Working on the Edge
When I was very young we lived near a fairly large pond. Along the southerly banks of the pond was a long, continuous row of stately willow trees. Actually, these trees were called weeping willows for the long droop of branches hanging down to the water’s edge. These trees fascinated me; I loved them, in fact, for they seemed at once so incredibly fragile yet were so obviously sturdy. These willows exuded longevity and grace.
I thought of these trees yesterday after a wonderful “meeting,” actually a fascinating two-hour conversation over lunch, with Christopher Newell. Chris is the VP of Knowledge and Learning at Keane, a Boston area IT consulting company. We were getting together for the first time to compare notes, as it were. Chris is trying to start a new institute focusing on making “global work” work. One of his passions is advancing communication, collaboration, and connectivity within and between enterprises and organizations of all types, across town and around the globe.
Why? What Chris sees, as so many others do, is the transformation of our economy bringing us back to the central idea that our economic future, as never before, lies with our ability to find new value in the creative and imaginative energies of ALL of our people. Honoring and unlocking our collective energy is what Chris thinks it’s all about. And he’s certainly not alone. The enterprise that is, or will soon be, working on the edge will be using communication and collaboration tools, mostly found on the web, but combined with a growing awareness of the power of social capital. Imagine your colleagues, co-workers, and employees as unbounded vessels of energy, always connected to lots of other people, learning from them and gathering new information about the world. Information that could at any moment be of service to a team, project, group, or larger network working to clarify and solve a problem.
Now imagine you and your network are connected to other groups or networks, without regard to age, class, race, ethnicity, gender, generation, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, formal education, or professional credentials. What connects you is what you know and share with others who can find value in your knowledge.
This is Chris’s vision. A vision I strongly support, albeit without any of the deep technical knowledge that Chris brings to the conversation. This is working on the edge. If I made a substantive contribution to the conversation it was this question: Could it be that young workers — Millennials (sometimes referred to as Generation Y) — carry into the workplace a good amount of the tacit knowledge required to make this vision a reality? If you’ve been following my posts you probably can guess my answer.
The willow tree — open, fluid, always moving, bending, reaching simultaneously towards the sun, the earth, and the water. Always connected but never in a rigid way that would expose it to the vagaries of its environment. Like the enterprise working on the edge.
April 6th, 2007 at 1:59 pm
The enterprise, like a willow tree, has strongs roots, and a center, or a trunk. The key for an enterprise is how the center + edge interact. The actors at the “edge” of an enterprise depend upon a core set of values and principles, from the center, or the trunk. Successful enterprises are like willow trees in that the trunk and branches work in harmony towards a collective goal — survival.
Millenials can’t be actors at the “edge”; they have an important voice. So like generations before them they must understand how best to interact with the “center” in order to effect change and the creation of more collaborative, boundary-free work environments.