Subscribe
Here on ATC, we’ve talked a lot about the changing nature of work and what that could mean for cities.
We talk (and debate) about the value of density and of being in close proximity to others so that ideas can percolate – whether that means open office floor plans or community coffee shops.
But alongside all of this, there are some fascinating structural changes taking place within organizations. Below is an excerpt from a recent New York Times article called, How Larry Page’s Obsessions Became Google’s Business.
But corporate success means corporate sprawl, and recently Google has seen a number of engineers and others leave for younger rivals like Facebook and start-ups like Uber. Mr. Page has made personal appeals to some of them, and, at least in a few recent cases, has said he is worried that the company has become a difficult place for entrepreneurs, according to people who have met with him.
Part of Mr. Page’s pitch included emphasizing how dedicated he was to “moonshots” like interplanetary travel, or offering employees time and money to pursue new projects of their own. By breaking Google into Alphabet, Mr. Page is hoping to make it a more welcoming home for employees to build new businesses, as well as for potential acquisition targets.
What I find interesting about the statements I’ve bolded is that they represent a radically different approach to business and employment. Of course, it’s not really a new thing. Google has been encouraging its employees to work on personal projects since, I think, the very beginning.
But as you read the above article, you really get the sense that Page believes that this kind of organizational culture is fundamental to the long term competitiveness of the company. It’s something he is genuinely worried about.
As counter intuitive as it might seem to encourage employees to work on other things besides the core business, one could argue that it’s almost essential in a world of rapid and constant innovation. Would you rather an employee or a competitor discover what’s next in your industry? If it’s the former, you have a chance of absorbing it into your current business. If it’s the latter, you’re already too late.
If you go back to the article I posted earlier this week, you’ll see that creative destruction is happening a lot faster than it did in the past. The average life span of many, or most, companies seems to be decreasing.
The tech sector seems to be ahead of most other industries with respect to this kind of thinking. But I believe that it will continue to percolate through the economy. And when it does, it will probably have many impacts on the kinds of spaces we design and build in our cities.
“Great ideas alter the power balance in relationships. That’s why great ideas are initially resisted.” -Hugh Macleod
I have been following the work and writing of designer Tobias van Scheider for quite some time now. If you don’t subscribe to his newsletter and you end up liking this post, you should consider signing up.
Recently I stumbled upon something he published back in October called “Ignore Everybody”, where he argues that when you’re exploring something new – that could potentially fail – one of the best things you can do is ignore everybody.
And that’s because:
“We have to understand that ideas are by nature very fragile. They’re like little naked babies, unable to protect themselves. If we really believe in a new idea, we have to protect her with great effort. This is difficult, because oftentimes the greatest ideas get killed by the people around us. Executing on a great idea is by nature a lonely path. If everyone would agree with you, the idea is probably not that great anyway.”
I am incredibly interested in how new things get started and how new ideas thrive. Fostering innovation has become a critical component of city building in today’s world. But sometimes I feel as if we’re thinking too top-down, as opposed to bottom-up.
As Tobias rightly points out in his article, lots of great ideas started as stupid little projects. Who would have thought that a teen sexting app with disappearing messages (Snapchat) would become a company worth many billions of dollars?
It’s for this same reason that Sam Altman of Y Combinator recently wrote that sometimes its better to call your new company a project, rather than a business. When you call it a business you impose all kinds of biases onto it in terms of viable business models, and so on. But when you keep it a “project”, it becomes more acceptable to be experimental.
As an example of all this, I was fascinated to learn this past weekend about a Toronto-based ad agency called OneMethod. Because as part of their agency they have a division called the MethLab, where the goal is to simply experiment with “absurd ideas.”
One of those absurd ideas was a social media campaign slash pop-up taco restaurant – remember, they are an ad agency not restauranteurs. It was so grassroots that they ended up having to sell original art work that happened to come with a “free” taco in order to get around all the legal requirements for serving food. Brilliant.
The idea was so well received that it has grown into a fully fledged restaurant called La Carnita, which today operates across 3 permanent locations and happens to be one of the most popular taco restaurants in Toronto.
But let me ask you this, if they had instead gone out to investors – as an ad agency wanting to get into the taco business – would they have been able to raise the money for their first physical restaurant? I can imagine this being a lot more difficult.
On a larger scale, this is exactly what Google is doing with Alphabet. The company was reorganized and rebranded so that they could continue to work on absurd ideas outside of the Google cash cow. If the idea/project takes off, then it becomes a fully fledged company. If it doesn’t, then it gets shut down and something else is tried.
This is what people and companies are doing today to stay relevant in the innovation race.
But in some ways it feels like a battle to allow the absurd to survive. That’s why the best approach might be to just ignore everybody. There’s value in the absurd but maybe you’re the only one who sees it right now.
There’s a lot of discussion about what the “online gig economy” will mean for traditional forms of employment. And seeing how we’re on the topic of Uber right now, I thought it would make for an interesting discussion.
Should Uber drivers, to use one example, be classified as independent contractors or should they be classified as traditional employees? There are arguments for both sides.
Seth Harris and Alan Krueger recently published a discussion paper where they argue for a solution somewhere in between the two. They call it “the independent worker.”
Here’s a snippet that illustrates the tension that currently exists for people working in this new emerging grey area:
“Independent workers typically work with intermediaries who match workers to customers. The independent worker and the intermediary have some elements of the arms-length independent business relationships that characterize “independent contractor” status, and some elements of a traditional employee-employer relationship. On the one hand, independent workers have the ability to choose when to work, and whether to work at all. They may work with multiple intermediaries simultaneously, or conduct personal tasks while they are working with an intermediary. It is thus impossible in many circumstances to attribute independent workers’ work hours to any employer. In this critical respect, independent workers are similar to independent businesses. On the other hand, the intermediary retains some control over the way independent workers perform their work, such as by setting their fees or fee caps, and they may “fire” workers by prohibiting them from using their service. In these respects, independent workers are similar to traditional employees.”
I haven’t read the full paper, but I like the idea of remaining adaptable in the face of innovation.
Here on ATC, we’ve talked a lot about the changing nature of work and what that could mean for cities.
We talk (and debate) about the value of density and of being in close proximity to others so that ideas can percolate – whether that means open office floor plans or community coffee shops.
But alongside all of this, there are some fascinating structural changes taking place within organizations. Below is an excerpt from a recent New York Times article called, How Larry Page’s Obsessions Became Google’s Business.
But corporate success means corporate sprawl, and recently Google has seen a number of engineers and others leave for younger rivals like Facebook and start-ups like Uber. Mr. Page has made personal appeals to some of them, and, at least in a few recent cases, has said he is worried that the company has become a difficult place for entrepreneurs, according to people who have met with him.
Part of Mr. Page’s pitch included emphasizing how dedicated he was to “moonshots” like interplanetary travel, or offering employees time and money to pursue new projects of their own. By breaking Google into Alphabet, Mr. Page is hoping to make it a more welcoming home for employees to build new businesses, as well as for potential acquisition targets.
What I find interesting about the statements I’ve bolded is that they represent a radically different approach to business and employment. Of course, it’s not really a new thing. Google has been encouraging its employees to work on personal projects since, I think, the very beginning.
But as you read the above article, you really get the sense that Page believes that this kind of organizational culture is fundamental to the long term competitiveness of the company. It’s something he is genuinely worried about.
As counter intuitive as it might seem to encourage employees to work on other things besides the core business, one could argue that it’s almost essential in a world of rapid and constant innovation. Would you rather an employee or a competitor discover what’s next in your industry? If it’s the former, you have a chance of absorbing it into your current business. If it’s the latter, you’re already too late.
If you go back to the article I posted earlier this week, you’ll see that creative destruction is happening a lot faster than it did in the past. The average life span of many, or most, companies seems to be decreasing.
The tech sector seems to be ahead of most other industries with respect to this kind of thinking. But I believe that it will continue to percolate through the economy. And when it does, it will probably have many impacts on the kinds of spaces we design and build in our cities.
“Great ideas alter the power balance in relationships. That’s why great ideas are initially resisted.” -Hugh Macleod
I have been following the work and writing of designer Tobias van Scheider for quite some time now. If you don’t subscribe to his newsletter and you end up liking this post, you should consider signing up.
Recently I stumbled upon something he published back in October called “Ignore Everybody”, where he argues that when you’re exploring something new – that could potentially fail – one of the best things you can do is ignore everybody.
And that’s because:
“We have to understand that ideas are by nature very fragile. They’re like little naked babies, unable to protect themselves. If we really believe in a new idea, we have to protect her with great effort. This is difficult, because oftentimes the greatest ideas get killed by the people around us. Executing on a great idea is by nature a lonely path. If everyone would agree with you, the idea is probably not that great anyway.”
I am incredibly interested in how new things get started and how new ideas thrive. Fostering innovation has become a critical component of city building in today’s world. But sometimes I feel as if we’re thinking too top-down, as opposed to bottom-up.
As Tobias rightly points out in his article, lots of great ideas started as stupid little projects. Who would have thought that a teen sexting app with disappearing messages (Snapchat) would become a company worth many billions of dollars?
It’s for this same reason that Sam Altman of Y Combinator recently wrote that sometimes its better to call your new company a project, rather than a business. When you call it a business you impose all kinds of biases onto it in terms of viable business models, and so on. But when you keep it a “project”, it becomes more acceptable to be experimental.
As an example of all this, I was fascinated to learn this past weekend about a Toronto-based ad agency called OneMethod. Because as part of their agency they have a division called the MethLab, where the goal is to simply experiment with “absurd ideas.”
One of those absurd ideas was a social media campaign slash pop-up taco restaurant – remember, they are an ad agency not restauranteurs. It was so grassroots that they ended up having to sell original art work that happened to come with a “free” taco in order to get around all the legal requirements for serving food. Brilliant.
The idea was so well received that it has grown into a fully fledged restaurant called La Carnita, which today operates across 3 permanent locations and happens to be one of the most popular taco restaurants in Toronto.
But let me ask you this, if they had instead gone out to investors – as an ad agency wanting to get into the taco business – would they have been able to raise the money for their first physical restaurant? I can imagine this being a lot more difficult.
On a larger scale, this is exactly what Google is doing with Alphabet. The company was reorganized and rebranded so that they could continue to work on absurd ideas outside of the Google cash cow. If the idea/project takes off, then it becomes a fully fledged company. If it doesn’t, then it gets shut down and something else is tried.
This is what people and companies are doing today to stay relevant in the innovation race.
But in some ways it feels like a battle to allow the absurd to survive. That’s why the best approach might be to just ignore everybody. There’s value in the absurd but maybe you’re the only one who sees it right now.
There’s a lot of discussion about what the “online gig economy” will mean for traditional forms of employment. And seeing how we’re on the topic of Uber right now, I thought it would make for an interesting discussion.
Should Uber drivers, to use one example, be classified as independent contractors or should they be classified as traditional employees? There are arguments for both sides.
Seth Harris and Alan Krueger recently published a discussion paper where they argue for a solution somewhere in between the two. They call it “the independent worker.”
Here’s a snippet that illustrates the tension that currently exists for people working in this new emerging grey area:
“Independent workers typically work with intermediaries who match workers to customers. The independent worker and the intermediary have some elements of the arms-length independent business relationships that characterize “independent contractor” status, and some elements of a traditional employee-employer relationship. On the one hand, independent workers have the ability to choose when to work, and whether to work at all. They may work with multiple intermediaries simultaneously, or conduct personal tasks while they are working with an intermediary. It is thus impossible in many circumstances to attribute independent workers’ work hours to any employer. In this critical respect, independent workers are similar to independent businesses. On the other hand, the intermediary retains some control over the way independent workers perform their work, such as by setting their fees or fee caps, and they may “fire” workers by prohibiting them from using their service. In these respects, independent workers are similar to traditional employees.”
I haven’t read the full paper, but I like the idea of remaining adaptable in the face of innovation.
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
Share Dialog