Hunter Gatherers Lead the Way

With roughly 600,000 people losing their jobs each month, it is getting difficult to imagine what all those people are going to do.  File for unemployment? Search Craig’s list for gigs? Refresh that database of contacts? Massage your LinkedIn profile?

Probably all of these at some point.  But increasingly, as Intuit’s “The Future of Small Business” Report (The New Artisan Economy) suggests, whole categories of accidental entrepreneurs are entering the ranks of the self employed.  This includes Boomers who un-retire, mompreneurs, and… the recently laid off.

Start a Business in a Recession?

Consider the story of Black Sheep Adventures, which began operations in the wake of the tech crash of 2001-2002.  A fragile jobs market combined with scarce capital made for a tough environment, but they have made it 7 years now, and are profitable.  To be sure, it is difficult, but there are opportunities out there.

In February 2009, Draper-Fisher-Jurvetson invested $1.1 million in World of Good, an online market place (that runs on an eBay platform) that sells artisanal goods made by artists in developing countries.  While the volume may be small, signs of entrepreneurial success are not necessarily about VCs and headline-making investments.  Rather, it is about bootstrapping and hard work and making due with very little.

Revenge of the Nomads

Independent entrepreneurs today are the new hunter gatherers, foraging on the margins of a traditional economy defined by single-source employment, job security, benefits, retirement plans, etc.  There is nothing wrong with these things, they just happen to be really scarce right now!

Like nomadic hunter-gatherers of old, this new breed of independent business owner recognizes that being successful in small business requires a symbiotic relationship with other institutions—companies, banks, non-profits, government, partnerships with other independents, etc.  This is the new ecology of trust, transparency, reputation, and authenticity, all qualities sadly lacking in many large firms.

Historically, there has often been an ebb and flow between the success of large organizations (Empires) and nomads surviving on the margins in symbiosis.  Occasionally, the relative power of nomads increases dramatically.  Recall the Mongols, who for countless generations were referred to by Imperial China simply as the ’savage hordes to the north’… Thus the Great Wall.

At some point in the early 14th century the Mongols made it around the Wall and sacked the Chinese government on their way to building the largest (by land mass controlled) empire in human history.  They controlled from Beijing to what is now eastern Austria!

I’m not saying that today’s entrepreneurs are on the verge of a revolution; however, they are filling a niche and providing jobs, gigs, and money in an environment when the corporate empires are reeling.  Nomads are not totally independent, they never have been; but they serve a useful, even necessary, function, in the allocation of resources and the maintenance of social continuity and stability.

So, while this too will change eventually, for the time being look to small businesses and would-be entrepreneurs as part of the solution to the current economic crisis.  Heck, you might even have a go yourself!

Office Space for Lease! Or Not?

Every where I go I see signs like this.  Just on the 2 mile drive to drop my kids at school, 11 ’spaces’ are now available to rent as “office space.”  What does this say?  What does it mean?

First, it means that we are in the midst of one helluva recession.  A recession with an ‘R’ that looks an like a ‘D’.  But we all know that.  What I see in this, in combination with the some 600,000 people who seem to be losing their jobs every month, is opportunity.

Time to Negotiate

Sure, there is ample doom and gloom to go around.  But there is good—no great—news for the coworking community!

There has never been as good a time to revisit that tightass landlord who, only 6 months ago, was still holding out for a 3-5 year lease, with a month’s or two rent deposit, 4 references, a bank account large enough to pay off the whole lease in the event of an asteroid strike, etc.  Since you first visited him (and yes, it probably was a ‘him’), he has just been sitting on that property, collecting nothing. What he didn’t tell you was that he was probably sitting on that property for at least 6 months before you first met him.

So the question/issue, for commercial realtors, is this.  Are you going to stay wedded to the traditional/paranoid lease structure process, and continue to sit on millions of square feet (nationally) of empty space, for months and months if not years, or are you going to flex with the times and get some money for that space?  By remaining old school, you folks are just digging your holes deeper and deeper.

In walks the would-be coworking entrepreneur.

“I’ve noticed that this space has been for lease for… 2 years.  Are you going to lease it to us, or are you going to just keep sitting on it.  I mean, we do plan on paying you money.  Our question is, do you want money or not?”

“Get back with us when you make up your mind.”

The Eagle Has Landed

Howdy Folks!

After many months, we are glad to announce that we have a book!  It is Monday night, February 16, and the book is now for sale at Lulu.com!

In going the Lulu route, we have the opportunity to continually grow and improve the book over time.  We plan on periodically folding in new information, ideas, and updates from the awesome world of coworking, and will be releasing subsequent editions when it feels right.

This points to a couple of important communications details regarding how we proceed from here.  First, notice the entry headings on the right side of the site.  Each of these is connected to a book entry, where we are beginning to provide source materials, comments, and further readings.  The main reason for opening each book entry on the site is to invite feedback, suggestions, commentaries, stories and interaction.  The idea is to make the book just a starting point for the ongoing conversation that’s happening online.  Self publishing provides an exciting platform for books to become living, breathing, open documents, very different from the one-off prints of traditional publishing where a book is eternally static from the day it is “printed” and “released.”

Another detail pertains to the different forms in which the book will be available.  The first edition will be a black and white version of the book, which runs at $18.  If there’s interest, we’re looking into offering a downloadable eBook for about $10 and/or a color version of the book for around $45.  The color copies look awesome, but they are also much more expensive to produce, and thus the ouch! price.  We are assuming that many will prefer the black and white edition, but we will make the other types available if you are interested.

That’s it for now, and we look forward to talking with you “in the book” in the coming months-

Drew, Todd, and Tony

Hey Manager Guy!

1.       Not all of your employees do very much when they are ‘at work.’

2.       You probably employee many more people than you need to.

3.       You can innovate with fewer people if you have the right people.

4.       If most of your employees still come ‘into’ work on a regular basis, you are needlessly wasting (probably lots of) money on real estate.

5.       Your ‘face time’ will be much more effective and productive if your work spaces are open and designed for collaboration and real-time communication.

6.       Your company culture- as you are seeing it- is a fiction.

7.       White collar workers spend over $350M per day on gas and tolls commuting to work.

8.       The Gross Corporate Footprint (i.e. the daily commute) is a massive blight on the environment (to the tune of 1.67 billion tons of carbon dioxide daily, not to mention the daily CO2 belch from half empty office buildings.

9.        Benefits for ‘full-time’ employees are costly and unnecessary.

10.   Flexibility/Autonomy/Respect/Trust and work-life balance are a sustainable substitute for the security offered up by ‘full-time’ status and expensive benefits.

Good luck with that…

Workspace Matters

Today (and perhaps tomorrow) Tony and Todd will be at New Work City sifting through pictures and laying out the design of the book.  We don’t have enough high res pictures, really, so we are having to resort to the friends and family plan.  We want to go heavy on the pictures for a simple yet important reason.

Workspace Matters

While we all know that the cultural vibe around coworking is radically different than the hiearchical vibe that one encounters in most companies, there is a visual element that is crucially important as well.  The physical space in which a person works…matters.  Space and culture are inseparable.  If you are isolated in a cubicle with no contact with other people, then, well, you are working alone.  If, on the other hand, you want to or need to actually communicate with other hominids (for collaboration or just simple human contact) then working in a truly open space will make that more possible.

Built environments are never neutral.  Work spaces reflect assumptions about human needs and human behaviors.  You can tell a lot about a company or organization by just looking at the workspaces they provide their employees.  For example:

  Most coworking spaces, as we show in the book, are pretty much the opposite.  For example:

Time and again, each coworking space we discover counters the cube-farm with an open-space environment where people can get their work done AND interact with other hominids at the same time…

Imagine that.

Monday Morning Quarterback

Composing our book–The Work/Life Revolution–has been an experiment in long-distance collaboration. As Todd spoke about the other day, we have been heavily dependent on Google docs, for better or worse. (Some day soon, I suppose, someone will release a truly user-centered collab writing platform, but that is for another entry.)

Last night we met up, by phone with the Google doc in front of us, to talk about… images. Pictures. Of people and spaces. Now that the text is more or less complete, we realize that a LARGE part of the story will be pictures of the spaces where creative coworking is taking place, and of the people making it happen. We have some pictures, and are using the best we have.

Now that we realize what a central narrative role the pictures should have–ideally pictures of coworking in action– we are keen to see if any friends out there have pictures that we can use in the book?

For example, below is a pic I took this past summer while working at Conjunctured, in Austin. Any such image, from where you work/live/play etc, would be awesome.

And thanks!

Going Native

The primary research method of cultural anthropology is known as ethnography.  It is the process of immersing oneself into the daily routines of a group of people in order to access, and eventually write about, that culture from the native’s point of view.  One specific form of ethnography is called participant observation, which is when the researcher goes deep and becomes a full participant with the group they are studying.

While we never set out to conduct an ethnography of coworking, per se, it turns out that this is exactly what we did.  Ethnography consists of interviewing people, talking through issues, observing rituals, taking pictures, and identifying patterns of behavior and the meanings of those behaviors.  According to a textbook definition of ethnography, we have been in the field for about a year.  Call it accidental ethnography. 

We went to Jelly gatherings in several cities, and we coworked in spaces across the country and the world.  We started a Jelly and Tony started New Work City in New York.  We talked with and interviewed coworking leaders and participants via blogs, facebook, twitter and email for a year.  This is the new frontier of digital ethnography.

It is interesting to reflect on this now that we have completed the process.  Anthropologists often talk about colleagues who get so in to their field sites and go so deep that they in fact go native.  I’m afraid that the three of us have gone native.

But the view is awefully nice!

Drew