Why Work Doesn't Happen at Work
I believe our working models and how we collaborate have to change. They haven’t for years. In fact, they haven’t changed much since the beginning of the 20th century: most of us sit in offices, at dedicated desks, participate in meetings now and then and hope to achive set goals within a reasonable time span.
Altough there is not solution yet, we’re at the verge of dicovering it. Jason Fried has a radical theory of working: that the office isn’t a good place to do it. He helt an inspiring talk at TEDxMidwest in October 2010.
[Facebook and Twitter] aren’t the real problems in the office. The real
problems are what I like to call the M&Ms, the Managers and the Meetings.
About Jason
He thinks deeply about collaboration, productivity and the nature of work. At TEDxMidwest he lays out the main problems (call them the M&Ms) and offers three suggestions to make work work.
Fried is the co-author of the book Rework, about new ways to conceptualize working and creating. He is the co-founder and president of 37signals, a Chicago-based company that builds webbased productivity tools that, in their words, “do less than the competition – intentionally.” 37signals’ simple but powerful collaboration tools include Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, Campfire, Ta-da List, and Writeboard. 37signals also developed and open-sourced the Ruby on Rails programming framework.
Sources:
Jason’s Speaker Profile on TED.com, Jason’s Talk on TED.com
