The concept may have left my head had it not been for a second conversation I had yesterday. I was speaking with a new friend and protegee down in Rio de Jainairo.. and we also talked about “calor humano”.. Interesting.. anyway.. the idea kept rattling around in my head and the more I think of it, the more I see how many of our modern work trends, working at home frequently, distributed worldwide teams, endless conference calls or web meetings are all threatening that basic human need we have to be near our colleagues. I experience it more and more every day.. … we believe we’re becoming more efficient and flexible.. but at what cost ? I see that folks are becoming more detached from their jobs , from their colleagues and from their companies. In my own job and most of my colleagues, I rarely work face to face with anyone anymore.. my entire job is on the phone or on a computer.. I MISS PEOPLE !
I’m wondering if we’re thinking about the global work environment totally wrong. Often now we try to globalize tasks so that a single job may have folks participating virtually from many locations.. sounds good.. but.. more often than not these people hardly know one another.. they’ve never have met in person.. never have drank a beer together.. don’t know each others families, etc. how can we expect them to care deeply about their joint work ?
What if instead of dividing all jobs into global exercises where we picked the skills form across the world.. might it not be better to return more to the idea of decomposing work into closely knit groups of people working face to face on well defined problem that were coupled together globally ? I know it sounds naive.. but I’m being serious here. There are many ways we can divide our work.. the current wisdom of globalizing each task just doesn’t seem to be working to me.. it’s draining the humanity out of our jobs.. I’m going to start thinking of ways to start reversing this trend and restore a little calor humano in my own little sphere.. What do you all think ? Am I off base ? A luddite ? What ?
end of rant
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end of day
nite folks.. nite Sam !
-me
