Netflix lets its staff take as much holiday as they want, whenever they want - and it works - read the full article by Daniel Pink here
Recently in Future Category
I finally got around to watching this talk by Seth Godin on Tribes this morning.
It got me thinking about another discussion I've been having recently on Thought Leaders Central regarding the perennial Mac vs PC debate. We don't make buying decisions based on which product best suits our needs at the lowest cost. At one point or other we generally join a tribe (in this case Mac or PC) and then pretty much just buy whatever everyone else in the tribe buys. We ever try to bring others into our tribe.
When I first started thinking about this I thought we did this for social/emotional reasons. We like belonging to a tribe and we like to wear the badges of that tribe.
While I still think that's true, I wonder if there is a pure economic element to it as well. Belonging to the tribe means we don't have to spend time comparing all possible options when we are looking for a new product - we buy what the tribe buys. This might result in us having a product that does not quite suit our needs as much as another product and we might pay slightly more than we need to. However, we have save ourselves a lot of time and energy comparing all the available products. As well its likely other members of the tribe have already tried the product we're thinking about and they'll give us a good indication if it will live up to our expectations. This seems pretty efficient to me.
I’ve come across the work of the sociologist, Max Weber, a couple of times recently.
Firstly, in their book, Why Should Anyone be Led by You?, Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones talk about the implications of Weber's thinking for Leadership in business. I hope to write a piece on this book in the near future.
However, the catalyst for this post is this thought provoking piece, by Lorin Loverde. Loverde discusses Weber’s book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. I am fascinated by Loverde’s analysis which is that the development of capitalism only became possible with the widespread influence of the ‘Protestant Ethic’.
According to Loverde, there is a vast contradiction inherent in capitalism — we seek to gain wealth but when we do we are immediately tempted to spend it on ourselves. So previous societies over millennia created great edifices to themselves or lived in debauchery, but there was nothing left to invest in future investment for wealth creation. So the civilisation collapsed only to start the process over again.
But then came the Reformation and the Protestant Age. The capitalist contradiction was held by a ‘transcendent purpose.’ Our wordly life was but a preparation for a future life. In this life our purpose was to serve God and deny ourselves. Loverde puts it this way:
“...we demonstrated on earth by our economic success that we were predestined to go to heaven after death; thus, our success was a sign of goodness, but we still had to avoid being extremely selfish with extravagant spending and conspicuous consumption to typical of non-Protestant cultures.”
Having a "Reformed Baptist” background myself, I would contest Loverde’s theological interpretation but the end result is the same. The Protestant ethic was one of self discipline (as opposed to the self-denial of the pre-reformation Christian Church.) This involved enjoyment but avoidance of the wordly pleasures or ‘sins of the flesh’. In Wesley's Methodism, this developed into avoiding anything that was thought to be worldly — including dancing, drinking alcohol, anything that had a sexual association, the theatre and even reading ‘wordly’ (ie non-religious) books.
Most “Protestant” christians today would regard this methodism as extreme but would still aspire to some notion of avoiding ‘wordliness’ – that is that their ultimate purpose in this life is in preparation for the next.
The point Loverde is making is that this live view — that of having a transcendent purpose — made, and to some extent continues to make, capitalism possible. Without it, previous generations would have spent all the wealth they created and we would not now be enjoying the benefits of the ‘great industrial west.’ There would be no infrastructure, no large industrialised capacity.
The problem now is we have capitalism but have lost the Protestant Ethic.
It reminds of the RAF's Bomber Command during World War II. It was formed during the darkest days of the Battle of Britain in an attempt to strike at the German war machine at its source. From it’s origins as a cobbled together unit with hopelessly inadequate and out of date machinery, it became itself an efficient and ruthless machine that could ‘take out’ any city in Germany on any night it chose. And, in the end, it did for no other reason than because it could. It had been set up in the dire need to defend Great Britain but when the hour of desperation had passed it continued to bomb cities because that’s what it did – with devastating impact and little military gain as we say in Dresden.
Perhaps that’s the point we have reached in capitalism. We make wealth because we can. We’ve forgotten why. We just do it. For ourselves we could say this is no problem, except that our continuing to make wealth threatens our very ability to make wealth.
We have become so efficient at extracting and using the Earth’s resources that we can, for the first time in our history, envision the day when we have used all there is to use. Again our efficiency at using resources has created daunting problems of waste and impact on the world’s environment. It has gone well past the stage where the West can live without regard to the pollution we create in the Third World. The world is now just too small.
Finally, continuing to create and concentrate wealth while at the same time making communications technology easily available to almost every square millimetre of our planet, we have allowed the world’s poorest peoples to know about our affluence and, many would say, decadence. There can be little doubt that this is a major driving force towards global terrorism. This has perhaps always been the case, as long as there has been a divide between rich and poor. What is driving, and makes so threatening, the extremism in the terrorism of the “fundamentalists” is the juxtaposition of this divide with what they see as the purposelessness of the West.
Loverde’s response is to propose the need for a transcendent purpose.
For better or worse we have left behind the Protestant Ethic and now, like Bomber Harris, we build bigger businesses because we can. We have forgotten why. The catch cry is that business exists to make a profit. If we believe this, we are sounding the death knell of capitalism as we know it for there will be nothing left to invest. That is if the earth’s resources don’t run out first or fundamentalist extremist terrorism doesn’t make it impossible to continue to operate business on a global scale.
So what might a viable transcendent purpose be? How about you tell me?
