There are no stable jobs anymore. Entrepreneurship is like creating a safety net.

Great quote from Penelope Trunk.

We're nearing the end of month 2, but this recap from month 1 is awesome!

I have great clients.  Most of the people who end up working with me do so because they want to work in radically more participatory ways, opening up processes to more voices, more leadership.  In conference settings this means scheduling much more dialogue or running the whole thing using Open Space Technology and dispensing with pre-loading content.

But there persists, especially in the corporate and government sectors, a underlying nervousness in doing this.  common objections to making things more participatory include:

• It’s too risky
• We’re not ready for it
• I’m worried it won’t work
• There won’t be enough structure
• People need content
• We need to know what the outcomes will be.

It is worth exploring these issues in a compassionate and direct manner.  What these issues are really about are trust and control and a sense that the responsibility for the experience lies with the organizers and not the participants.

This is not always the easiest thing to say to people, especially those that have hired you to deliver a conference or a conversation.  But it is important to confront these issues face on, because no matter how well you run a participatory process, without confronting the edges of control and trust, you are going to get anywhere ultimately.

These setiments originate in a couple of assumptions that are worth challenging:

• The responsibility for the experience rests with the organizers, not the participants. This is to some extent true although it does a great disservice to most conference design.  Assuming that you as a planning committee have to deliver a great experience for everyone is neither possible nor productive.  You are never going to make everyone happy, so leave that idea behind.  And you aren’t going to get all the content right.  The best traditional conferences meet some of the expectations of participants most of the time, meaning that there are large blocks of time that don’t meet people’s expectations.  And so the default setting for most participants is to spend thousands of dollars on a passive experience, taking some interest in workshops or speeches and spending the rest of the time self-organizing dinners, coffee breaks and other chances to connect with friends old and new.  Another word for a conference that takes thousands of your dollars and leaves you finding your own way is “a racket.”
• People need content and structure. Of course we do, but not in the way most conference organizers deliver it.  On the content side, most conference planning consists of spending a year guessing what people want to learn about, or worse, putting out RFPs for workshops, which results in conferences becoming big commercials for people’s pet processes, or ideas, without any consideration for what folks want to learn.  The conference is then marketed on the backs of these offerings.  That isn’t to say that there can’t be value, but it does constrain learning.  Similarly, with structure, conference organizers will often say to me that things like Open Space don’t have enough structure.  Open Space has plenty of structure, but it is free of content until the gathering itself populates the agenda with the questions that are top of mind.  I have worked at countless conferences where “structure” is everything.  And what this typically means is that the conference runs behind schedule and people are herded here and there, shortshrifting almost every aspect of their experience, to the point where folks just plain don’t return from coffee breaks.
• People learn by passive listening. There is no question that a stirring keynote or a dynamic and powerful presentation can have the effect of galvanizing ideas and making people hungry for learning.  But too often the passive experience of listing to experts is built into conferences such that a key note is followed by a panel, is followed by lecture-workshops, is followed by another keynote and so on.  Participation is minimal.

What I have discovered over the years is that people want to be in a conference setting that has a variety of experience.  If there is a keynote, it is important to have that person act more as a provocateur, to set up questions that folks can dialogue around rather than proclaiming the truth from on high.  Also building a conference in part or in whole around Open Space means that people can bring their own questions and expertise to the gathering, create a marketplace to exchange ideas and perhaps even create new ways of being together.  I don’t think every conference needs to end in “action,” but I do think that many conferences could build in more explicit opportunities to start something.

the bottom line for people in understanding that giving up control is important.  A conference planning committee should focus on building a container into which participants can pour their ideas.  Creative, engaging, participatory conferences and gatherings have substantial participation undertaken by the participants themselves.  They look at how passive a conference is and break open opportunities for people to connect, to go on a learning journey together, to create something new, or simply to sit in good conversation with each other catching up and sharing their work.

Trust your participants and invite them well.  Invite them to come prepared to make contributions.  Put responsibility for their experience solidly in their laps.  Let them know that if they are taking to time and money to come to the gathering, they should also take the chance to create and contribute content to the gathering.  Bring your questions, bring your stories, look for others and see what you can create.  Challenge participants to show up to a co-creative gathering rich in conversations, connections and inspiration.  Invite them, provide a good container with tools for them to do their work, and turn it over to them.

Fearless conference planning, accompanied by excellent invitation and skilful hosting for productive self-organization and emergence creates memorable experiences.

Not understanding and agreeing what "Entrepreneur" and "Startup" mean can sink an entire country's entrepreneurial ecosystem.
------
I'm getting ready to go overseas to teach, and I've spent the last week reviewing several countries' ambitious attempts to kick-start entrepreneurship. After poring through stacks of reports, white papers and position papers, I've come to a couple of conclusions.

1. They sure killed a ton of trees
2. With one noticeable exception, governmental entrepreneurship policies and initiatives appear to be less than optimal, with capital deployed inefficiently (read "They would have done better throwing the money in the street.") Why? Because they haven't defined the basics:
3. What's a startup? Who's an entrepreneur? How do the ecosystems differ for each one? What's the role of public versus private funding?

Six Types of Startups - Pick One
There are six distinct organizational paths for entrepreneurs: lifestyle business, small business, scalable startup, buyable startup, large company, and social entrepreneur. All of the individuals who start these organizations are "entrepreneurs" yet not understanding their differences screws up public policy because the ecosystem in supporting each type is radically different.

For policy makers, the first order of business is to methodically think through which of these entrepreneurial paths they want to help and grow.

Lifestyle Startups: Work to Live their Passion
On the California coast where I live, we see lifestyle entrepreneurs like surfers and divers who own small surf or dive shop or teach surfing and diving lessons to pay the bills so they can surf and dive some more. A lifestyle entrepreneur is living the life they love, works for no one but themselves, while pursuing their personal passion. In Silicon Valley the equivalent is the journeyman coder or web designer who loves the technology, and takes coding and U/I jobs because it's a passion.

Small Business Startups: Work to Feed the Family
Today, the overwhelming number of entrepreneurs and startups in the United States are still small businesses. There are 5.7 million small businesses in the U.S. They make up 99.7% of all companies and employ 50% of all non-governmental workers.

Small businesses are grocery stores, hairdressers, consultants, travel agents, Internet commerce storefronts, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, etc. They are anyone who runs his/her own business.

They work as hard as any Silicon Valley entrepreneur. They hire local employees or family. Most are barely profitable. Small business entrepreneurship is not designed for scale, the owners want to own their own business and "feed the family." The only capital available to them is their own savings, bank and small business loans and what they can borrow from relatives. Small business entrepreneurs don't become billionaires and (not coincidentally) don't make many appearances on magazine covers. But in sheer numbers, they are infinitely more representative of "entrepreneurship" than entrepreneurs in other categories--and their enterprises create local jobs.

Scalable Startups: Born to Be Big
Scalable startups are what Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and their venture investors aspire to build. Google, Skype, Facebook, Twitter are just the latest examples. From day one, the founders believe that their vision can change the world. Unlike small business entrepreneurs, their interest is not in earning a living but rather in creating equity in a company that eventually will become publicly traded or acquired, generating a multi-million-dollar payoff.

Scalable startups require risk capital to fund their search for a business model, and they attract investment from equally crazy financial investors - venture capitalists. They hire the best and the brightest. Their job is to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. When they find it, their focus on scale requires even more venture capital to fuel rapid expansion.

Scalable startups tend to group together in innovation clusters (Silicon Valley, Shanghai, New York, Boston, Israel, etc.) They make up a small percentage of the six types of startups, but because of the outsize returns, attract all the risk capital (and press).

Just in the last few years we've come to see that we had been building scalable startups inefficiently. Investors (and educators) treated startups as smaller versions of large companies.

We now understand that's just not true. While large companies execute known business models, startups are temporary organizations designed to search for a scalable and repeatable business model.

This insight has begun to change how we teach entrepreneurship, incubate startups and fund them.

Buyable Startups: Born to Flip
In the last five years, web and mobile app startups that are founded to be sold to larger companies have become popular. The plummeting cost required to build a product, the radically reduced time to bring a product to market and the availability of angel capital willing to invest less than a traditional VCs- $100K - $1M versus $4M on up - has allowed these companies to proliferate - and their investors to make money. Their goal is not to build a billion dollar business, but to be sold to a larger company for $5-$50M.

Large Company Startups: Innovate or Evaporate
Large companies have finite life cycles. And over the last decade those cycles have grown shorter. Most grow through sustaining innovation, offering new products that are variants around their core products. Changes in customer tastes, new technologies, legislation, new competitors, etc. can create pressure for more disruptive innovation - requiring large companies to create entirely new products sold to new customers in new markets. (i.e. Google and Android.) Existing companies do this by either acquiring innovative companies (see Buyable Startups above) or attempting to build a disruptive product internally. Ironically, large company size and culture make disruptive innovation extremely difficult to execute.

Social Startups: Driven to Make a Difference
Social entrepreneurs are no less ambitious, passionate, or driven to make an impact than any other type of founder. But unlike scalable startups, their goal is to make the world a better place, not to take market share or to create to wealth for the founders. They may be organized as a nonprofit, a for-profit, or hybrid.

So What?

• When I read policy papers by government organizations trying to replicate the lessons from the valley, I'm struck how they seem to miss some basic lessons.

Each of these six very different startups requires very different ecosystems, unique educational tools, economic incentives (tax breaks, paperwork/regulation reduction, incentives), incubators and risk capital.

Regions building a cluster around scalable startups fail to understand that a government agency simply giving money to entrepreneurs who want it is an exercise in failure. It is not a "jobs program" for the local populace. Any attempt to make it so dooms it to failure.

A scalable startup ecosystems is the ultimate capitalist exercise. It is not an exercise in "fairness" or patronage. While it's a meritocracy, it takes equal parts of risk, greed, vision and obscene financial returns. And those can only thrive in a regional or national culture that supports an equal mix of all those.

Building an scalable startup innovation cluster requires an ecosystem of private not government-run incubators and venture capital firms, outward-facing universities, and a rigorous startup selection process.

Any government that starts public financing entrepreneurship better have a plan to get out of it by building a private VC industry. If they're still publically funding startups after five to ten years they've failed.

To date, Israel is only country that has engineered a successful entrepreneurship cluster from the ground up. Its Yozma program kick-started a private venture capital industry with government funds, (emulating the U.S. lesson of using SBIC funds.), but then the government got out of the way.

In addition, the Israeli government originally funded 23 early stage incubators but turned them over to the VC's to own and manage. They're run by business professionals (not real-estate managers looking to rent out excess office space) and entry is not for life-style entrepreneurs, but is a bootcamp for VC funding.

Unless the people who actually make policy understand the difference between the types of startups and the ecosystem necessary to support their growth, the chance that any government policies will have a substantive effect on innovation, jobs or the gross domestic product is low.

Steve Blank's blog: www.steveblank.com

Follow Steve Blank on Twitter: www.twitter.com/sgblank

NEW YORK (FORTUNE Magazine) - Robert Oppenheimer agonized over building the A-bomb. Alfred Nobel got queasy about creating dynamite. Robert Propst invented nothing so destructive. Yet before he died in 2000, he lamented his unwitting contribution to what he called "monolithic insanity."

Propst is the father of the cubicle. More than 30 years after he unleashed it on the world, we are still trying to get out of the box. The cubicle has been called many things in its long and terrible reign. But what it has lacked in beauty and amenity, it has made up for in crabgrass-like persistence.

More from Fortune Sergio Marchionne's magic moment with Chrysler Apple stock flirts with $400 Cord-cutters not so into Netflix, either FORTUNE 500 Current Issue Subscribe to Fortune

Photo Gallery See more photos

Secrets of greatness E-mail and voicemail; yoga and personal assistants; structure and grooving: A dozen accomplished people tell what works for them. (See the gallery) How you get it done Share your own tips on how to manage your work life more efficiently. (E-mail us)

See a gallery of cubicles -- from futuristic workspace to box.

Reviled by workers, demonized by designers, disowned by its very creator, it still claims the largest share of office furniture sales--$3 billion or so a year--and has outlived every "office of the future" meant to replace it. It is the Fidel Castro of office furniture.

So will the cubicle always be with us? Probably yes, though in recent years individuals and organizations have finally started to chart productive and economical ways to escape its tyranny.

The cubicle was not born evil, or even square. It began, in fact, as a beautiful vision. The year was 1968. Nixon won the presidency. The Beatles released The White Album. And home-furnishings company Herman Miller (Research) in Zeeland, Mich., launched the Action Office. It was the brainchild of Bob Propst, a Coloradan who had joined the company as director of research.

After years of prototyping and studying how people work, and vowing to improve on the open-bullpen office that dominated much of the 20th century, Propst designed a system he thought would increase productivity (hence the name Action Office). The young designer, who also worked on projects as varied as heart pumps and tree harvesters, theorized that productivity would rise if people could see more of their work spread out in front of them, not just stacked in an in-box.

The new system included plenty of work surfaces and display shelves; partitions were a part of it, intended to provide privacy and places to pin up works in process. The Action Office even included varying desk levels to enable employees to work part of the time standing up, thereby encouraging blood flow and staving off exhaustion.

But inventions seldom obey the creator's intent. "The Action Office wasn't conceived to cram a lot of people into little space," says Joe Schwartz, Herman Miller's former marketing chief, who helped launch the system in 1968. "It was driven that way by economics."

Economics was the one thing Propst had failed to take into account. But it was also what triggered the cubicle's runaway success. Around the time the Action Office was born, a growing breed of white-collar workers, whose job titles fell between secretary and boss, was swelling the workforce. Also, real estate prices were rising, as was the cost of reconfiguring office buildings, making the physical office a drag on the corporate budget. Cubicles, or "systems furniture," as they are euphemistically called, offered a cheaper alternative for redoing the floorplan.

Another critical factor in the cubicle's rapid ascent was Uncle Sam. During the 1960s, to stimulate business spending, the Treasury created new rules for depreciating assets. The changes specified clearer ranges for depreciation and established a shorter life for furniture and equipment, vs. longer ranges assigned to buildings or leasehold improvements. (Today companies can depreciate office furniture in seven years, whereas permanent structures--that is, offices with walls--are assigned a 39.5-year rate.)

The upshot: A company could recover its costs quicker if it purchased cubes. When clients told Herman Miller of that unexpected benefit, it became a new selling point for the Action Office. After only two years on the market, sales soared. Competitors took notice.

That's when Propst's original vision began to fade. "They kept shrinking the Action Office until it became a cubicle," says Schwartz, now 80. As Steelcase, Knoll, and Haworth brought their versions to market, they figured out that what businesses wanted wasn't to give employees a holistic experience. The customers wanted a cheap way to pack workers in.

Propst's workstations were designed to be flexible, but in practice they were seldom altered or moved at all. Lined up in identical rows, they became the dystopian world that three academics described as "bright satanic offices" in a 1998 book, Workplaces of the Future.

Designer Douglas Ball, for instance, remembers the first installation of cubicles he created for a Canadian company in 1972. "I thought I'd be excited, but I came out depressed," says Ball, now 70. "It was Dilbertville. I'd failed to visualize what it would look like when there were so many of them."

Having taken over the world, the cubicle defeated several attempts to dethrone it. One of the most ambitious assaults came in 1993, when Jay Chiat, chairman of ad agency Chiat/Day, declared a sort of Bolshevik revolution when he moved his employees into newly renovated space in Venice, Calif. The design "was loungy, like Starbucks," remembers Stevan Alburty, then head of technology. "It was 20 years ahead of its time."

But it had a fatal flaw: No one had a fixed place to work. Employees were expected to park their belongings in lockers and check out laptops every morning as if renting a movie at Blockbuster. It quickly sparked a counter-rebellion--many employees simply stopped coming to the office, preferring to work at home. After the firm was acquired by an advertising conglomerate, employees got workspaces again.

Designers since then have mostly limited themselves to trying to offset the cubicle's most glaring defects. A recent Steelcase offering, the Personal Harbor, can be fitted with its own lighting system, fan, door, and window. Knoll offers the A3 (or anticube), a colony of rounded, podlike structures with translucent mesh coverings for privacy.

Herman Miller, now a $1.5-billion-a-year company, will launch two concepts in June that are the work of designer Ball. He says the new designs are the culmination of more than 30 years of trying to undo his early mistakes. The company won't release many details, but the systems will emphasize color and privacy; Ball says the workstations will be "more capsule-like, or cockpit-like." In all, more than 100 cubicle-variant office systems have come to market over the past three decades.

When openly challenged, the cubicle still gets the last laugh. In California state-employed attorneys obtained relief from the cube through Title 13.3 of their union contract: "The State agrees to make a reasonable effort to provide private enclosed office space to each permanent full-time attorney who has confidentiality needs." Should an attorney be assigned to "other than enclosed private offices," the union must be notified. Rather than violate the rule, says union president Holly Wilkens, the state sticks some young attorneys in airless closets.

Is that really where we're headed? No, says Stewart Brand, co-founder of the Global Business Network, an Emeryville, Calif., consulting firm that helps companies make long-range plans. Back in the '60s, right around the time Propst unveiled the cubicle, Brand created The Whole Earth Catalog, which became the bible of environmentally aware living and arguably had a much more benevolent effect on American culture.

He says that the most productive people he knows have developed ways to work outside offices, not in them. Brand himself worked out of a converted shipping container in Sausalito for seven years and now commutes to a beached fishing boat a few yards from his house. He sees two workspaces rising up to compete with the modern office: homes and what might be called the third space--i.e., Starbucks.

A living example of work in the third space is Diego Guevara, a 23-year-old appraiser for a large mortgage and insurance company. He camped out on a recent winter afternoon in a Manhattan Starbucks; before him on the counter were his ruggedized computer, a calculator, a Wi-Fi card, a yellow pad, and a grande.

As he used a PDA-cellphone to check on a property, Guevara typed details of the morning's appraisals into the laptop, which would sync the records with a database back at the office in West Orange, N.J. He usually goes to the office only when he needs supplies. And the last time he saw his boss? "Before Christmas," said Guevara, adding that his boss mostly works at home.

If working at home is now part of the zeitgeist, one very large employer that seems increasingly tapped in is the U.S. government. Congressman Frank Wolf, a Republican whose Virginia district is home to many federal worker bees, has made telecommuting his pet project. "There is nothing magic in strapping ourselves into a metal box every day only to drive to an office where we sit behind a desk working on a computer," he told a congressional committee.

Wolf sees telecommuting as a way to decrease traffic, reduce air pollution, increase productivity, and frustrate terrorists. In 2004 he launched a campaign to penalize government agencies by docking funds if they fail to support telecommuting. Now the SEC, the State Department, the Department of Justice, and four other big agencies are required to offer every eligible worker the opportunity to telecommute.

A 2005 survey by Milwaukee's Dieringer Research Group reported that 26 million Americans use broadband to do work from home. Sales reps and consultants have always worked remotely; now finance people, lawyers, administrators, researchers, and creative types can too. Just as infotech has enabled companies to offshore white-collar functions, it also untethers Stateside employees from their cubes.

Coming to the office for meetings and in-person collaboration is still important, of course, but as Brand points out, "People are realizing they don't need face-to-face time all the time."

Remember how economics helped turn the cube into a plague? Now giants like Cisco Systems see "workforce mobility" as a way to cut real estate costs. Thanks to heavy use of mobile technology by employees, says real estate VP Mark Golan, "we discovered that Cisco offices and cubicles went vacant 35% of the time."

By switching to what it calls the Connected Workspace--employees set up work areas wherever they are needed in the building--Cisco says it has raised satisfaction while boosting density. Now 140 employees are able to work comfortably where 88 would work in a traditional workspace.

Hewlett-Packard, which has introduced a similar scheme, expects to cut $230 million out of annual occupancy expenses by mid 2007. The new economics of the office won't actually kill the cube. In fact, U.S. sales of office systems rose 11% in 2005. But as the office occupies a smaller part of companies' budgets, cubes will claim a smaller share of employees' lives.

FEEDBACK: jschlosser@fortunemail.com

REPORTER ASSOCIATES Doris Burke and Abrahm Lustgarten contributed to this article.

-----------------------------------------

5 rules to make your work day sane

What Ben Franklin can teach you about time management -- set goals, forgive yourself for not meeting them, and don't drink rum all day. Read today's Plugged In. 

Share:

More

Email Print Comment

162

By Amy Hoak, MarketWatch

Continued from page 1

Page 1 Page 2

“In Sao Paulo, they have the ‘Star Trek table,’ where executives sit together in an open plan. Adjacent to the table, they have a room they can go in for private conversations,” Pursell said. “They see it as a tremendous benefit. It encourages more dialogue and more feedback.”

At the Jones Lang LaSalle headquarters in Chicago, an area resembling a Starbucks café — complete with casual tables and access to vending machines — provides employees a relaxed kind of workspace they’re encouraged to use throughout the day. The open floor plan means that everyone has access to natural light from the windows — as well as glimpses of Chicago’s Millennium Park. Jones Lang LaSalle is a real-estate services firm.

When moving to an open plan, a major fear that employees have is that there will be increased noise and distractions when the walls are taken down. But that may just be an urban workplace myth.

Once the walls come down, ”we have found that, without exception, the noise level goes down,” said Matthew J. Fanoe, vice president of real estate for Coca-Cola Refreshments, a division of Coca-Cola Co. /quotes/zigman/222647/quotes/nls/ko KO +3.43% , and chairman of CoreNet Global.

Cubicle walls don’t block sound, he said. But when you see the person next to you, you’re more likely to keep your volume down. And advances in white noise systems break down frequencies of the human voice, Fanoe said. “You see that people are talking, but it’s harder to hear,” he said.

Jones Lang LaSalle is currently working with a client that is going from 100% private office space to 95% open office environment, including areas ranging from a living room-like setting, to work tables and a cafe bar.

Other types of office spaces are quiet zones where cell phones aren’t allowed, and where employees who want absolute quiet can sit down and concentrate on a task. Or they don’t have to sit at all — they can take a slow walk on a treadmill as they work, she said.

“The trend is to get people moving around the office so they get to see and connect with each other, and provide variety to stimulate creativity and innovation,” said Tish Kruse, senior vice president for strategic consulting at Jones Lang LaSalle, in an email.

Shrinking personal space

There’s also a trend of companies using the spaces they have more efficiently, Kadzis said. The average space per person in an office has fallen below 200 square feet in the United States; it’s as low as 100 square feet in Europe, he added.

Driving this is mobile technology that has allowed people to easily work offsite. Many workers like having flexibility in where they work and the option to occasionally work from home. But when they do come into the office, a priority is to interact with their co-workers, putting the emphasis not on personal spaces but areas where collaboration can thrive.

“The personal space gets smaller, and that gets put back into more collaborative spaces,” Fanoe said. “You couldn’t have done it 20 years ago, because the technology wasn’t there to support it.”

And more companies have adopted hoteling setups, where employees don’t have a designated space but check in with a concierge and get an assigned desk for the workday, he added.

But even as firms become more efficient with their spaces, it’s not likely they’ll give up their offices completely, Kruse said.

“We believe that regardless of the technologies and innovations that the modern era introduces, the workplace will always have a ‘place,’ since humans by their very nature are social animals and need to feel that they are part of a community,” she said.

/quotes/zigman/222647/quotes/nls/ko

Add KO to portfolio

KO

Coca-Cola Co.

$ 69.42

+2.30 +3.43%

Volume: 15.66m

July 19, 2011 3:41p

Amy Hoak is a MarketWatch reporter based in Chicago.

Page 1 Page 2