When you do business, you don’t do emotion.
That’s the unspoken rule in the workplace. We get up in the morning, drive to our workplace and unhook our emotional profile before we sit in our cubicle to get our work done. We plough through the day’s work trying our best not to engage our whole person in the process, just in case we get too emotionally involved. To get emotionally involved with our work is a taboo.
We look to getting home to re-connect with our emotions so that we can bond with our loved ones. Sometimes the re-connection process happens along the road home and you see people with sudden emotional surges behaving like broken electrical equipment.
Source: The Vancouver Sun
Before the Industrial Revolution and the implementation of the division of labour in mass manufacturing, the mode of production is artisanal. Every village has its family of artisans who will produce all the necessary crafts and food for its community. The bakers, carpenters, shoemakers, cooks and all sundry. A person is either born into a profession or becomes an apprentice to a chosen vocation in life. In other words, you are deeply identified with your work and it becomes your identity. In both, you attain your standing in your community and draw meaning in life as you serve the people you live with.
Our workplace now creates an alienated workforce. Most people go to work for the money they need to pay the bills. It’s is not very often you identify with the work you actually do and much less identify with the goal of your company.
So the question is, how can we do meaningful work in this kind of environment? And how will people feel happy being so alienated from the output of their labour? And if they are unhappy and disconnected, how can anyone do great work? Who will produce great products and services in a disconnected work environment?
This brings me to something that is very close to my heart, that is, how to build a community that will imagine, design and build great products and services in a work environment that are engaging, challenging and rewarding at the same time.
Is that even remotely possible?
It is not common, it might not be easy but I believe this is a worthwhile goal for us.
To see people in this world torn apart by a system that is undoing their lives as they seek to make sense and meaning of their existence much like broken toys trying to reassemble themselves, I believe the time has come for us to seek a way to address this issue.
I foresee the new goal of any enterprise in the coming times is to foster a community of inspired artisans coming together to collaborate and produce in exchange for a dignified existence, creating products and services that are put together with love.
XiMnet Team Company Retreat 2013 @ Taipei, Taiwan.
In answering to this call for a brave new world, XIMNET is employing this very philosophy in building a new version of our software XTOPIA. Within a community of 5 artisans from different disciplines, we want to put our minds and souls together to re-imagine how “to change the world” within our circle of influence. We imagine our collaboration can with a software tool that will make website publishing, sales and marketing interaction and customer support so effectively simple that we can reduce significant amount of time and stress from someone who uses these tools. And they can spend their time doing things they want to, like spending time with their loved ones, reading their favourite book or going for a bike trip.
There’s another thing. In a world that always equate big with better, I think the real winner is the one who can ask the most fundamental question about life, work and happiness. We can’t fight a 100-pound gorilla on might but we can always win with our soul inspiration by delivering a better product that meets the needs of the people.
All said, in XIMNET, the total engagement of body, mind at soul in the workplace is not only a nice to have, it is our business strategy.
We intend to live and work as complete persons and to serve our customers with inspired products and services that can only be put together by complete persons.
Join me, and let’s build a village of artisans or complete persons again at the workplace, one at a time.
You can start a counter-revolution at your workplace by being “all present” starting today.
Good luck and have fun!