Creative Class » collaboration

Net Gen Floods the Workforce: Place Influences Choices

Alex Tapscott — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 20:21:59 +0000

I’m a member of the Net-Generation, people born between 1978 and 1997. At first glance, my cohort seems tailor-made for a decentralized and “flat world,” so we shouldn’t care so much about the place where we work. After all, the internet, like no other technology, has lowered geographical and temporal barriers for communication and collaboration, and N-Geners, like no other generation, are the most comfortable and capable working, learning, and communicating online. Case in point: I recently found myself collaborating on a project with two college pals on Skype (the free online video phone application): one in Palo Alto, California, the other in Alaska, while also chatting and sharing photos with a friend who was in an internet café in rural Vietnam.

However, while technology has lowered barriers and allowed people all over the world to participate in the global economy, it’s a mistake to suggest now that ‘place’ is no longer important for today’s emerging creative workers. Indeed where one works matters now more than ever.

Whether interested in finance, law, politics, computer programming, consulting, or medicine, young friends and colleagues of mine are drawn inexorably to the epicenters and major nodes of their respective fields; in cities, suburbs, and exurbs that also happen to score very high on the creative class index. This is certainly true for my friend in Palo Alto, a city straddling the area between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. He is a talented computer programmer working for an internet start-up. But what about my friends in Vietnam and Alaska, you ask? Did Google just open a server farm in Juno? Is rural Vietnam the new Silicon Valley? Why do your friends want to live there? Truth is they don’t.

My Alaska friend was working for Mark Begich, a Democrat, who defeated the incumbent Senator (and convicted felon) Ted Stevens. If ever there was an appropriate time to say “got out of there like a bat out of hell,” Jeff’s escape from Alaska after the big victory was it. Jeff is passionate about politics, and he is now in Washington, D.C. looking for full time work. Truth is he would rather struggle for a little while in D.C. than be instantly employed anywhere else. After all, every politically engaged young person he and I know wants to be in the U.S. Capitol and, as a result, a burgeoning social scene of smart, creative, and ambitious young people has flourished there. Dave, my friend in Vietnam just graduated from McGill’s School of Management and is wandering Southeast Asia barefooted and bearded trying to ‘find himself,’ but really he’s just on vacation. Like me, he will soon find himself up to his elbows in financial statements and spreadsheets. He is returning to Toronto to work at a boutique private equity group. Jeff was drawn to the epicenter of the political world. Dave, a former business student with an entrepreneurial streak, will return to Toronto- Canada’s financial capital, because he knows the city offers great opportunity for a person with his interests (it also helps that he is a die-hard Leafs fan). In both instances, the where did not merely influence their decisions, it determined them. If anything, their stints in Alaska and Vietnam simply reinforce the notion that the Creative Class, and young people in particular, travel and move throughout the world with increasing ease.

Though not identifying it as the “Net Gen” specifically, Richard Florida presciently foresaw the emergence of a new generation of the “Creative Class” in The Rise of the Creative Class, a theme that has surfaced in ensuing works. His experience interacting with students at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University revealed that young people are drawn to certain hubs, crowding together in thriving and diverse places where like-minded individuals share lifestyles, cultural tastes, and work interests. While the moniker ‘Creative Class’ is not generation-specific, by 2018, when all members of my cohort will be of working age, the Net Generation will, simply put, dominate the creative class. As Boomers retire and Generation Xers fill the ranks of senior management, there will be an overwhelming demand for these young, highly educated people. Attracting them to companies and regions where they can thrive and prosper will be the next great imperative for today’s corporate leaders and politicians.

I encourage everyone to share your thoughts and opinions with me. If a conversation begins, I will be happy to engage in it with you.

Collaboration Beyond Consensus in the White House

Kwende Kefentse — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 04:37:12 +0000

Columnists like Stanley Crouch hope that Obama’s win will renovate the content and style of hip hop music. Throughout a recent article he takes hip hop modes of fashion to task and, by extension, the more identifiable affectations of urban culture. With his win, Crouch hopes that Obama will shift trends:

On the pop cultural end, Barack and Michelle Obama’s worldliness and common sense will greatly diminish the national appetite for and the defense of those who proudly commit intellectual suicide by submitting to anti-intellectual stances and the surface styles that repel across all ethnic lines.

At the same time, Obama is considering creating an Office of Urban Policy, hopefully to replace the ailing/failing HUD. Obviously the connection to urban America he developed as a community organizer in Chicago doesn’t stop at the White House.

With Jay-Z and Beyoncé rumored to be performing at the inauguration, and Obama’s now infamous hip hop mannerisms (brushing his shoulders off, the “fist-jab” – as Fox News so adeptly termed it – with his wife, etc.), and the overwhelming support from the urban music community bolstering his win, one has to wonder what role the hip hop community will play in this new office.

While Crouch is holding out for a great shift in urban culture, one has to wonder about the wisdom of that wish. Everyone can agree that Obama is a great role model to urban youth and urban culture in general, but hoping for this seismic shift is glib and doesn’t acknowledge the critical perspective that urban cultural practitioners can and regularly do bring to the discourse on cities. Obama as cultural-consensus-maker might not be in the best interest of the urban discourse. As in intellectual, he might be more interested in working with difference than in drawing it toward his position – collaboration as opposed to consensus.

University of London PhD candidate Markus Miessen examines the potential of a new type of collaboration in a phenomenal article:

An alternative model of participation within spatial practice will be rendered, one that takes as a starting point an understanding of participation beyond models of consensus. Instead of aiming for synchronization, such model could be based on participation through critical distance and the conscious implementation of zones of conflict. Through cyclical specialization, the future spatial practitioner could arguably be understood as an outsider who–instead of trying to set up or sustain common denominators of consensus, enters existing situations or projects by deliberately instigating conflicts as a micro-political form of critical engagement with the environment that one is operating in.

From a policy perspective, what does Obama need with more people like him when he’s trying to address a different demographic? Instead of encouraging urban youth and urban culture to emulate him, wouldn’t it be more useful for him and for them if on-the-ground representatives from urban culture could advise as post-consensus collaborators to help enrich future urban policy? Is there intellectual wealth in the distance between Obama and the “anti-intellectual stances and the surface styles that repel across all ethnic lines”?

And now, as always, some music.

Private Offices Versus Cubicles

Wendy Waters — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 12:19:19 +0000

When the cubicle was first invented – apparently 40 years ago – it soon became the butt of jokes, source of fear, and eventually symbolic of a dehumanizing aspect of some office work.

But arguably the cubicle has also been a positive innovation in workplace design. People who would never get a private office often had more privacy. Having fewer people in private offices and instead in more flexible and movable cubicles reduced workplace costs. In today’s more collaborative environment, research suggests that the right type of cubicle can improve productivity.

The workplace furniture company Knoll has an excellent research department. They recently published a report summarizing research into offices and cubicles from a variety of perspectives. Here are some findings:

Advantages of open office spaces (according to Knoll):

Helps to create a sense of community.
Encourages better communication and improved information exchange among co-workers.
Some employees feel greater work satisfaction being among other people rather than working alone.
The open work environment allows more people to “be in the know” about what’s happening with the company – more transparency.
Allows better inter-generational communication. More mature workers can learn new ways to work or new technologies from younger co-workers; meanwhile younger workers can receive less formal mentoring from working around those more experienced.

Advantages of enclosed, private offices (according to Knoll):

90% of participants in a Knoll study reported privacy as the #1 benefit of a private office.
Noise reduction can be another advantage (although see below).
Private offices typically allow for more individual space.
Private offices can be seen and used as a status symbol.

On this last point, another section of the article suggests that technology may be becoming the status indicator rather than office space. The person with the “mobile toys” like a Blackberry, iPhone, or advanced lap top is starting to rival the private office in some companies.

Subtleties of open plans: not all cubicles are created equal. The Knoll report found research to indicate that different cubicles work in different ways:

Computer programmers preferred open-plan workstations with “seated height privacy” – this allowed them to stand and communicate quickly or see what others were doing, but privacy to focus while seated.
Another study found that proximity to a window significantly affected employee satisfaction with their jobs as well as feeling of personal well-being.
Cubicle auditory privacy can exceed that of private offices: 60″ high acoustical panels used as cubicle walls along with acoustical ceiling tiles and sound masking can achieve 93% acoustical privacy, according to Knoll. Meanwhile, typical dry-wall offices only achieve 75% acoustical privacy.
If done well, with proper communication with and participation of employees, changing over to a cubicle environment can bring significant corporate efficiencies from reduced real estate costs to higher productivity says the Knoll report. One study found a 5.5% reduction in “business process time.”
Knoll also cites a 1996 UCLA study of companies that had changed to open plan to encourage collaboration and found performance increases of “440 percent” – which may be a typo (but without a Harvard Business Review subscription, I couldn’t check the source), but even if the number should be 40% or 44% that’s a noteworthy increase.

Thinking back through my own work history, I felt at least as productive if not more in the open plan environments as in ones when I’ve had a private office (although my roles have been different in each work environment).

What has your experience been?