Tuesday, September 8, 2009
free association
The genesis of this week’s entry is hard to explain. Thinking about virtual work, a flat world, the speed of technology and its power to transform take my mind in so many different directions that each post could go far too many places to make good sense. Therefore I need to coalesce around whatever is recurring in my brain. This week, the word “freedom” kept coming to mind. Among the many concepts that virtualwirks promotes is freedom. Freedom from the tether of the office, freedom to work where you want to live, freedom to use technology as a liberator, and freedom choose employees for your business from a larger pool of candidates because geography becomes an ally. Global business is finding it ever easier to be borderless through linkage with like minded people in dispersed locations. To me, this is great for our world not just because of what it can do for business success, but because drawing the world together through a shared work ethic this promotes freedom of the spirit and enhances the human condition.
And then, it hit me. Freedom is on my mind because it’s September. This year, September marks the 70th anniversary of the invasion of Poland kicking off WW2; a period of commitment to and sacrifice for freedom that is inconceivable to much of the world today. It also marks 8 years since the attacks of 9/11. While 8 years is a small weight on the larger scale of time, the children who were in 1st grade on that momentous Tuesday are in their first year of high school in 2009. The violence inflicted on New York and Washington was only one piece of the terroristic assault on the freedom of people which has taken no rest in the years since. Yet, the human spirit finds ways to combat such divisiveness. Work is a commonality of people everywhere. At the heart of it all, we work to take care of our families, to create a sense of self worth and hopefully to do something consequential to others. When people around the globe get to know and understand each other by working in a flattened world, it can’t help but be beneficial. Much has changed since 2001, particularly through the power of the world to work closer together using ingredients of the borderless work world which are vastly more abundant than they were even 8 short years ago.
So I am adding freedom to the list of motivators for virtual work. The more we take advantage of the tools and processes of working anywhere, the more we learn how much we have in common with each other. By finding ways to link people across countries together in the pursuit of our common need for work, success and sustinence, I think we’re enriching the cause of individual liberty. Let the inevitability of shared experience be a part of the answer to the inexorable assault on people’s freedom through violence. Imagine that. Maybe I’m the classic John Lennon like dreamer, but I doubt I am the only one.
– Jim
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