Читать книгу Will there be Donuts?: Start a business revolution one meeting at a time - David Pearl - Страница 46

I like to ask business audiences to look at their fingernails. Very few of them have coal dust, soil, or heavy machine oil underneath them. In general, business life doesn’t include the physical labor of clawing commodities out of the earth, harvesting by hand, or grappling with heavy machinery.

We are moving into a post-industrial age where knowledge and ideas are the assets. Meetings are where these assets are formed and traded. They are to our times what the steam hammer, forge, and mill were to the Industrial Age.

Meetings are where value is created—or lost. When people complain that meetings are getting in the way of their work, you might want to point out that, increasingly, meetings are the work.

Information, ideas, concepts are the new commodities. Intellectual property is as valuable as bricks and mortar. The meeting is the modern mine …

Great businesses like Marks and Spencer, Procter and Gamble, Dolce and Gabbana, Ben and Jerry remind us that commerce stems from the meeting of two or more minds. The word Company (from the Old French for companions) appears in the names of millions of enterprises—another reminder that value is generated where and when people meet.

Sole proprietors are rarely that. They operate as small gatherings of friends and families. More and more people are self-employed, but that doesn’t mean people are working alone. As Tom Ball, CEO of the London-based “co-working” venture Neardesk, explains:

About 13 percent of the U.K. workforce now works from home for part, if not all, of the week. For many it’s an attractive alternative to the traditional commute-to-the-office life. However, people often discover that sitting at home quickly becomes boring and lonely. They can rent small offices, but they’re still alone. For this reason we are seeing a real growth in what we call co-working, where individuals gather in “business hubs” so they can get the benefits of being “in company” without the commuting life and all the stress that comes with it. They bump into people, have stimulating conversations, trip over business opportunities they would otherwise have missed. They get the best of both worlds. I think in a few years belonging to a business club or hub—being part of this new kind of self-creating business community—will be as common as gym membership.