Meat is meat. And it ain't sweet. If you add sugar, it is still meat. If you leave meat sitting around for a while, it simply turns into... rotten meat.

Eat Meat, it's good for your heart

Conventional management thinking, and the buttoned-down managers who worship at the altar, are red meat. Grind in every possible management fad (MBO, LBO,TQM, BPR, ERP, SCM, CRM, Diversity Management, Six Sigma, Servant Leadership, blah, blah, blah), and all you have is... ground meat. Or chuck if you prefer. It confirms the second law of meat-dynamics: meat only exists as a solid, a gas, or as butter... meat-butter, what the fuck is that?

Meat-butter is the admixture of ground meat plus three generations of excuses for why management and managers have such small imaginations. "We can't pursue that opportunity because we don't have the data that prove that it will be successful." Or, "We don't have the resources to prototype that new service," Mervin Dickweed says as he exits the posh corporate campus on his way to his $50,000 company car. Or, "Employee-led innovation might work in your company, but around here we are trying to run a real business and what we need is execution," Mervin says as his pork sandwich lodges in his throat and sends him to the floor.

As Stanford's Jeffrey Pfeffer said a few years ago, "It's as though a requirement for entering the ranks of corporate management today is the ability to generate excuses for why its impossible to do things everyone agrees are important."

A recent study by the London based consultancy, Stanton Marris, suggests that only about 5-10% of the total activity of employees in large firms directly adds value to end-users (i.e. customers), and that only about 30% of employee work is indispensable (stuff like IT, payroll, and some accounting, etc). The rest of the time, what the fuck are people doing at work? According to the study, employees spend approximately 10 hours a week looking for shit. That's right, rifling through emails, drawers, files, the network, trying to find things they know exist but can't put their fingers on. Boil down the actual hours spent working on the work of your employer, and what most of us are really offering our employers is... face time. And if your face is ugly, then you are doubly worthless!

Over 30 years ago Peter Drucker suggested that there are only 2 sources of value creation in the work of a firm: innovation and marketing. Everything else, he suggested, was a cost. If he was right, and I am inclined to thing he was, then many of those hours that employees spend in their cubes sitting on their thumbs, and all of the fixed-costs tied up in the real estate that makes this monumental waste of time possible, are just costs. The return on your investment for having all your little executors turn up and look busy are not only costing you loads of money, they actually kill energy, enthusiasm, and the opportunity to inject fresh thinking and innovation into the company's work.

If you hate someone, set them free

We all know that most (though not all) employers, despite their beautifully composed shibboleths claiming that 'our people are out most important asset,' or that 'without our employees we wouldn't have anything,' despise their employees. If they didn't, then they would involve them in more critical and meaningful aspects of decision making and strategy making.

Using this as a starting point, managers need to ask themselves a set of simple yet devious questions:

• How much of the work that our employees do absolutely has to be done on site, at the office?
• Which employees have work processes that are necessarily tied to the corporate campus?
• How much more or less productive would employees be if they were allowed to when and where they choose?
• Do your employees need to be watched to do their work?
• How much money would the company save if we wacked 1/2 of our office lease obligations and allowed some of our people to work remotely?
• What would be sacrificed at the company in terms of a sense of belong and culture?
• Have you ever asked your employees any of these questions?

These types of question make most managers shit themselves. Yet, if the work of the company gets done, and the results and performance of employees are what really matters, then setting your employees free will accomplish two things:

1. Your employees will feel more respected and trusted, and will likely part with more, not less, discretionary effort for the company.
2. They will have greater opportunities to mix with outside ideas and activities that will make their work for you more informed and more connected to the external environment of the market, customers, etc.

Add Jelly

It is estimated that some 10 million professionals (independents and corporate employees) work in co-working spaces on a daily basis. Some of these are coffee shops, some of these are membership based work clubs like the Hat Factory in San Francisco, or Souk in Portland, or Indoor Playground in Toronto. There are now dozens of thriving co-working spaces/communities thriving out there today.

Another approach to co-working that is taking form is called Jelly. Jelly is a co-working concept where interested parties (whether independent programmers, designers, writers, or corporate employees) meet up in different locations (in their respective cities) every couple of weeks and co-work in a shared place. Sort of a nomadic band of creatives, roaming around for the right place to hunt... meat. What is cool about Jelly is that while the work done by Jelly People is creative and 'fringe looking,' much of it is in fact part of and aimed at the mainstream corporate ecosystem. That is, as nomads have always had to over the generations, their independence is never complete, it is always of a symbiotic nature. Nomadism has always depended on sedentism for at least part of its livelihood. Today is no different.

Empires need nomads

Empires, though, become complacent. Corporate sameness becomes red meat, and excuses become like air and water. This is why, as Proctor & Gamble has recently discovered, innovation often (if not usually) comes most fruitfully from beyond the walls of empire, from far flung spaces and places. P&G has networked with university researchers and independent designers and consultants around the world, in their Connect and Develop system, and the results are tangible. On the one hand, they downsized aggressively, and made thousands of people redundant when A.G. Laffley became CEO. Clearly, many of those people who were fired were not necessary, they were simply turning up and sitting on their thumbs, looking for shit and emailing long-lost friends from high school. Instead, P&G has connected with creative and smart people from all over, and have the system in place to capture creative ideas with commercial potential.

Similarly, what is evolving at Jelly is a deep well of potential creativity--in design, HR, strategy, film, advertising, database management, consumer insight analysis, marketing strategy, etc. If today's senior managers really want their firms to be more innovative, as most of them claim, then there are many smart and creative people out there (co)working on tomorrow's agenda. If they have the courage/guts/balls to let their own employees join these post-modern creatives at their local Jelly gathering or co-working club, then the cross-pollination can begin.

Not only will they save money in terms of their real estate costs, etc, they will get a more energized community of employees, a community that is out in the world engaged in the creative churn. That is, add a little Jelly to your meat-butter sandwich, and everyone wins.

Leave off the jelly, and all you have is meat.

The Butcher

Image courtesy of http://www.sxc.hu/profile/nazreth.