September 2006

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This is our personal note welcoming you to the September 2006 issue of Future of Work Agenda and setting our theme for the month. This month we’re wondering about what it takes to make visions turn into reality. Our feature article envisions a very compelling yet seemingly unattainable future of distributed work, while our rant goes after the fear-mongering that’s getting in the way of getting to the future.

Charlie will be speaking at the IEDC Annual Meeting in New York City later this month. We’ve got an article in the July issue of Corporate Real Estate Leader, and we were quoted in EE Times. This is your last chance to participate in Paula Bartholome’s online survey on collaboration; and – as always – Future of Work continues to seek new members.

This is the first article of a three-part series that will address the question in the title: how come Distributed Work isn’t being embraced to the degree many of us have thought it would be by now? We fully intended to address the question and answer it in one thought piece that would be appropriate for this issue of the newsletter. However, as we began writing it became apparent that we were tackling a Very Big Issue – one that reminds us of the 1990’s quandary about collaborative software: why should anyone use it, what gets in the way of widespread use, and what can be done to promote it?

By Barbara Armstrong and Mark Sekula
The work of today is drastically different than the work processes that supported the industrial revolution. Today’s product – knowledge – requires a different environment in which it can be "produced," nurtured, and shared. Based on our experience as workplace designers, along with our research and review of current literature regarding workplace design, productivity, and business trends, we established a list of physical attributes associated with a well-designed workplace.

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

So how did it get to be September already? Somehow August always seems to disappear in a flash – and it’s not because we were asleep on the beach. Seems the world continues to divide up into those (including us) with too much to do, and those (unfortunate) folks with not enough on their plates (both figuratively and literally).

Anyway, here we are in the September, when the days start growing longer (at least up here in the northern half of our overheated planet). Maybe the record hot spells of 2006 will finally begin to recede into the past – and let’s hope that Katrina’s cousins stay away too.

This is the one newsletter issue a year that we have two months to prepare for (since we supposedly "take off" the month of August – ha!). We’d like to believe that the extra time gives us a chance to think a bit more and bring you something special. And we hope you’ll agree that we’ve succeeded.

Our feature article this month ("How Come Distributed Work is Still the Next Big Thing?") is actually Part One of a three-part series (Parts Two and Three are still in production). Several of our conversations this summer kept coming back to this very basic question: with all the obvious business benefits of distributed work, why isn’t it sweeping across the corporate landscape like one of those summer forest fires that’s gotten out of control?

Well, you’ll actually have to wait a while for the answer, because we ended up writing Part One to remind us first of all why distributed work should be the Next Big Thing. We’ve got a lot of theories about why it isn’t, and we’ll share them in Part Two, soon to be appearing in a newsletter near you. But please do read Part One, and then write us about why you think corporate executives are so good at ignoring the obvious. We’ll be happy to incorporate your thoughts into Part Two.

We’re also pleased to share with you some research on workplace design coming from our friends Barbara Armstrong and Mark Sekula of Kahler Slater Architects. The "bonus article" this month is their contribution to our global community’s understanding of "The Physical Attributes of a Well-Designed Workplace." We hope you’ll find their thoughts as helpful as we have.

And then there’s our Rant. This month we’re taking on a big and very current issue: fear. Frankly, we’re tired of being scared, of giving up our shampoo and toothpaste (and, most of all, our hair gel) in the name of making the world safe. More seriously, we’re deeply concerned that all this fear is making it really, really hard to think about the future. Now, we’re not so naïve or "soft" as to think the world can be made safe without some effort and considerable sacrifice, but we also take some exception to the way fear has so rapidly seemed to take over our daily lives.

As we suggest in "Getting Beyond the Fear of Fear," some good old-fashioned creativity and imagination is needed to start thinking about a positive future once again – or there may not be a future of work, let alone of life. Just at importantly, we also think we’ve found a really exciting way to build strategy and create a whole bunch of new "blue oceans." If you don’t know what we mean by that, read the Rant (heck, please read it even if you do know what a blue ocean is).

And as always, of course, we’re pleased to bring you our regular Announcements and Best of the Blog sections. 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

Charlie Grantham to Speak at IEDC Annual Meeting

The International Economic Development Council is holding its annual meeting in New York City September 17-20 at the Marriott Marquis in midtown Manhattan. The theme this year is "Roadmap for a Knowledge-Driven Economy."

Charlie will be participating on a panel focused on "Workforce Development Implications for Economic Developers" where he expects to focus in particular on the need for a new network of workforce support centers, local shared workplace facilities, and learning centers (we call them Business Community Centers^tm).

For more information about the IEDC Annual Conference, click on this link:

http://www.iedconline.org/AnnualConference/index.html

New Article on Corporate Relocation and Economic Development

We are very pleased that Corporate Real Estate Leader, the executive publication of CoreNet Global, has just published our article "Location Strategies." The article appears in the July 2006 issue; it's available online at this link (free access for CoreNet members, small fee for non-members).

Here's a brief overview of the article:

In today's dynamic global economy organizations are compelled to move away from a fixed-cost structure to variable cost models in order to reduce capital requirements and risk, while simultaneously increasing their agility and responsiveness to changing environments.

This new reality, in combination with equally dramatic changes in work force demographics, means there is a powerful need for closer integration between corporate real estate operations and community-based economic development initiatives.

Jim and Charlie Quoted in Article in EE Times

We are very pleased that our long-term emphasis on the power (and the challenges) of distributed work is achieving wider recognition by the larger world. See this month’s Feature Article, "How Come Distributed Work is Still the Next Big Thing?" below, for our current views.

There’s also a new report out on the challenges faced by global engineering/product development teams - and it cites WDC Executive Producers Jim Ware and Charlie Grantham as experts (a designation we're happy to accept).

The story ("Global teams rock around the clock"), by Deb Schiff, appears in the current issue of EE Times, a rather mainstream publication focused not on distributed work but on technical and managerial issues in the engineering community.

Please Participate in a Survey on Collaboration

We are pleased to invite all Future of Work Agenda readers to participate in an online survey about collaboration that is being conducted by Future of Work small business member Paula Bartholome.

Please read her announcement in the July newsletter and contribute your ideas and insights to the survey.

Paula teaches online and on campus in DePaul University’s nationally recognized School for New Learning and heads her own firm, called Parallax. This fall she will conduct a workshop at Loyola University Chicago’s School for Professional Studies on the individual and organizational requirements for collaborative workplaces.

You can access the survey directly by clicking here. It will be closed out at the end of September, so this is your last chance to participate.

If you have any questions about the survey, please contact Paula directly at paula@parallax-perspectives.com. Also, if you have stories, theories, or questions you’d like to share about your experiences of collaborative work, your organization’s approach to fostering collaboration, or other related topics, Paula would love to hear from you.

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 Come Distributed Work Is Still The Next Big Thing?

by Jim Ware and Charlie Grantham

This is the first article of a three-part series that will address the question in the title: how come Distributed Work isn’t being embraced to the degree many of us have thought it would be by now? We fully intended to address the question and answer it in one thought piece that would be appropriate for this issue of the newsletter. However, as we began writing it became apparent that we were tackling a Very Big Issue – one that reminds us of the 1990’s quandary about collaborative software: why should anyone use it, what gets in the way of widespread use, and what can be done to promote it?

We believe the same three questions have to be asked – and answered – regarding Distributed Work. What makes it compelling in the first place? Why isn’t it being embraced more quickly and more widely? And what can or should be done to promote its adoption?

So we’ve split our thoughts about those questions into three digestible articles focusing on those three fundamental questions. Even this first one is longer than our usual newsletter piece, but we just can’t say what needs to be said in any fewer words. Besides, this approach will give you, our readers, an opportunity to weigh in as we go, creating what we hope will be a meaningful dialogue and conversation that just might help us all understand where the future of work is really going.

Part One: The Business Case for Distributed Work

Okay senior business executives, here we go again: just what is it about distributed work that you don’t get?

We’ve been studying and writing about distributed work and its impact for years (see, for example, Charles Grantham and Larry Nichols, The Digital Workplace: Designing Groupware Platforms, Nostrand-Reinhold, 1993; Jim Ware, "Understanding Distributed Work," Future of Work White Paper, 2003; and "Understanding the Hidden Economy," Future of Work Agenda, October, 2005). And while there’s a lot more remote and distributed workers today than there were even a few years ago, we continue to puzzle over why the adoption rate seems so slow.

There are, after all, plenty of economic and other benefits that have been well-documented over the years, not only by us but others who are even stronger advocates for telecommuting/distributed work/remote work (or whatever you want to call it) than we are.

So we’ve decided it’s time to revisit the business case yet again. But this time we’re going to go further and also discuss the sources of resistance to change and what the advocates of distributed work need to do to promote what seems to us to be incredibly obvious.

Now don’t get us wrong: we’re not saying that remote/distributed work is right for everybody, or for all jobs – and we actually believe that it’s not right for anyone all the time.

So with those caveats, we’re first going to discuss why distributed work is a good idea and identify the business case for embracing it. Then we’re going to explore why even after forty years it hasn’t become an overnight success. Finally, we’ll talk about what distributed work advocates and believers can and should do to increase its rate of adoption in their organizations.

What’s the Business Case?

This is the easy part. There are at least six solid reasons why just about all organizations should establish distributed work programs:

1. Reducing basic workforce support costs;
2. Increasing workforce productivity;
3. Attracting and retaining talent;
4. Increasing organizational agility;
5. Reducing the business risk of disruption from terrorism or a natural disaster
6. Reducing traffic congestion, air pollution, and environmental impact more generally

Let’s consider each of these factors briefly.

Bottom-Line Economic Benefits

Our own research and a number of real-world company experiences confirm that an Alternative Workplace Strategy or program can reduce workforce support costs by 40% or more. The biggest and most obvious source of cost reduction is real estate and corporate facilities costs. Companies like Sun Microsystems, Cisco Systems, and IBM have been able to reduce their investments in real estate and facilities by up to 50%, driving costs down by $50 million or more per year.

Sun Microsystems’ iWork program was based largely on the discovery that over one-third of Sun’s office-based employees did not "badge in" to their assigned office building on any given day. They were already working at home, traveling, or attending meetings in other Sun facilities. The obvious conclusion was that there was simply no need to Sun to maintain all those empty offices, and the iWork program was created to move thousands of Sun employees into shared workplaces, or "touchdown" facilities that many different people would use over the course of a day or a week.

But there are other, more subtle workforce support cost savings opportunities that go well beyond real estate and facilities. In almost every infrastructure area, from IT to HR to Administrative Support to Management Span of Control, remote/mobile workers operate more independently and need less support than do traditional office-based workers. In order to survive "in the field" distributed workers have to learn to work on their own, and to solve their support problems quickly and inexpensively.

True, there are usually some increased technology costs as remote workers go online, making greater use of laptops, cell phones, and PDA’s, but in our experience these added technology investments are minuscule relative to the real estate and facilities cost savings. Historically, remote telecommunications access costs were excessive, but recently as high-speed, reasonably-priced Internet access had become almost ubiquitous, added technology cost is no longer a significant issue.

Increasing Workforce Productivity

While the measurement of knowledge worker productivity is a difficult and complex subject, we are convinced from our own research and consulting work with individual organizations that distributed workers are clearly more productive than their office-bound colleagues. We have conducted numerous studies of the productivity differential at both the individual and the group level, and they have consistently shown gains 15% or more for distributed workers.

Just think of the time-wasters that remote workers can avoid: commuting (and the fatigue and stress that goes along with it); inefficient meetings; long lunches and coffee breaks with peers; and the distractions, interruptions, and disturbances that inevitably come from one’s cubicle neighbors in traditional office settings.

We’ve tracked the time that distributed workers spend "on the job" and there is no question that they almost always give back to the company more than 50% of the time they save by not commuting. Moreover, they typically achieve their work goals and produce agreed-on results in fewer hours – and it’s usually of higher quality too (as reported both by themselves and by their supervisors).

Distributed work really is a win-win for the company and the individual worker. It’s truly a case of getting more done with less effort.

Attracting and Retaining Talent

Our original research on working patterns (conducted over five years ago) was driven by our conviction that knowledge workers today want – no, demand – extensive control over where and when they work. And distributed work – getting things done from wherever they are or want to be, gives them exactly the kind of control they are looking for.

And those knowledge workers – what Richard Florida dubbed "the Creative Class" – are increasingly in the driver’s seat. There is no question that the United States (and most other advanced economies) will be experiencing a severe workforce shortage over the next decade, driven largely by the impending retirement of millions of Baby Boomers with far fewer workers in the following generations. Combine that with the increasing criticality of knowledge and innovation as sources of competitive advantage, and you’ve got a recipe for a "sellers’ market" when it comes to labor. (see, for example, "Closing the Talent Gap," Future of Work Agenda, January, 2005; and "The Coming Talent Shortage: It’s Here, and Will Get Much Worse," Future of Work weblog, March 26, 2005).

Not only that, but that scarce talent is also choosing where to live before worrying about who to work for. (See "In Our Humble Opinion: Reality Bites," Future of Work Agenda, July, 2006; "Attracting the Young, College-Educated to Cities," CEOs for Cities, June, 2006).

That’s one more very compelling reason to embrace distributed work – it may be that the only way to get that scarce talent working for you is by hiring "location-independent" employees who have chosen to live in smaller communities far removed from your corporate facilities. As we’ve said over and over, it’s a whole lot less expensive to let the work "go" to the workers than it is to require the workers to come to the work.

Increasing Organizational Agility

This is an easy one. With a large number of remote/distributed workers your business is inherently more flexible and agile (see "The Agile Workplace," Gartner Group and MIT, July 2001; "Enabling Work in a Networked World: Must-Have Intelligence on the Emerging Global Workplace," CRE2010, CoreNet Global). Your fixed costs of real estate and facilities are minimized. And your business can grow (or shrink) quickly and relatively inexpensively since finding (or disposing of) office space is less likely to be a time-consuming and constraining factor.

With a distributed workforce you are also far more able to respond to local business opportunities, get someone to a client site anywhere in the country more quickly, and better able to tap into local pockets of unique talent (it’s no accident that western Michigan and South Carolina are centers of furniture design talent, New York City is awash with financial experts, Silicon Valley is the place to go for software innovation, and Los Angeles is filled with acting talent, producers, directors, and digital film experts).

Reducing Business Risk

This one is obvious too. We all know that one of the primary design objectives of the original Internet was to create a redundant network with no mission-critical "center." If some portion of the Internet is down because of hardware or software crashes, the rest of the Net picks up the slack by rerouting messages and data. Similarly, a distributed business model is far less susceptible to disruption from any kind of disaster, whether it’s terrorism, a hurricane, a snowstorm, an earthquake, or an old-fashioned power outage. With your workforce operating over a wide geographic region and not needing to come into a central facility to be productive, business continuity is a given, not a challenge.

Minimizing Environmental Impact

This too is an obvious benefit to having your workforce operating in a distributed fashion. The arithmetic here is simple: if every company in a major metropolitan area encouraged (or actually required) its entire workforce to work from home or in a neighborhood satellite facility just one day a week instead of commuting to the central office, the number of cars on the road, and their energy consumption, will drop by 20%. Just think what we could do for energy independence in the United States if we could shift to distributed work models (see "What Will a World of $5 Gas Be Like?" Future of Work Agenda, April, 2005).

Pulling It All Together

So the case for distributed work isn’t only compelling – it’s overwhelming. In fact, we are reminded of something Alvin and Heidi Toffler said way back in the 1970’s in their landmark book Future Shock: one of the most unproductive things we do in the entire economy is move millions of bodies into central business districts every morning and then back home again every evening.

In the Industrial Era, given the technologies of that time, there was no choice. Factory workers had to be in the factory to work. Not only that, but all the points on the assembly line had to operate in sync; the activities were tightly interconnected, and highly dependent on each other.

Now, of course, that is no longer true. While a percentage of knowledge work still needs to be done in real time, and in face-to-face settings, certainly much of it can be done asynchronously, and remotely as well. And collaborative technologies are getting better all the time at simulating face-to-face interaction. While there is still no substitute for "being there," things like Hewlett-Packard’s Halo videoconferencing systems are beginning quite literally to compete with air travel. And in the current geo-political climate the video system is just likely to win out.

Okay, distributed work is a good thing – economically, socially, environmentally, and for reducing business risk while increasing workplace attractiveness. But it still hasn’t taken off like we think it should (and even HP’s own CIO, Randy Mott, is currently pulling his IT professional staff back from distributed work and requiring them to commute into HP offices every day of the work week).

In Part Two we’re going to take a hard look at why so many companies and their senior executives resist Distributed Work. It’s not a pretty picture, but that resistance is a reality that those of us who believe in the value of distributed work have to understand if we ever expect to move beyond ideas and business plans that gather dust on CEOs’ bookshelves.

Please direct your comments and questions to comments@thefutureofwork.net. We’d love to publish your reactions and suggestions.

Bonus Article: The Physical Attributes Of A Well-Designed Workplace

by Barbara Armstrong and Mark Sekula

Barbara Armstrong, Principal, and Mark Sekula, Associate Principal, are senior workplace strategists with Kahler Slater Architects of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

The work of today is drastically different than the work processes that supported the industrial revolution. Today’s product – knowledge – requires a different environment in which it can be "produced," nurtured, and shared.

Based on our experience as workplace designers, along with our research and review of current literature regarding workplace design, productivity, and business trends, we established a list of physical attributes associated with a well-designed workplace. We focused on those issues that may have the most significant impact on knowledge workers.

We believe that the fourteen attributes described below are those that have the biggest positive impact on the physical workplace, and that individually and collectively contribute to productivity measurements and bottom-line performance. Understanding these attributes and their impact also can help to create a compelling business case to seek improvements in your own work environment.

In research by BOSTI (Buffalo Organization for Social and Technological Innovation), as reported in "Dispersing Widespread Myths about Workplace Design," the following three qualities were considered to have the strongest effect on job satisfaction. We believe they stand out as key attributes to measure:

• The ability to perform distraction free work as an individual;
• The ability to perform undistracted group/team work; and
• Having environments that support collaboration and impromptu interaction

An individual’s ability to perform his or her job efficiently and effectively is substantially influenced by a number of physical environment factors that can be affected by good design and planning. These attributes include:

• Attention to thermal comfort;
• Direct visual access to daylight;
• Attention to glare factors;
• Proactive attention to ergonomics; and
• Workspace size allocations by functional needs, not hierarchy.

We believe that several attributes can either enhance or create challenges to productivity:

• Appropriate adjacencies to support workflow;
• Simple and clear way finding, i.e., understandable spatial organization; and
• Ease of accommodations to adapt to changing technology

While overall well-being and health can be influenced by simple attributes such as;

• Flexibility of workspace to accommodate personal work styles; and
• The inclusion of a professionally maintained live green plant program.

In our recent research of companies designated as Best Places to Work, we found that an important attribute in achieving a well-designed workplace is:

• The expression and manifestation of the organization’s culture

We believe that the benefits to achieving a well-designed workplace can be measured in many non-physical ways. With the changing workforce demographics, it is wise to use every available means to attract and retain top talent to your organization and to leverage that diverse talent to be creative and innovative. Using your workplace as an asset to achieve these goals makes good business sense.

Summary

The physical workplace can be a critical factor in the success of an organization. It is an important factor in supporting an organization’s business initiatives and it can be proven to be an effective tool to improve performance, rather than being seen only as a cost of doing business. The physical workplace is often the second-largest asset of an organization; this asset can be used to effectively attract and retain talent, typically the first major asset of any organization.

In today’s world, the role of the workplace is about:

• Enabling new ways for people to work within an organization;
• Valuing the individual;
• Implementing new technology;
• Shifting or reinforcing culture and change;
• Leveraging facilities as assets;
• Facilitating faster and more simple change; and
• Achieving financial objectives - tracking how workplace changes help achieve the organization’s goals.

The complete report on our research, What Makes A Great Workplace, is available by e-mailing your request to msekula@kahlerslater.com.

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.

An Inconvenient Future (July 24)

In the middle of an unbelievable heat wave here in the San Francisco Bay Area, my wife and I decided yesterday afternoon that it would be a good (and highly appropriate) time to go see the film "An Inconvenient Truth." . . . I can certainly understand why it is getting such rave reviews. It's not only important, but it's well done. . . .And what, you ask, does the climate crisis have to do with the future of work? . . .For me, at least, the answer is obvious. Our current patterns of work are hugely harmful to the environment. Most of us get in cars - alone - each morning and travel anywhere from twenty minutes to two hours to a downtown or suburban office complex.

Telecommuting: More Talk Than Action? (July 25)

I've just discovered another recent study that sheds some new light on telecommuting work patterns, preferences, and trends. This one, published on July 12 by The Center for Excellence in Service at the Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, is titled "2005/2006 National Technology Readiness Survey" (downloadable pdf file of the Summary Report). . . .

The Future of Urban Living: An Exciting Vision (July 26)

For anyone interested in the future of urban centers - and their alternatives - there's an important and insightful article in the current issue of Business 2.0 ("The next real estate boom: Dense settlements, not sprawling ranch houses, are the future of housing..."). . . .

This is the Future of Work? (August 4)

I've written often about the attractiveness of live-work neighborhoods where you can walk or bike to work, and where many people work from home offices much of the time. . . . But I think I've also found some examples that just might be carrying the idea of blending work and life a little too far (at least for me).

Last Sunday (July 30) the San Francisco Chronicle featured (on the front page no less) a story by staff writer Jessica Guynn about several startups that are being run out of homes that the entrepreneurs have either bought or leased ("Grunge Inc. Live in startups combine frat-house culture with venture capital"). They literally live and work in the same place. . . .

The Future of the Office: Maybe There’s Hope After All (August 10)

If you are like me, you consider the Call Center - rows upon rows of workers with headsets, hunkered down staring at a monitor screen displaying customer service and/or tech support software - the sweatshop of the 21st century. . . . So I was very heartened to come across an article by Mary Pratt in the Australian edition of ComputerWorld describing a very different call center concept ("Office space reconsidered: new style, new digs"). . . .

The Dark Side of Collaborative Technology (August 15)

I'm generally an advocate of collaborative technologies that enable people to communicate and work together even when they are separated by time and space. . . . But it's not all roses and champagne. While I've written before about the dangers of over-reliance on technology as a substitute for "presence" (same-time, same-place interaction), there's another risk that we don't talk about enough: trusting the judgment and knowledge of others who you don't know.

In Our Humble Opinion: Getting Beyond The Fear Of Fear

Commentary by Charlie Grantham and Jim Ware

The sky is falling, the sky is falling. . .

We hope you’ve had a wonderful summer (that’s for all you North American and Europeans – you Southern Hemisphere folks are presumably just down in the trenches slogging things out). Now you’re back at it, all rested and ready to go for the Fall marathon.

Well, so are Buford, Maynard, Zeke, and ol’ Cooter (they’re our inveterate and astute observers of "cultcha," for those of you new to this-here column; or as we fondly call it, our monthly Rant). They’ve just had a dickens of a time running around all henny-penny looking for something to talk about.

Given that it’s now September 2006 and 2,973 souls departed this world on September 11, 2001, because of a "failure of imagination," the gang would like to rant on about why people can’t seem to imagine their way out of a barn with the door wide open and white flashing lights leading to red lights leading to that door – well, ya’ll get the picture.

As Buford would say, "It’s darn hard to think ahead when a gator is snappin’ at your butt." And that, dear hearts, is right where we were in 2001 after that dot.com incident. And guess what? We’re still there!!

Come on, we all seem to be so busy lookin’ over our shoulders for the boogeyman that we keep walking into trees, falling off cliffs, and generally doing stupid stuff. Even Cooter knows that a scared rabbit can’t think straight.

Every day we hear the fear thing over and over. Good God, the next thing they’ll be doing is body cavity searches of Seeing Eye dogs at airports. And we’ve already seen a cartoon showing folks in the airport security line stark naked. That just may be only way to convince those TSA folks that you ain’t got squat hidden away (‘course we can’t think of anything more scary than a bunch of nekkid folks on a plane).

Well, Homer, sit back and think about it. Just how paralyzed is your business right now? Has the word "terrorist" crept into your fancy-schmancy slide presentations yet? Look, even the brainiacs at MIT have jumped on this bandwagon of, "Oh, what are we going to do. Oh, what are we going to do?"

Now, those MIT guys are really smart, but we do wonder sometimes (if you need any proof just go check out "Team studies terrorism's impact on supply chain"). Poor Maynard can’t even understand the topic. Just what is a "supply chain" anyways? Maynard thinks you go down to Home Depot and buy a chain, not "supply" it. Oh, well.

Our whole society has been stuck in fear mode since September 11, 2001, and too many folks have just plain stopped doing any imagining about the future of their businesses. Hard to think about tomorrow when you’re not sure you’re going to get through today.

Reminds us of the time Zeke walked downtown and saw this guy standing on a corner clapping his hands slowly. Zeke (who as you remember ain’t the brightest bulb on the porch) said, "What ya doing?" The guy said back, "I’m keeping the elephants away." Zeke opined to him that there weren’t any elephants around. The guy looked back at Zeke and said "See, it must be workin’ then." Same kind of magical thinking that’s going on everywhere these days. If we don’t think about tomorrow, maybe it will just sorta come along and be the same as today. Get a grip here, folks.

Those guys (the ones at the day school on the Charles River, not on the street corner) are trying to figure out what makes one company successful and why others don’t get it when their ship hits the sand. More about their answer later, but for now back to the ranch. Buford’s been around the lower forty enough times to recognize bovine poop when he sees it.

Is there anybody out there who can name the Navy ship that was attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin that led to the whole Vietnam mess? Has anybody seen a weapon of mass distraction (er, in case you’re wondering, that was intentional) at your local Saturday flee market? Well, guess what’s going on one more time. Looks like Miss Henny-Penny, Mr. Ducky Daddles and Ms. Turkey-Lurky are back in town.

Here comes the lowdown – cover up the young-un’s ears. In Our Humble Opinion, you can’t plan for the unpredictable (that’s what we call imagination) when you’re running scared.

Even the boys down at the M.I. of T. figured that out. And then there were those really clever folks that Buford and the gang ran into down in Cancun sippin’ rum. You really, really, have got to get this book if you want to know what genuine imagination is all about: Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant, by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne Harvard Business School Press, 2005.

Blue Ocean Strategy is available from Amazon.com.

The "Big Idea" in this terrific read (it’s currently #85 on Amazon.com’s bestseller list) is that by being really creative and differentiating yourself from every other business you can think of, you can create a "blue ocean" (free of sharks) where you’re playing a game no one else even knows exists (sorry for the mixed metaphor; we’re not very good at sticking to one image at a time).

Now the damnedest thing is that the guy and gal who wrote this wonderful tome are from a graduate business school in France. France - isn’t that the country that Henny Penny said no one should listen to? Aren’t they the ones who invented "freedom fries?" But we digress (not unusual for us, but what the hey?).

These really smart authors show us a way to get beyond the fear thing by thinking proactively, not reactively; and perhaps more importantly to do all of it with a positive mindset. Or, as a friend said, "It’s time to stop running from the chocolate and start running towards the vanilla" (that’s a folksy way of suggesting that a positive move towards a desirable future is a whole lot more productive than a negative move away from a negative past. Come to think of it, the ice cream thing is a whole lot easier to understand, so just ignore this so-called "clarification").

The boys (Buford and company) came up with a little scenario planning game to use once you (and your company) have gotten beyond this stupid fear thing. First of all, the brainiacs discovered that companies that are successful in unpredictable environments are usually the ones that communicate bad news quickly (like, "We made a mistake, guys," or "They won’t buy our stuff no matter what we do. Time to change.").

Successful companies have cultures and mindsets that see adversity as opportunity. They are also driven to change faster than everyone around them because they understand the value of being a "first mover." Good googamooga, could we maybe have a recipe here for a gen-u-wine strategic planning process?

So, how do you actually do something creative and constructive to overcome all that fear stuff? (We’d like to call that "stuff" somethin’ else, but this here’s a family-oriented newsletter.)

Now remember that this packet of advice is just another Humble Opinion, and be ready to be called a total whack-doodle when (if) you pull it off. The most important ground rule in Buford’s planning process is that you can’t use any corporate speak. Chuck the "out of the box," "blue sky," "50,000 foot" talk. Sounds like some sort of Air Force Academy football cheer anyway.

Then, the next time you’re in one of those "off-site" thingies pondering your corporate navels and wondering what you’ll do if your competition cuts its prices by 20%, if Mega-Mart builds a store next to yours, or if Big Bob gets caught on your security cameras lowering his hand with an intent to grope with Ms. Floozy in accounting, do the following. (PS: The Big Bob story is true. It really happened. And guess who demanded that the cameras be installed so they could catch the mythical bad guys? Hey Bob, sometimes things just work out right). But there we going digressing again.

Focus, focus, focus. Back to the story line. At that off-site reach into your pocket and pull out a card with a question on it and ask everyone to take 30 minutes to ponder "What would happen to our business if. . . ?"

Yea, yea, we kinda guess you’ll need some sample questions to get you started and help you see what we’ve got in mind. Here are some of our "blue ocean" strategy favorites. You wouldn’t believe how much bad tequila it took to come up with these.

What would happen to your business if:

• intelligent life were discovered somewhere other than planet Earth?
• someone genetically engineered a renewable energy source whose by-product is water?
• Congress passed a universal health insurance program?
• microbes that safely destroy HIV were discovered in plants in the Amazon rain forest?
• earthquakes could be predicted with a 1% accuracy in both time and place?
• the Federal deficit disappeared in the next three years?

Okay, that’s enough to get you goin’. Hey, looky here. Sure, those are "crazy" what-if’s, but this is long-range planning we’re talking about folks. And not the fear mode variety. Note that they all have positive outcomes for humankind.

Now stand by for a literary moment: remember that great line of George Bernard Shaw’s?

Some people look at things as they are and ask, 'Why?' I dream of things that never were, and ask, 'Why Not?’

Like they say down at the feed store, "Once you start thinkin’ of things, they have a funny way of happenin." This kind of exercise gets you to stop all sorts of over-analyzing (like we all used to do before 9/11) and imagine things that might actually be possible. And it can lead to the most radical redefinition of your business that you can possibly imagine. Why not try it?

Stop worrying, for crying out loud, and start building your own blue ocean strategy.

Comments and suggestions welcome, though we will warn you that Cooter does funny things to letters that insult him. He has flashes of fire hydrants. . .

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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