This popped up in the mailbag this morn, in response to yesterday’s posting:
…if everyone found work that they were passionate about and work and life merged, that would truly be the end of large corporations – I just don’t think any company can find thousands of people passionate and aligned with why the company exists, ready to merge their lives in pursuit of making the company succeed….
Not sure they’d go away, but they sure would be different. Consider that many tasks would go away, many of those seem likely to be related to gaining and maintaining control over others.
Furthermore, it might not be a problem to find people who are passionate about the work, but for how long? The most successful companies may or may not be smaller ones, and their turnover rates might actually rise significanly. Passion is volatile. Get in, work like crazy, get out. Mission accomplished.
Then, there would be more time for other, non-income things between jobs/companies, too. Instead of working for the middle forty years of life, we might work in more and shorter spurts, and longer into life. Retirement might be more seasonal, too. So it seems what we really need is more social and cultural support for the sabbatical.
Frithjof Bergmann (sp?) has done a bunch of stuff, though not much web-published, on what he calls New Work. A snippet…
Much of work is horrific; it maims and disfigures people, physically and emotionally. But work also has an opposite pole; it can be ecstatic and entrancing, so much so that “sex has to be good indeed to stand the competition with the most delicious and fantastic work.”
So given that some things really do require large corporate-type orgs to deliver, might we end up with delicious, fantastic, sexy corporations? Or perhaps a lifelong string of on again, off again, one-year stands?