Each year Fast Company magazine solicits nominations for innovative businesses (the Fast 50) that are, in their words, helping to make the world a better place. Their call for nominations from 2007 reads like this:
This year’s focus: Our sixth annual global readers challenge will spotlight businesses that are helping to save the world. We’re looking for profit-driven problem solvers–people and companies out to address the planet’s woes and make money at the same time. Tell us about yourself, someone you admire, or someone you work with. But make sure your nominee is using new strategies, new ideas or new technologies to tackle issues like global warming, pollution, sustainability, access to healthcare, poverty, trade impact, child labor, and other concerns. No charities, please. We believe that business– capitalist business–is a profound force for positive change. Help us prove it.
The social problems that Fast Company lists are pretty much THE hairy problems that humanity faces. Meeting these challenges will bring, hopefully one day, a bit of fairness and evenness to the distribution of resources and opportunities worldwide.
Coworking and Changing the World
At the same time, I see coworking as a response to, as redress for, another huge problem created by humans for humans: the dehumanization of work and praxis. While it would be naive to suggest that prior to the Industrial and Information Revolutions people had it easy, because they didn’t. But today, in the multi-acre cube farms in which millions of people live out their working lives, something of the innate spirit in us gets lost.
When you consider that we spend something like 2/3 of our adult lives at work, being gutted in this way…fucking sucks!
Coworking, and its various models, proposes to tackle this problem: By providing a new kind of work context where our spirit is not sucked out. For the next Fast 50, I nominate COWORKING as a business that has as its main goal making the world a better place by making work organic and natural.
The Butcher
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