Social Hallucinations

Office nomads

The office. Walls, ceiling, windows (if you are lucky), tables, machines, people and noise. A place where you go to work. The church of work. Do we actually need the physical office as we know today?  How do office actually contributes to our performance and output of our work?

Don't get me wrong, I love my office and my colleagues. It is a great place to be, but like with most things in life, sometimes you need to get out to grasp a bit of fresh air, try something new and get inspired. People to collaborate with and machines to work on are to be found everywhere. Todays easiness of access allows us to create our office wherever we feel like, fuel our potential and can make us work in a new ways.

I am a big fan of working different places than your office but I hope Seth Godin isn't entirely right when saying "I think in ten years the TV show 'the Office' will be seen as a quaint antique.".

I believe the office and the community you build there are also very important part of your work life. Face time and the relationships you create contribute to your overall satisfaction, motivate and inspire you. So please, don't kill offices, just give people opportunities for being the office nomads and sit with laptop different and unexpected places. Make them go out. Changing the environment can fire some different neurons and bring astonishing results and discoveries. 

 

I am the Orson Welles of PowerPoint 2010

Next slide.

"I don't use PowerPoint to spew hollow facts and meaningless statistics. I aim to deliver revolutionary corporate poetry into the hearts and minds of marketing vice presidents across this country.

I believe that sometimes a PowerPoint demands five consecutive pages of full bleed abstract images. Just to make people feel. To get mid-level managers to loosen their ties and take off their name card necklaces. Too much logic is the death knell of any PowerPoint pursuit."

McSweeney

Excellent!

 

(Don't) Hold a meeting

It is a good post to start the Monday and hopefully change something this week. Stop meetings for meetings sake. Meetings have become the solution. We have problem on agenda let's meet.

Meetings can be good if only everyone is prepared and there is clear plan on how to follow up. So don't waste this week and all the upcoming weeks on fruitless meetings. Let's do something.

Via Johnnie Moore

 

What's your favorite working space?

Can you imagine this is the real working space!? Someone is really sitting there and working. Amazing and so calming.

What I love about it, is the lack of ditractions around and the omnipresent calmness. This is you and your thoughts. Wonderful. I wish I could spend there a few working days. I imagine that it is impossible to get stressed out in there :) Idyllic.

Here is my working space. I like being surrounded by things I like and things where I can bring inspiration. Quiet and safe. It means a lot to me where I work, though the best ideas come to me while I am walking.

What's your favorite working space?

The more focus on profit, the less good ideas

What motivates us...

I work for free

Dictractions foster creativity

It was good to read this article in Wired:'How Twitter and Facebook Make Us More Productive' that breaks the army of voices who present how distracting Facebook and Twitter can be and how much loss they generate for companies. This is just a one side of story as "social networks are particularly well suited to stoking the creative mind"

 
From my own experienced being focused for 8 hours on power points slides or excel sheets doesn't take me really productive. On the contrary it imprisons me in the fast tracks of routine thinking. There is nothing more inspiring than sharing thoughts with other people, finding impulses from completely different and not really connected with the problem you are working on sources. Our minds need to be kept fit and challenged to work properly.So stay connected and never stop exploring, sharing and learning. Play. Create. Share.

Photo by Adrian Wallet

The 6 types of ideas

via Tom Fisburne 

Do We Really Have to Meet?

Meetings are nice but are all they really necessary? It is very valid question on Monday morning and calender full of meetings. Sitting in meetings is often a nice time - waster, break from work where you sit and...nothing really happens except of talking. 

How to change the meeting culture and cut down the unproductive hours of just sitting and talking. Here are a few tips from Seth Godin

1. Understand that all problems are not the same. So why are your meetings? Does every issue deserve an hour? Why is there a default length?

Schedule meetings in increments of five minutes. Require that the meeting organizer have a truly great reason to need more than four increments of real-time face time.

Require preparation. Give people things to read or do before the meeting, and if they don't, kick them out.

Remove all the chairs from the conference room. I'm serious.

If someone is more than two minutes later than the last person to the meeting, they have to pay a fine of $10 to the coffee fund.

Bring an egg timer to the meeting. When it goes off, you're done. Not your fault, it's the timer's.

The organizer of the meeting is required to send a short email summary, with action items, to every attendee within ten minutes of the end of the meeting.

Create a public space (either a big piece of poster board or a simple online page) that allows attendees to rate meetings and their organizers on a scale of 1 to 5 in terms of usefulness. Just a simple box where everyone can write a number. Watch what happens.

If you're not adding value to a meeting, leave. You can always read the summary later.

It is a good way to start the new year at work, the year that is about doing the meaningful things. 

via Tom Fishburne

Rethink the way how you run your business

Traditional rewards aren't always as effective as we think. Incentives block creativity.

Time to build business based on the knowledge of human motivations, it is what can lead to creating the change and making a difference.

More hyphen - More perspective

What qualities make a good planner?

Passionate practitioner, who are interesting and are interested in the world around and put the madness in the method and treat their job as a hobby

via PSFK

The Near Future Agency

"(...) the future agency becomes virtual and led by superhero planners and creative thinkers. Behind the superheroes, it's all virtual. All shared."

(John Ebbert)

The media fragmentation, increasing number of channels and ways to communicate with people that live liquid lives is followed by the increasing number of agencies that offer their "expert" service to

Image by michael.heiss via Flickr

solve a piece of your communication problem and get a piece of marketing budget. Roles get blurry. Advertising agencies think media, media agencies think creativity, etc. More experts emerge. More silos get built. We can't face the near future with the silos organizations that are characterized with the lack of flexibility.

What we can do to survive? Implement flexibility, strong leadership and work the way that reflects how people live and think - seamless. Ordinary people don't think in communication channels, they seek for the ways to satisfy and fulfill their needs.

The seamless life of agency can be reflected in the way we organize ourselves into flexible and versatile teams and collaboration across different disciplines is the key. 

After all, we together in the business of helping our clients to connect with people.

More interesting related read: Markets are Networks

DONE is the Engine of MORE

"There are three states of being: not knowing, action and completion" This is how The Cult of Done Manifesto begins.

It is all about optimizing your actions to get things done, to move on. It is about effectiveness and creating things. 

Personally I enjoy the state of creating, wandering, asking questions and exploring, the tickling feeling of uncertainty but there is always the moment when the urge to move on and see the thoughts taking shape emerges. Then it is all about getting things done, cause it "is the engine of more". When you are done with one project, you can start another one and begin the new exploration. Besides if you want to know who you are, don't ask. Do something. Doing will define you.

There is Life After Advertising

Trailer for the new movie about advertising - Lemonade. More than 70,000 advertising professionals have lost their jobs in this Great Recession. Lemonade is about what happens when people who were once paid to be creative in advertising are forced to be creative with their own lives. It is uplifting and fantastic to see how they find their new call. It is also fascinating to hear how liberating for them was to lose the job and get time to eat, see family and "do things that matter".

What's Your Job