Ioic slides on future workplace

Editor's Notes

• #4: People are loyal to their careers not their places of workNEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - Americans are more loyal to their favorite soft drink, television show or car brand than they are to their employer, according to a joint Reuters/Ipsos poll.LIFESTYLEBut they are most committed to their country, followed by their family and their doctor."The most surprising thing was that country, which is more abstract, was No. 1, ahead of your family or spouse," said Timothy Keininghan, the author of the poll and a co-author of the book, "Why Loyalty Matters.""There's a general belief that the government is broken, and people want to fix it," he said.Seventy percent of Americans questioned in the survey said they are more loyal to their country now than they were two years ago.Companies did not fare well when it comes to allegiance. Most Americans said they are more committed to their favorite soft drink than the company they work for.Keiningham said the findings may reflect the impact the U.S. recession and Wall Street banking crisis has had on broader U.S. sentiment.The poll by market research company Ipsos showed that the majority of Americans do not believe that companies are doing a good job rewarding loyal employees or customers.Only 55 percent of employees said they would stay at their job and turn down higher pay elsewhere, which suggests that 45 percent of workers would leave their job if offered a 10 percent hike in pay."Employers have real issues," Keiningham said. "This should be a wake-up call. The only way to grow your way out of a bad economy is to hold on to your customers and encourage both employee and customer loyalty."When asked how companies could improve loyalty the top answers included offering cash awards to consumers, replacing automatic answering machines with real people, making good products and not raising prices. 29 April 2010
• #6: Link to Eunapio’s film of the entrance for managers and the entrance for staff
• #9: Before the dawn of the Industrial Revolution Britain was a quite different place to the one that exists today. Industrialisation brought with it new types of roads, trains and many other forms of communications which simply did not exist prior to industrialisation. So before the Industrial Revolution it was very hard to keep in touch with people in other parts of the country. News was spread by travellers or through messengers and goods were distributed largely within the locality in which they were produced.Because it was so hard to move around: and remember, there were no cars, aeroplanes or even tarmac roads, people had to rely upon themselves and their communities to provide the vast majority of the things that they needed. Food was produced locally, agriculture could provide for but a few large commercial towns. Clothing was made locally, making use of animal hides and furs: nylon wasn't an option and cotton wasn't imported in large quantities until developments enabled mass production of goods.Life was, for the bulk of the population, the life of a farmer. By the 18th century the feudal system was long gone, but in it's place was a system in which the people were as reliant upon each other and their master as before.In general then, people worked in villages and small towns, working the land and relying upon the local community to provide for them. Some people were fortunate enough to benefit from imported goods which came into ports such as London and Bristol in increasing quantities from the Elizabethan age onwards. What was manufactured was done making use of natural elements. Windmills for example could make the life of a miller easier.Education was poor, only the rich being catered for by nannies and private tutors. There were of course schools and several universities. These were not for the ordinary man or woman though. Politics was based upon land ownership and military honours won, with women and ordinary men given few rights. Life as a result was a constant battle against famine, a wicked landlord, overwork and sheer bad luck. Industrialisation would change only some of these worries.
• #10: In Leviathan, Hobbes set out his doctrine of the foundation of states and legitimate governments - based on social contract theories. Leviathanwas written during the English Civil War; much of the book is occupied with demonstrating the necessity of a strong central authority to avoid the evil of discord and civil war.Beginning from a mechanistic understanding of human beings and the passions, Hobbes postulates what life would be like without government, a condition which he calls the state of nature. In that state, each person would have a right, or license, to everything in the world. This inevitably leads to conflict, a "war of all against all" (bellum omnium contra omnes), and thus lives that are "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (xiii).To escape this state of war, men in the state of nature accede to a social contract and establish a civil society. According to Hobbes, society is a population beneath a sovereign authority, to whom all individuals in that society cede their natural rights for the sake of protection. Any abuses of power by this authority are to be accepted as the price of peace. However, he also states that in severe cases of abuse, rebellion is expected. In particular, the doctrine of separation of powers is rejected:[12] the sovereign must control civil, military, judicial and ecclesiastical powers.Leviathan was also well-known for its radical religious views, which were often Hobbes's attempt to reinterpret scripture from his materialist assumptions. His denial of incorporeal entities led him to write, for example, that Heaven and Hell were places on Earth, and to take other positions out of sync with church teachings of his time. Much has been made of his religious views by scholars such as Richard Tuck and J. G. A. Pocock, but there is still widespread disagreement about the significance of Leviathan's contents concerning religion. Many have taken the work to mean that Hobbes was an atheist, while others find the evidence for this position insufficient.
• #12: Sixty-eight per cent of organisations reported difficulty in filling vacancies, down from 81% in the 2009 survey.• The most frequently cited causes of recruitment difficulties were lack of specialist skills (67%).• Between 2009 and 2010, the proportion of organisations reporting retention difficulties decreased from 69% to 55%.• Labour turnover for all UK employees averaged 14%, down from 16% in 2009.
• #14: Niels Bohrhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bombahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niels_Bohr
• #15: Things that changed our view of the world and made us somewhat fatalistic. How did attitudes to society change after the bomb became reality.
• #16: People are loyal to their careers not their places of workNEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - Americans are more loyal to their favorite soft drink, television show or car brand than they are to their employer, according to a joint Reuters/Ipsos poll.LIFESTYLEBut they are most committed to their country, followed by their family and their doctor."The most surprising thing was that country, which is more abstract, was No. 1, ahead of your family or spouse," said Timothy Keininghan, the author of the poll and a co-author of the book, "Why Loyalty Matters.""There's a general belief that the government is broken, and people want to fix it," he said.Seventy percent of Americans questioned in the survey said they are more loyal to their country now than they were two years ago.Companies did not fare well when it comes to allegiance. Most Americans said they are more committed to their favorite soft drink than the company they work for.Keiningham said the findings may reflect the impact the U.S. recession and Wall Street banking crisis has had on broader U.S. sentiment.The poll by market research company Ipsos showed that the majority of Americans do not believe that companies are doing a good job rewarding loyal employees or customers.Only 55 percent of employees said they would stay at their job and turn down higher pay elsewhere, which suggests that 45 percent of workers would leave their job if offered a 10 percent hike in pay."Employers have real issues," Keiningham said. "This should be a wake-up call. The only way to grow your way out of a bad economy is to hold on to your customers and encourage both employee and customer loyalty."When asked how companies could improve loyalty the top answers included offering cash awards to consumers, replacing automatic answering machines with real people, making good products and not raising prices. 29 April 2010
• #17: Look at the growth of workers that expect more than to just pick up the paycheck (ONS)I Professional 1911: 1% 1991: 5%II Managerial and Technical 13% 32%III Skilled 37% 34%IV Partly skilled 39% 22%V Unskilled 10% 6%
• #19: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/wbs/research/irru/wpir/wpir_93.pdfIt seemed a fair bet that the labour market was also going to take a savage blow. The Confederation of British Industry’s (CBI) own forecast was for unemployment to peak this year at above three million and then to decline only slowly. Others, like former Monetary Policy Committee member Danny Blanchflower, were much, much more gloomy even than that. Indeed it has been a tough and worrying time for many people both in and out of work. But with unemployment today at 2.45m, the numbers are nothing like as bad as we had feared. Output has fallen by 6.2 per cent since the start of the recession, but employment is down by just under 2 per cent. Compare that to past experience. In the early 1990s, a fall of 2.5 per cent in gross domestic product led to a fall of 3.4 per cent in employment. In the early 1980s, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) declined by 4.7 per cent, leaving employment 2.4 per cent lower. Of course it may not be over yet but conditions in the labour market have been fairly stable since the Autumn. Employment has continued to decline but firms are not laying off full-time employees at the rate they were last year and our CBI surveys suggest that moderate rates of employment growth are possible later this year. Most people who have become unemployed have moved back into work fairly quickly. More than 4.6 million people have moved off Jobseekers Allowance since November 2008, and the number of people claiming Incapacity and Lone Parent Benefits has remained broadly constant despite the recession. By contrast, between 1990 and 1995, the number of people claiming these benefits rose by around 1 million. For what it is worth, the Treasury in last week’s Budget assumed that the claimant count would peak at just under 1.75 million around the middle of this year, and fall back to around 1.25m by the end of 2012.
• #25: KrosnoOdrzanskie, Poland. Dakar, Senegal. Greenwich, London. Uzice, Serbia. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Cardiff, Wales. Praia, Cape Verde. Edinburgh, Scotland. Derry, Northern Ireland. Blaegoevgrad, Bulgaria. Guadalajara, Mexico.These are the birthplaces of the 11 who took the field in today’s Barclays Premier League soccer match between Manchester United and Stoke City, two venerable English clubs. The starting line-up were born, on average, 1896.56 miles from Manchester. Which is the distance between Manchester and Ankara, Turkey. Which is in Asia.Not one person born in Manchester made that starting line-up.The goals were scored by men born, on average, 4106.32 miles away from Manchester, one from Cape Verde and one from Mexico.Why is all this important? Because until 1982, when Arnold Muhren transferred to United, they’d never really fielded a “foreign” player, from beyond the UK and Ireland. [While some claim Carlo Sartori in 1967 as the first, I am led to believe his family moved to Manchester while he was a young child, and he came through the junior ranks as any other domestic child.]Talent knows no borders, and Manchester United have done a good job garnering and harnessing global talent. As far as the club was concerned, it did not matter where they were born, or what nation they represented. What mattered was how they played football.The Principle of Simultaneity: Un-national things happen at the same time everywhere; an un-national film is released everywhere and in all format in the same instant.The Principle of Unownability:  Un-national things are owned by no one. In Doc Searls’ words, they’re NEA. Nobody owns them. Everyone can use them. Anyone can improve them.The Principle of Emergence: Un-national things standardise through market adoption rather than by diktat or decree or regulation. There are no standards bodies to game, no lobby mechanisms, no palms to grease.The Principle of Federability: Un-national things have to be built on the DNA of federation rather than the toxins of monoculture and monopoly.
• #26: Biomimicry is a new science  that utilizes design and engineering solutions to mimic natural processes. An interesting example are John Todd’s Living Machines. A greenhouse-style arrangement of diverse ecosystems where waste contaminated water is pumped to be filtered through a minimum of three ecosystems and purified naturally.Regular waste water plants run on high energy and expensive technology.Here, it is a basic engineering concept where the “technologies” are living organisms. Snails, plants, bacteria, fish, clams and fungi work together to break down solid wastes and purify the water.Todd’s design received the Buckminister Fuller Award  for it’s innovative  design solution to the waste water problem. For more information on living machines, go here: Worrell Water Technologieshttp://theraggedpost.wordpress.com/2009/03/
• #27: Butterflies; barnacles; true friends; strangers
• #28: 20% of employees time at Google is spent on innovation3M 15% of time goes to engineersResultsFerranAdria – Buli restaurant – closes for sabbatical every 5 years
• #29: What happens is that they start to work within those parameters. They start to do stupid things for the right reasons.Well intentioned people policies designed to protect people from being exploited at work can become the same policies that people start to hide behind or work within in order to avoid performance.
• #30: In Google's case this could be a misguided effort and represent a departure from what has worked so well up to this point - individualized work environments and incentives. In fact, that may be part of why there has been more turnover. In more traditional industrial-model work environments, fairness rules the day, so an across the board pay raise may work. At Google, the culture has been about individuality and flexibility, so this could backfire.
• #31: I also went out on the road with this guy recently. We were making deliveries. He’s an agency driver and not paid much about the minimum wage. He’s not directly employed by the company for whom we were delivering, but he recognises that the company in question are clearly a significant customer for his agency.He was a nice guy. He was quick; polite – he wanted to get home.At the end of the shift I experienced one of those moments – one of those moments that makes you want to cry. I was wearing a lovely new hi-vis jacket. One of the hideous yellow things that our HSE now quite rightly make anyone working in public wear. He turned to me and he asked if he could have it. He pleaded in fact. “It’s just that mine is so old and I look so bad in it, and as an agency person I don’t always get given new gear.”This guys just wanted to look smart. He actually didn’t want to be seen in any way doing a bad job.