Work and life and work and life and...

Should we 'live to work' or 'work to live'? A key question of our age. And the root of much of my personal existential anxieties.



Modern thinking seems to be dominated by two conflicting conceptions of 'work' and the role it should play in our lives.

The first idea is that our work and personal lives are two separate domains. They are ruled by separate concerns, needs and motivations. We should aim for a 'work/life balance' but we shouldn't 'bring our work home' or 'mix business with pleasure'. In effect, we're actually two different people depending on whether we're at work or at home.

The best account I read of this was by Michael Foley in his book The Age of Absurdity. I don't have the book handy but the impression it left is that we somehow put our more sincere feelings on hold when we step into the office. The workplace has its own set of (absurd and unwritten) rules and constraints. At its heart is the need to maintain a shallow cheeriness, a veneer of self/group-enforced 'workaday' pleasantries that makes the whole enterprise work-able (excuse the pun). To try to reveal one's true feelings in this setting would be nigh on impossible and almost definitely counter-productive.

Its an idea that I can definitely relate to. I suspect most others can too.

The second line of thinking is that we should essentially be living our work. Our work should be our reason to be and should be motivated by the same values that drive us in our private lives. It's an idea that has become increasingly influential as technology has made us contactable any where, any place, any time, allowing work to seep into previously private corners of our lives. It appeals to idealists (and freelance social media 'gurus') because it holds out the promise to end drudgery and unite our lives. After all, 'If you choose a job you love, then you'll never have to work a day in your life'.

A difficult concept to argue with. But in my experience one that's even harder to put into practice. There just aren't enough good jobs to go around. For every fashion designer, doctor or astronaut, there are countless shelf stackers, call centre workers or office drones. But there's an even more fundamental tension at work.

Most jobs are not driven by the things that really motivate us - feeling loved, being a useful part of society, having purpose, getting better at stuff, fulfilling our potential. They may tangentially satisfy some of these needs but all as secondary to the real business - 'efficiency' for the purposes of making money.

So perhaps the problem isn't work itself but the kind of work we do at most jobs?

Killing Time At Home

Still not sure what this film is trying to say but it gets me every time. Video and audio are both amazing but it's the story that does it. So much emotion packed into less than 3 minutes of animation...



Apparently it's been used in English lessons in schools across the UK. Amen to whoever decided to include this on the syllabus!

Facing up to the customer

One of the things that market researchers do is help people at the companies they work for meet with their customers. I wonder if this isn't in fact one of the most important things that researchers do? Could it be the basis of a kind of research that add real 'thick' value?

I'm reading a book called Made to Stick about how different messages can be made more effective or 'sticky'. One element that they identify as being important is that a message is 'concrete' - rooted in real stuff and not abstract concepts.

An idea that is truly concrete has 'hooks'. Like velcro, it is able to catch onto pre-existing 'hoops' in our mind, stuff that we already know about and can relate to.

One story they tell is of a new brand manager at an American food corporation. When she started in the role she was given a folder of reports and statistics on her supposed customer all of which left her feeling none the wiser about they were actually like. Then her company arranged for her to actually spend a few days in the homes of some of the people who actually bought and used her product. That experience was so real that it led her to several insights about how to improve the brand offer and still informs how she thinks about her customer.

It's amazing how distant many people that work in big companies are from the customer they're trying to reach. Given this it's perhaps unsurprising that just a few days spent face-to-face - immersed in people's real lives, observing how they actually use the product, hearing their views directly - could form a more useful and lasting impression than any amount of second hand reports or statistics.

What's perhaps even more impactful about this approach though is that it humanises the customer, changing them from a statistic to a real life person and helping to build empathy. A company of employees who have looked into the eyes of the people they are selling to, encountered them in their own home, witnessed them playing with their children, is a company that is less likely to take cynical decisions.

In other words, meeting the customer shouldn't just about developing strategy. It's should be about creating human connections and situating what a customer does in a more social - and more empathic - setting.

Branded hypocrisy

So if hypocrisy can be good on a personal level could it also be true for businesses and brands?

I've done a lot of work in the past with one of the major mobile phone manufacturers. This company has one of the CSR records in the business, way above its peers in terms of both environmental and social behaviour. I know that this was driven by authentic beliefs in the boardroom, a real desire to do their bit.

Now talking about ethical initiatives alone is't going to sell. People are on the whole just not that interested. But a lot of these 'ethical' initatives were also very innovative - in terms of say new materials or new ways of using the mobile - and could easily have fed into wider technological credentials. They felt right for the brand and would have made sense out in the open.

By now you may or may not have guessed that I'm talking about Nokia. But even if you did guess then I bet it was just based on a vague feeling and nothing concrete.

Because Nokia never made anything of these virtues. They were afraid of being called hypocrites. They knew that whatever they said, there woud still be some people who would find fault with them for being part of an industry built on a business model that encourages people to replace their handset every year.

Just like on a personal level, businesses are never going to be perfect. As we come to recognise that we're pushing the planet to its ecological limits, the very idea of consumer capitalism seems shaky. Businesses are part of this old model. But still some are doing it better than others.

Companies that are doing things better should be shouting about it. It takes guts to stick your head above the parapet but it's about starting a conversation around the impact of your industry and showing what you're doing to improve things.

The playing field is shifting and brands who have a head start can lead the conversation and help shift it further, giving competitors an increasingly tough time to keep up. Smart brands are realising that this way the future lies, Nike being one example of a company that's beginning to do this quite well (see http://www.nikebetterworld.com/ for an example).

Nokia had a chance to do this some years ago and unfortunately passed it up. Maybe it was just too early then. Maybe they bottled it. Whatever the case, they probably still have the credentials to make something of their values.

Some might say it's too late. After all, 'values' are no substitute for a lack of exciting products. If Nokia want to stand for more than just the 'original mobile phone' and a new deal with MS then they need to give their staff and customers something to believe in. Talking about their values and what they're doing about them could help galvanise the company, whilst at the same time putting pressure on competitors.

More than that though, if Nokia really want to follow through on their beliefs, then talking about how they're trying to solve the problems in their industry is surely the right thing to do. Even if it does make them a bit of a hypocrite.

Is hypocrisy better than the alternative?

Is being a hypocrite always such a bad thing? Or could it sometimes be better than the alternative?

I reckon that being a hypocrite has got a petty bad press. The notion that we might think and do conflicting things has been given pretty short shrift. It's been taken as a demonstration of 'falseness' - a cardinal sin when you believe in the idea of a single united self. Nobody wants to think of themselves as a hypocrite.

In a recent interview with Jonathan Safran Foer - the author of Eating Animals - he makes this point in relation to vegetarianism.

The food industry is the single biggest contributor of climate change gases, bigger even than transport. The head of the IPCC -Rajendra Pachauri - has recommended cutting back on meat intakeas the one action that everybody could take to personally mitigate their own contribution. Not to mention the inhumane conditions in which most animals are kept in order to keep costs down. This at a time when we are starting to appreciate that animals aren't the 'soul-less automatons' that we have for so long assumed them to be.

The more you know about the story behind how our meat is produced and the consequences of it, the harder it becomes to justify eating so much of it. Eating meat is increasingly a moral choice.

That puts a lot of people - me included - in a difficult situation. We like eating meat. We've been doing it pretty much guilt free for years. Everybody else eats meat. And now we're being told the rules are changing?!

It can feel like we're left with two choices. Stop eating meat entirely. Or continue as we always have done.

There is of course a third choice - to cut back on meat - but this involves thinking of ourselves as hypocrites. We need to agree that eating meat is no longer really something we should be doing but continue doing it anyway for our own pleasure.

I agree with Foer here, that this is not something that we generally like to do. It involves an acknowledgment that we're not living up to our own standards. We would rather bury our head in the sands and carry on as normal. Or make up all kind of justifications about why we can't do it. We're too busy. We don't like vegetarian food. Meat is just too damn tasty.

So I for one am now proud to be a hypocrite on this issue. Each time I eat meat, on some level I feel like I'm making a bad choice. With that acknowledged, perhaps it'll help my behaviour to catch up with my conscience.

Because it's true what they say... nobody likes to think of themselves as a hypocrite.

A Scenic World shared by people who've never met

A brilliant fan made video to Beirut's Scenic World...



And read the comments below for a touching reminder of how social media can create touching little encounters and provoke real feelings... between strangers

Warning: Thanks to Sony Music Entertainment you will not want to watch this video

I've recently been watching the 3rd series of a comedy called How Not to Live Your Life on YouTube. If you haven't already seen it then do, if only for the final episode of the series in which there's an amateur dramatics production of Top Gun: the Musical.

Oh and it also guest stars Noel Fielding from the Mighty Boosh and contains references to Penge. What's not to like?

Here's a little sample...



Yes that's right. The video has no audio. Thanks to Sony Music Entertainment (Don't worry though, you can watch pretty much all of the rest of it here)

I actually managed to watch the video somewhere else and in one of the party scenes Rock the Casbah by The Clash plays in the background. The Clash happen to be signed to Sony Music. Bye bye sound.

The last time I came across this was when I was watching the BBC4 documentary Krautrock, a brilliant and engrossing as much about the rebirth of German culture after WWII as the amazing characters behind Kraftwerk, Can and Neu amongst other bands. But be warned. Sony, in their wisdom, have requested the removal of the sound from the final part of the film because it contains a snippet of a David Bowie song.

So having already invested 50 mintes of my time I was left feeling seriously let down.

This kind of behaviour by Sony is so counter-productive it makes me want to go and download the entire Clash back catalogue just on principle (I don't need to because I pay a monthly subscription to Spotify).

The most stupefying thing is that Sony are actually paying someone to police videos on YouTube and piss off potential customers. It's like they're intent on running their business into the ground rather than adapt a new media landscape.

I've actually met people who work for Sony who recognise that there's no real future for the music industry if they keep on acting on tired old notions of ownership. But unless the people at the top get that too, they'll lose out to newer rivals who get that the rules have change about what constitutes value in the music industry.