Cracks are forming in the careers veneer. They reveal a stark choice between a career that makes us dumb down and switch of or something that deserves our talent, passion and sense of fun.
Jonathan Robinson, co-author of "Careers Un-ltd" explains how we can choose to be ltd or un-ltd.
Rafiq Manji traded hundreds of millions of dollars a day on the global financial markets. Until one day he attended a lecture on how debt based economic growth leads to social and environmental breakdown. A rather stark contradiction emerged between what he believed in and the ltd stuff he did every day. He began to resemble a hammer-headed shark with eyes looking in diametrically opposite directions. One eye firmly fixed on screens scrolling his million dollar transactions while the other eye was surveying the fire escape knowing there is an un-ltd world out there.
Not wanting to be hard on the bloke, but for a moment he personified tendencies that more and more of us find a little unpalatable. We find ourselves saying, believing, feeling one thing, and doing quite another - often out of sheer necessity. Rafiq walked out and joined a commercial enterprise that provides organisations with a way of measuring and monitoring performance in environmental sustainability.
Cracks are forming in the careers veneer. They reveal a stark choice between a career that makes us dumb down and switch of or something that deserves our talent, passion and sense of fun. We can choose to be ltd or un-ltd.
Things are not looking good in the world of ltd career options.
I was trapped in the corporate world by a bravado and fear of expressing what I was really passionate about. Most of the time it was like being forced to wear clothes that I didn't like wearing and which didn't fit me. So every day there I was presented to the world as someone that was not me and everything inside me on an emotional level was screaming.
Chris Wild, former Management Consultant
Disturbing revelation. Yet it would be tempting to dismiss if this mood had not been substantiated as a national trend. According to an ICM poll covered by The Observer those of us who think our working lives have got worse over the last five years are more than double the number who think things have improved. This dismal picture portrays the whole idea of work as something stressful, tiresome and dull. Surely not. What we are talking about here is the stuff we fill most of our waking life with. Surely that makes it worthy of something altogether more extraordinary, stimulating and rewarding.
But check this out. By widening our radar screen of possibilities in the world, something quite extraordinary pops into view. It is a quiet un-ltd revolution, led by a disparate bunch of low flying heroes. Together they personify a profoundly different conception of work. They are devoting themselves to being the change they want to see in the world. And they're doing it with all the imagination and creativity they can muster. Maybe you are one of them.
Some un-ltd pioneers have dynamic jobs in corporate social responsibility and have won the mandate to question, agitate and reinvent the rules of the game. But there are other un-ltd pioneers whose livelihoods outside the corporate mo(u)ld could teach us a thing or two, not least about thinking outside the box.
Richard Reed and two of his mates founded Innocent fresh fruit smoothies. Richard tells me that their "original business ideas were really rubbish".
The first idea was foil underpants and remote-controlled curtains - too futuristic. A bath that filled itself with water at exactly the right temperature - too dangerous, all that water and electricity. We even had a couple of dom.com ideas, but with hindsight, roastchicken.com probably wouldn't have caught on.
Smoothies did seem like a good idea though. Take lots of nice fruit, put enough in a bottle to give you your daily intake of fruit and sell it in shops. People could do themselves some good, and it would taste nice too. We needed to test our theory out. So we bought £500 worth of fruit, turned it into smoothies and sold them from a stall at a little music festival in London. We put up a big sign saying 'Do you think we should give up our jobs to make these smoothies?' and put out a bin saying 'YES' and a bin saying 'NO', then asked people to put the empty bottle in the right bin. At the end of the weekend the 'YES' bin was full so we went to work the next day and resigned.
Stories like this prompt some big questions. What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? What is it you plan to do that deserves you? What deserves your sense of humour, your ingenuity, your intelligence, your sense of fun? What deserves your energy and passion for half your waking life?
I don't know about you, but my sense is that too many of us are facing some stark realities. Our ideas don't fit the predetermined boxes. We don't feel passionate about how we spend our 9 to 5. We're convinced that ideas of work and success need reinventing. And we've got a niggling feeling about the state of the world? But where to go, what to do?
So maybe if you find yourself in a company that's failing to release the creative potential of it's people and products, it might be time to pick up the phone to the nice people at !Whatif? on 020 7535 7500 to find out how they can help. Or if you've got a winning idea for a project or business you'd like to start, even if it's just in your free time, log onto http://www.unltd.org.uk/ or http://www.nesta.org.uk/ and apply for a grant or some investment. Or if you find yourself in Borders, grab a coffee and flick through ‘The Art of Looking Sideways' for inspiration on changing the way we look at the world or ‘The Cultural Creatives' for an account of how a once disparate movement of 50 million people are now re-shaping work and lifestyles in America. Why not pick up the phone to someone you really admire and seek their advice? Or if you need a place to work alongside a community of other people driven by their values, check out http://www.the-hub.net/, an incubator for creative ideas opening in central London.
Transforming our experience of work, is more than anything, about first fuelling our capacity to see things not as they are, but as they could be. George Bernard Shaw, has this to say ‘You see things are they are and you ask why? I dream things that never were and I ask why not?'.
Good luck and please get in touch!
jonathan.robinson@the-hub.net
Jonathan Robinson is co-author of Careers Un-ltd.
Rafiq Manji traded hundreds of millions of dollars a day on the global financial markets. Until one day he attended a lecture on how debt based economic growth leads to social and environmental breakdown. A rather stark contradiction emerged between what he believed in and the ltd stuff he did every day. He began to resemble a hammer-headed shark with eyes looking in diametrically opposite directions. One eye firmly fixed on screens scrolling his million dollar transactions while the other eye was surveying the fire escape knowing there is an un-ltd world out there.
Not wanting to be hard on the bloke, but for a moment he personified tendencies that more and more of us find a little unpalatable. We find ourselves saying, believing, feeling one thing, and doing quite another - often out of sheer necessity. Rafiq walked out and joined a commercial enterprise that provides organisations with a way of measuring and monitoring performance in environmental sustainability.
Cracks are forming in the careers veneer. They reveal a stark choice between a career that makes us dumb down and switch of or something that deserves our talent, passion and sense of fun. We can choose to be ltd or un-ltd.
Things are not looking good in the world of ltd career options.
I was trapped in the corporate world by a bravado and fear of expressing what I was really passionate about. Most of the time it was like being forced to wear clothes that I didn't like wearing and which didn't fit me. So every day there I was presented to the world as someone that was not me and everything inside me on an emotional level was screaming.
Chris Wild, former Management Consultant
Disturbing revelation. Yet it would be tempting to dismiss if this mood had not been substantiated as a national trend. According to an ICM poll covered by The Observer those of us who think our working lives have got worse over the last five years are more than double the number who think things have improved. This dismal picture portrays the whole idea of work as something stressful, tiresome and dull. Surely not. What we are talking about here is the stuff we fill most of our waking life with. Surely that makes it worthy of something altogether more extraordinary, stimulating and rewarding.
But check this out. By widening our radar screen of possibilities in the world, something quite extraordinary pops into view. It is a quiet un-ltd revolution, led by a disparate bunch of low flying heroes. Together they personify a profoundly different conception of work. They are devoting themselves to being the change they want to see in the world. And they're doing it with all the imagination and creativity they can muster. Maybe you are one of them.
Some un-ltd pioneers have dynamic jobs in corporate social responsibility and have won the mandate to question, agitate and reinvent the rules of the game. But there are other un-ltd pioneers whose livelihoods outside the corporate mo(u)ld could teach us a thing or two, not least about thinking outside the box.
Richard Reed and two of his mates founded Innocent fresh fruit smoothies. Richard tells me that their "original business ideas were really rubbish".
The first idea was foil underpants and remote-controlled curtains - too futuristic. A bath that filled itself with water at exactly the right temperature - too dangerous, all that water and electricity. We even had a couple of dom.com ideas, but with hindsight, roastchicken.com probably wouldn't have caught on.
Smoothies did seem like a good idea though. Take lots of nice fruit, put enough in a bottle to give you your daily intake of fruit and sell it in shops. People could do themselves some good, and it would taste nice too. We needed to test our theory out. So we bought £500 worth of fruit, turned it into smoothies and sold them from a stall at a little music festival in London. We put up a big sign saying 'Do you think we should give up our jobs to make these smoothies?' and put out a bin saying 'YES' and a bin saying 'NO', then asked people to put the empty bottle in the right bin. At the end of the weekend the 'YES' bin was full so we went to work the next day and resigned.
Stories like this prompt some big questions. What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? What is it you plan to do that deserves you? What deserves your sense of humour, your ingenuity, your intelligence, your sense of fun? What deserves your energy and passion for half your waking life?
I don't know about you, but my sense is that too many of us are facing some stark realities. Our ideas don't fit the predetermined boxes. We don't feel passionate about how we spend our 9 to 5. We're convinced that ideas of work and success need reinventing. And we've got a niggling feeling about the state of the world? But where to go, what to do?
So maybe if you find yourself in a company that's failing to release the creative potential of it's people and products, it might be time to pick up the phone to the nice people at !Whatif? on 020 7535 7500 to find out how they can help. Or if you've got a winning idea for a project or business you'd like to start, even if it's just in your free time, log onto http://www.unltd.org.uk/ or http://www.nesta.org.uk/ and apply for a grant or some investment. Or if you find yourself in Borders, grab a coffee and flick through ‘The Art of Looking Sideways' for inspiration on changing the way we look at the world or ‘The Cultural Creatives' for an account of how a once disparate movement of 50 million people are now re-shaping work and lifestyles in America. Why not pick up the phone to someone you really admire and seek their advice? Or if you need a place to work alongside a community of other people driven by their values, check out http://www.the-hub.net/, an incubator for creative ideas opening in central London.
Transforming our experience of work, is more than anything, about first fuelling our capacity to see things not as they are, but as they could be. George Bernard Shaw, has this to say ‘You see things are they are and you ask why? I dream things that never were and I ask why not?'.
Good luck and please get in touch!
jonathan.robinson@the-hub.net
Jonathan Robinson is co-author of Careers Un-ltd.
