Autonomy. Mastery. Purpose. Microbusiness.

Posted on | January 14, 2010 | Comments Off

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(Photo by hydropeek, via Flickr)

I hope that you at least gave yourself the time to listen to Dan Pink’s talk, posted here at The Journal Blog yesterday.

He talks about something called the “results only work environment” which sounds to me like how to treat your employees as if they were independent contractors while still maintaining the employer/employee relationship — sort of.

Now, I can understand why the results of implementing ROWEs would include increased productivity and increased worker satisfaction and decreased turnover.

But, given the fact that independent contractors generally cost less than full time employees, I don’t understand why any firm that was willing to implement a ROWE wouldn’t instead just opt to use the contractors.

But maybe that’s just me.

I’m also wondering about the degree to which larger businesses will be open to finally matching what science knows with what business does. From the perspective of traditional, hierarchical, bureaucratic, control freak business structures, something like a ROWE implementation must sound like chaos.

These structures are institutions and institutions are notoriously slow to change. Paradigm shifts like the one Pink made a case for in his talk were usually unheard of in an institutional setting.

I’m going through all this because I’m trying to decide whether those larger businesses will get with the program, drop their sticks and their carrots, and inject some autonomy and mastery and purpose into their workplaces.

And I’m wondering whether microbusiness owners will realize the competitive advantages attached of working the way they do, where the autonomy and mastery and purpose are built in to the institution (the microbusiness).

Some times, I come in here and write as if the universe belongs to microbusinesses — or it ought to.

Some days, I wake up feeling like that, too.

From a more realistic point of view, however, I’ll just say that it’s kind of amusing whenever I hear or see evidence of ways in which some smart people have shown America that all it’s businesses should behave like its microbusinesses do.


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Dawn Rivers Baker, microbusiness journalistDawn Rivers Baker, aka The Journal Blogger, is the editor and publisher of The MicroEnterprise Journal, and the self-proclaimed Socrates of the small business blogosphere. See her official bio to learn more.


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