We spent yesterday afternoon with the awesome guys at Indy Hall in Philly. Groovy little coworking space, which has attended to all of the details. Community, vibe, space. The conversations we had with the guys there were illuminating, and continue to deepen our understanding of coworking.

Today we are hanging with Tony Bacigalupo, of Coworking NY, where many of the lessons we are learning are being rapidly evolved. He shares deep insights into the larger shift to distributed work enabled by technology. As someone of the nomadic tribe who is able to make a living doing it (it is NOT easy), his is a front line voice. Gramstand tea house in Manhattan, John Scofield… Vibe-white noise and creative churn. This is there…

Lessons

First, and most importantly, is community. As we are coming to understand it, community is the main pillar on which the other two—sustainability and interdependence—stand. Other themes that bubbled up in conversations at Indy Hall and Coworking NY centered on the differences between the focus on producing results and measurable performance for the work being done at places like Indy Hall and Jelly Austin/Jelly Atlanta, on the one hand, and the corporate addiction to face time, process and protocol and idleness, on the other.

In its corporate rhetoric, in annual reports and myriad types of official corporate communication, CEO Man talks endlessy about responsibility, results, “metrics” etc. However, for many of the really capable and dialed-in technologists and creatives, working in large firms seems to be more about showing up, remaining relatively quiet, and following processes and rules. And not necessarily about results and performance.

As we are learning in our conversations with the intensely sharp and creative people who are striking out on their own, delivering the desired corporate results may not be what their former company really wanted in the first place. The message: Get too much done too quickly, and… you’re fired. If you upstage a system and those whose organizational power depends on controlling those resources, you get voted off of Fear Island!

Interestingly, it now appears that the world has been hearing the corporate shibboleths about results and performance; however, those who actually listened have escaped onto the urban savannas, where they hunt and gather for projects and communities of their own choosing.

Message for corporate: Don’t say it unless you mean it! We might listen, and then we’ll have to tell you to piss off!

The Butcher