I’ve just been listening to Tim O’Reilly, who’s in the running for the driverlesscroc thought-leader of the week award.*
*There is no award.**
**More to the point: crikey, what would Zinsser say about that sentence?
O’Reilly was talking about the unequal distribution of wealth from the technological explosion, and said this:
… the idea that companies should basically focus on their core competency and treat all those people really well, and outsource all the rest, and its lead to this incredible divergence in our economy, and I think it’s a really pernicious idea. We have to figure out how to get our hands around that.
Because it isn’t technology that is causing this problem – it’s our choices as a society. It’s our values in our companies.
Tim O’Reilly at SXSW2018 (full video below)
Values question: What are you doing to help the people who work with you – or for you – to grow? It makes sense to be generous to scarce, highly skilled people, because of course you want to keep them. It means more to be generous to lower-skilled workers and help them learn what they need to know so that they can make a bigger contribution to your organisation, or to someone else’s (it’s not just your future that you’re building, after all). It’s the right thing to do.
(O’Reilly refers to ‘A Tale of Two Janitors’ in the New York Times – it’s worth a read.)