Tuesday, August 21, 2012

jorge barba & fried - how to celebrate/support innovation

Jorge Barba (@jorgebarba)
8/21/12 9:20 AM
New blog post: How does your company celebrate #innovation? | Game-Changer -ow.ly/d7yu4



via Fried: 
For example, from May through October, we switch to a four-day workweek. And not 40 hours crammed into four days, but 32 hours comfortably fit into four days. We don’t work the same amount of time, we work less.
the benefits of a six-month schedule with three-day weekends are obvious. But there’s one surprising effect of the changed schedule: better work gets done in four days than in five.
When there’s less time to work, you waste less time. When you have a compressed workweek, you tend to focus on what’s important. Constraining time encourages quality time. 
In the spirit of continual change, this summer we tried something new. We decided to give everyone the month of June to work on whatever they wanted. It wasn’t vacation, but it was vacation from whatever work was already scheduled. We invited everyone to shelve their nonessential work and to use the time to explore their own ideas.
People worked independently or joined up with other employees on team projects. The only rule was: explore, see if there are ways to make our existing products better, or come up with a new product idea, create a new business model, or do whatever is of most interest…
Celebrate the process, not the outcome.

funny - as we're working to incorporate labs/sandboxes/20% time within public ed.
isn't that what learning is? a sandbox?
how did we get to the point that we are leery of experimenting - most of all in our school years?

well - it's created adults that think what Jason is doing with his company, and google, and 3m, et al, is not normal. or at best - is something we can only do part time. and at great risk.

godin - the only the risky is playing it safe.
which translates to - not playing/experimenting..
no?