Nice slow, sleepy day.. just what I needed.. Diane and I took the dogs for about a 2 hour hike up Honey Hollow. We spent some of that time exploring some new trails we’d never followed.  There were some great pools and waterfalls along the way. It’s great finding something new that close to your house..

About the only thing I really got done today was to start unpacking, cleaning and repairing the electronics from the Burning Man Timecycle. The wiring for the lights got chewed up a few times.. and was completely covered with dust from the Playa.   I’m still covered with that dust even after trying to wash it off several times..

I got the first view in daylight of a battlefield repair I did with duct tape and electrical tape while hanging ten feet in the air, in near total darkness at 3 AM on the playa.. it looked  as bad as I thought it did.. but it worked !

I learned that there was one more mechanical failure with the Timecycle after Billy and I left for the airport around 2AM last Sat. That failure managed to chew up one of the rotary connection hubs that supplied voltage to the wheels. I was happy to find that the cool 2 connector mercury commutator I’d used was still intact.. and not leaking.. leaking mercury is bad…

The rest of the day was pretty blissed out.. we did listen to a good podcast interview which Mike from the Colony made.. I liked hearing someone else’s answers to the same questions I always get asked.

Despite my attempts not to think.. I did have one sort of deep thought today that stuck with me. 2 days ago I attended a welcome home party for a work colleague who’d been on an IBM service Corps trip to Brazil.. He told us about a Latin American concept he discovered in Brazil  called “calor humano”.. or human heat.. or human warmth. The actual meaning ., he said, went beyond the basic concept of warmth.. it spoke to the joy people get from being together.. He told us how the Brazilians hung out together after work.. went to each others houses all the time, hugged one another frequently, and hung out in each others offices all the time. He also said that some of the common practices we have… e.g. working from home, or frequent conference calls were not as prevalent there.. he said people needed to be close to one another to really understand one another and get things done.  

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