thoughtsignals

Creating Passionate Users has an incisive post on the differences between what kind of employees CEOs say they want and what kind of employees most managers actually want (and get). Does this sound like any place you’ve ever worked?

So yes, I’m thinking Mr. CEO of Very Large Company would say that their company should take the upstart whatever-it-takes person over the ever-compromising team player. “If that person shakes us up, gets us to rethink, creates a little tension, well that’s a Good Thing”, the CEO says. riiiiiiiiiight. While I believe most CEOs do think this way, wow, that attitude reverses itself quite dramatically the futher you reach down the org chart. There’s a canyon-sized gap between what company heads say they want (brave, bold, innovative) and what their own middle management seems to prefer (yes-men, worker bees, team players).”

Meanwhile, USA Today reports that more people are working at “third places,” like coffee shops. A big part of the attraction seems to be the ability to get away from the distractions of the office (not to mention not having to sit in a cubicle). Whether this is really a sustainable trend, or not, remains to be seen.

But some question the permanence of such work. “It remains to be seen if this is a cultural breakthrough or a generational artifact,” says Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

“The obstacles remain those bosses who insist on face time and bean counters who equate being outside the office with wasted time,” he says. But the reality is “most businesses run on 24-hour work cycles that follow the sun around the globe. That means it’s not where you are that matters, but what you’re doing.”

And the current issue of the Economist has several stories on the escalating “battle for brainpower.” One article says workers, especially talented, workers are gaining the upper hand over employers.

THE world headquarters of what its proprietor jokingly calls “Pink Inc” is in the attic of a redbrick house in north-west Washington, DC. Children’s pictures decorate the walls; highbrow novels are jumbled up with business books. Daniel Pink spent much of the 1990s working for the Clinton administration, ending up as chief speechwriter for Al Gore. But in the late 1990s he decided to branch out on his own. He now makes his living as what he calls a “free agent”—doing a bit of consulting, giving speeches, writing articles (he is a contributing editor to “Wired”) and books, including, in 2001, a book about people like himself, “Free Agent Nation: How America’s New Independent Workers are Transforming the Way We Live”. Mr Pink has no doubts about the changing balance of power in the corporate world: “Talented people need organisations less than organisations need talented people.”

he Economist piece mentions blogger, by the way, as one class of folks who need organizations less than organizations need them (link; you can watch a short ad to get one-day access to the Economist’s premium content if you’re not a subscriber).

What does all this mean? If you’re an individual cultivate your talent (and your visibility and your network, without which all the talent in the world is pretty useless). If you’re a company, improve your working conditions and make sure the office reality matches your rhetoric.