all overloaded and dealing with each other more asynchronously these days. We need to make our messages short, to the point, and very explicit. And always remember that any communication message is a request for someone else's time and attention. Use those requests judiciously.

Third, don't ever assume that more communication is better. Often it's just the opposite.

And finally, schedule some time every day when you're not available to anyone. Think time is critical for knowledge work, and it's in very, very short supply. Remember that just because the phone rings, or you get an email message, you don't have to answer it right away. We sometimes simply turn off the ringer on the phone when we need some quiet time. The world won't end if you take charge of your communications by doing it on your schedule instead of everyone else's.

As usual, your comments and reactions are more than welcome. As always, please send your thoughts to us at comments@thefutureofwork.net.

Reader Response: Comments on "Does Distance Matter?"

These comments from readers refer to our feature article, "Does Distance Matter?" that appeared in the January issue of this newsletter.

From Brad Jackson, Founder and CEO, Coordin8:

I was more than slightly interested in the January feature article, "Does Distance Matter?" My thought several years back was that collaborative technologies were supposed to make "place" irrelevant. I would agree that it has, but at the same time, it has also made it more relevant than ever before.

However, the question in the closing paragraph, "Why aren't available tools being used more widely?" is the same question that I've been obsessing over for at least the last 15 years.

As you know, I put together a piece for Max Wideman's site (Project Management) called "Virtual Teams: Getting Beyond Email" which looked at why email won't work and why collaborative technologies haven't worked date. I also wrote a variation of that article as a short piece, "Digital Group Memory", for Future of Work Agenda that appeared in xx, 2006.

I think it's helpful to consider [collaborative technologies] from a "memory" perspective:

• Collaborative technologies that predominately support synchronous (same-time) work (e.g., web-conferencing, instant messaging) have an effervescent memory. Once the session is completed, you're done. There is no memory. Yes, you can save a transcript of the session, which is memory, but the primary value is derived by participating [in real time]. To a large extent, products in this category have been highly successful. It's nearly "utility"-like. You can purchase a monthly plan or pay-as-you for web-conferencing.
• Collaborative technologies that are asynchronous, on the other hand, have a persistent memory. That is to say, their primary purpose is to be a memory so that people can interact with it at different times. From a product deployment perspective, there has been some success, such as the growing number of document management systems of varying levels of sophistication being deployed. However, despite these numbers, my observation is that they are not being used in a truly impactful way. It's this latter type of collaborative technology and why [it is not being used more productively] that has been my obsession.

Now, to get to the heart of the question that has occupied my thoughts, which is "Why haven't collaborative technologies-specifically, the asynchronous ones-worked to date?"

In my opinion, the answer lies in implementation. The fatal flaw is that organizations implementing these forms of collaborative technologies think of them at the group/team level rather than at the organizational level. In fact, in your article, you discussed [the idea that] "Communication is not coordination is not cooperation is not collaboration." There is no mention of how these technologies facilitate organizational work. The result is that each team/group creates their own version of a "Team Room." to use your term. each and every time. Each [Team Room] looks different from the other (the "snowflake effect"). But why would [people] do that? At a team level, team members are not particularly good at structuring a Team Room. They are not experts at process. And, because each Room is different, there is absolutely no way to share across them or to roll them up to assess the status of the whole.

The pain is very obvious at each management level. How much time does each team leader spend pulling together "status" information to send up one level? Then, that [next] level spends [more time] combining spreadsheets and email to create yet another communiqué to send [further] upward.

By the time the process is complete, the so-called "status" is out of date. Yet we have high-speed networks, more people using technology than ever before, and we even have "collaborative technology." Communication within the organizational unit hasn't benefited. In fact, I would suggest that it's worse. Managers of all levels have to contend with an overabundance of communication (that they wouldn't have had in a paper world) that they have to sort and shift through. They technology is working against them. And those who have to look over the "whole" have no more idea of what's going on "now" than those who managed in a paper-based world.

What if, instead of having each team waste time creating [its own] Team Room that has no hope of working with other Team Rooms," organizations designed one [kind of Team Room] that has the right processes and supports the type of work the organization does? Individual teams then wound not have create a new structure each time. And, at each organizational level, [managers] could aggregate progress [easily].

I've found the best framework to use for structuring team work at both the team/group level and the organizational level is project management processes.

So, my big "Ah Ha" has been that organizations that have deployed these asynchronous types of collaborative technologies where each team creates its own [unique] "snowflake" have sub-optimized, to say the least. They have created an environment that will never work. It's not that an organization won't have more than one "project" template or that the template won't be modified by a team; it will, but the starting point will be the same. After all, best practices in project management include doing a project charter, developing a work plan, managing issues and risks, communicating to stakeholders, and so forth - irrespective of whether the team is doing a drug development project, oil exploration, software development, or building a new office.

From Margaret King, Director of the Center for Cultural Studies & Analysis, based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania:

Thank you for taking the trouble to define the differences between the various meanings and levels of communication - collaboration. I have always thought that collaboration was one of the finest products of human work; now I have a better idea of the reasons. And face-to-face works so well, and can't be easily substituted, because humans are social primates: we get most of our information from how things look and sound, largely by reading faces and body language.

Think of a Rolling Stone (magazine) editorial meeting, or an ancient campfire, where our forebears discussed what was most important to us: how we got here, what forces act on our lives and decisions, and where we are going and why (what it's all for: the meaning of everything). There is a reason the travel industry leads all others in dollars and time spent; we need to be physically in places with real-time human beings, and we can't get enough of it. "Spend more time with family" is the number-one executive priority after work demands; and those two forces are always in contention. Trying to balance them, not the same thing as doing away with same time/same place dynamics, is the ongoing project of working.

Best of the Blog

Here's a small sampling of excerpts/lead-ins from our recent weblog posts. Please get in the habit of reading the Future of Work weblog regularly - bookmark it, or if you have an RSS news reader, subscribe to it. And please contribute as well. We're more than happy to reprint your stories, or to consider featuring you as a Guest Writer. We believe we're creating a unique knowledge base of what's going on out there today, and what's going to be going on tomorrow. If you want to learn about the future of work, our blog is the place to go (along with this very newsletter, of course). Just click on each headline below to visit the full original blog post.

Is Continuous Partial Attention Addictive? (January 16)

I've said several times recently that I am particularly interested right now in collaborative technologies and their impact on work as well as how those technologies affect our relationships with peers and colleagues. So when I was listening to the radio the other day (Friday, January 12) and caught a segment on KQED radio (NPR in San Francisco) focused on how technology is changing the way people communicate and interact I was naturally interested.

The conversation, hosted by David Iverson, included Chuck Nevius of the San Francisco Chronicle, Clifford Nass, professor of communications at Stanford University, and Rob Pergoraro, personal tech columnist at the Washington Post. . . . For me the most interesting idea in the entire conversation was the observation that young folks (20-somethings in particular) seem to prefer having lots of parallel "conversations" going on simultaneously via instant messaging and email, rather than being engaged in a real-time face-to-face conversation. . . .

Federal Agencies Failing to Meet Telecommuting Requirements (January 24)

Our friend, colleague, and Future of Work small business member Jim Redmond, the founder of Concisis, pointed me to an intriguing article that appeared Monday in eWeek. The title says it all: "Federal Agencies Fail to Meet Telecommuting Mandate."

Author Wayne Rush opens the article with this statement:

A study released Jan. 22 by the Telework Exchange, a group that facilitates the growth of telecommuting, reveals that most federal agencies and many federal managers are far from meeting their mandated requirements to have their employees work from home or other remote sites. While some agencies, notably in the Department of Defense, have met the requirements, others have made little if any effort to comply with Congressional and Administration mandates.

I find it surprising that there is so little effort to comply with the legal mandate that Congress issued some time ago (maybe I'm a little naive about government agencies!). . . .

In Our Humble Opinion: Coping with Carbon

Commentary by Charlie Grantham and Jim Ware

Move bits, not butts . . .

Okay, okay, we've been over this before but we're going to do it again. Everybody is all of sudden talking about their "carbon footprint," their "sequestration plan," being "green-certified," doing something about global warming and climate change. Good grief, please stop the yacking and let's get real!

Here's some homework (we're into participatory activism here): grab your lawn chair and a six-pack of your favorite beverage. Go sit next to some random on-ramp to a freeway early in the morning (or late afternoon, as we prefer). Count the cars whizzing by with only one person in them as a percentage of all the traffic. What do you see? Our bet: one heck of a lot of people who are using 200+ horsepower in a multi-thousand-pound vehicle to move their skinny little butts from point A to point B. Get serious. Does that make any kind of sense at all?

Buford, Maynard, and company have got two horse-power "vehicles" down on the farm and they do just fine. Their "vehicles" are named Sandy and Big Fella. Hey, and they've got faces too. Sure, oh sure, their "commute" from the house to the barn and the back forty is relatively short, but they've got always-on four-hoof drive in case of mud.

As an aside, Cooter (the ol' data dog) found that there are places in Los Angeles where you can take your three-ton Hummer to have real mud and dirt sprayed on it to make it look cool, like you've actually taken the damn thing off the road.

It's not about logic, it's not about responsibility, it's about being cool! How stupid can you get? We think it was P.T. Barnum who said he never lost a dime underestimating the intelligence of the average Joe. Now he understood hewmanity better than we do.

Back to the point. Do you remember the rant we did a couple of years ago about $5 a gallon gas ("What Will a World of $5 Gas Be Like?" - go read it, it'll be good for you)? Well we do. Newsflash. Retail gas prices have dropped 15% in the past few weeks. Hallelujah. It's still $2.15 in Charlie's neighborhood (and $2.79 in Jim's!). And we're supposed to go out and celebrate?

We don't think so. And Fearless Leader says we should lower our demands for oil by 20% over the next ten years. It must be comforting to live in a state of delusion (or was that a state of D-Nile?) where the bright light of reality never enters.

Come on folks, let's take 40% out within twelve months. No, we haven't been smokin' some of that Maui Wowi. In Our Humble Opinion (you knew it was coming) we could do that right here in River City, right now. How, you ask? Simple. Go back to that on-ramp and scream "move your bits, not your butts" at all those almost-empty cars.

Do you really, really have to be in your "office" all the time? Dirty little secret: the answer is No, and let's face reality, you're not there now about half the time anyway. So what's going on?

Most people think they have to be someplace special to do their work. Alright, maybe in a few cases. We don't want the doc to try doing an appendectomy using some stupid robot-controlled knife with his/her Blackberry from the privacy of his/her deck. But (and pardon the pun, or was that bun?), writing the prescription, reading the medical file, and consulting with the proctologist could certainly be done from a distance (and already is, more than most of us realize).

But (sorry, we're on a roll here) nooooooooooooo, the "ever'body's gotta get in that Benz convertible and drive fifty miles looking very cool and then do the reverse a few hours later - just 'cause that's what we do" attitude simply doesn't cut it anymore.

Move those bits folks, not your behinds. It's a whole lot cheaper, faster, and more responsible to move the work to you rather than you to the work.

Get out of your car. Ask, "Why do I need to be there instead of here? Go out and kill an SUV
while you're at it. And if you live on the left coast write the Governator and ask him to sell off all those Hummers he owns.

The point is really simple. About 40% of what knowledge workers do can be done from just about anywhere with an Internet connection. So why are we moving all that metal and flesh around, sucking up gas, spitting out exhaust, killing time, and funding Middle East terrorists? Wake up America!

Seriously, if each of us worked from home or a neighborhood "Third Place" two days a week we'd cut gasoline consumption by 40% overnight. What's so hard about that?

And here's a nice little bonus for all you civic-minded folks. Cousin and good buddy Rebecca Ryan (info@nextgenerationconsulting.com) brought an important little factoid to us through her newsletter. Research by one of our favorite gurus (Robert Putman of "Bowling Alone" fame) notes that for every 10 minutes people spend commuting they decease their civic participation by 10 percent.

Wow! No wonder we don't have civic-minded leaders anymore. Wonder where the Pop Warner league coach is? Where the local charity organizer is? Where the volunteer at the hospital is? They're all out there moving their butts into center city every day instead of moving their bits back to the home office.

You think we're totally goofy? (Some would argue we have always been a couple of bricks short of a full load anyway). Try this: go to www.conservation.org and do your own personal profile using their Carbon Calculator. Then go back and re-do it reducing your travel by 40%. Hmm, some difference there, huh?

And if you're feeling really responsible, visit www.terrapass.com, figure out how much carbon your car pumps into the atmosphere every year, and then tax yourself by funding an alternative energy project that takes that much carbon right back out (we owe this one to our good friends John and Michelle Cleveland). Seriously, do it. You get a nifty little Terrapass sticker for your car, it costs less than you might think, and it definitely feels good.

You know, the only thing that is going to make this happen, short of Las Vegas becoming oceanfront property, $12 a gallon gas and rolling blackouts all the time, is you. That's right, we're talking to you. Individual action, individual choices. Mother Nature is gonna get really PO'd at us if we don't start doing simple things like movin' our bits instead of our sorry butts.

Please direct your comments to comments@thefutureofwork.net. We'd love to publish your reactions and suggestions. And thanks for listening.

This issue of Future of Work Agenda was produced by Jim Ware and Charlie Grantham of the Work Design Collaborative. We encourage your comments, suggestions, and submission of materials for possible future publication. Please contact us at:

Charlie Grantham, charlie@thefutureofwork.net, +1 928 771 9138
Jim Ware, jim@thefutureofwork.net, +1 510 558 1434

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