Blog Cloud – A Short Case for People Time

 

This is a word cloud.  It’s a creative representation of the most commonly utilized words from a set of text.  That text just so happens to be from a few of the most recent post on my blog, which you are reading now.

I stumbled onto this website, Wordle, that creates “beautiful word clouds” utilizing an algorithm developed by IBM Senior Programmer, Jonathan Feinburg.  It’s fun, interesting and accurate – give it a try.  After creating my word cloud and being quite happy with the resulting image, I became curious as to not only who, but why someone decided to create this site when there are obviously no financial incentives involved.  So upon further reading I found this excerpt under the credits tab for Wordle.com.  Written by the developer, Jonathan, one short paragraph reads:

“I acknowledge my employer, IBM Research, for extending me the extraordinary privilege of using code, which I wrote on their time, for this personal project. While I did develop this web site on my own time, I developed the core algorithms for laying out and displaying words on company time.”

And so this brought me to another relevant thought.  Companies should must afford employees more people time and less company time.  Let’s define people time as the that part of one’s work day that is attributed to independent projects in which the inspirational motivation is from within – the catalyst here is an intrinsic drive to utilize ones talents to create something that is fresh or innovative.  Now lets define company time as work completed to drive a singular organization towards a unified goal for the purpose of enterprise prosperity, otherwise known as revenue, profit and stock price – the catalyst driving this function is financial incentives.

People time is important because it stimulates a greater sense of self worth.  Self worth begets confidence.  Confidence begets action.  Action begets productivity.

Company time is less important because it does not stimulate self worth, however, it breeds company worth thus smothering self worth.  Following the same course of logic as above, you can understand how this is counter productive.  In fact I would declare that a nearly equivalent composition of people time and company time is the better model for motivation, innovation and productivity.

A very interesting case for this is put forth in this TED Talk by Dan Pink.  He has developed a profound argument for the dynamics of motivation and application within enterprise.  For a great example much like the Wordle.com site, skip to 13:50 of the video, since many of your are on company time now and don’t have 20 minutes to view in entirety.  Those who are afforded people time, I encourage you to watch the full talk.

 

 

So it’s safe to say that:

1. motivation is organic and will flourish if provided the proper catalyst
2. people time is equally important to driving productivity as is company time
3. innovation is people-centric and business should act accordingly

I believe companies such as IBM understand this concept and live this philosophy.  If you are familiar with IBM ad campaigns, you will also notice it’s a part of their brand DNA.

Your thoughts?

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