Yahoo’s new boss, Marissa Mayer, has just issued an edict banning her employees from working at home. In this article in today’s Guardian, I give my response, suggesting five ways to become an expert homeworker (and keep bosses like Mayer happy as well).
I probably break all of your rules Roman, except perhaps getting out and making some human contact. I’ve been “home alone” for a decade or more. I do spend a lot of time online, engaging in and managing discussion groups which are by and large focussed on that which I spoke to you of earlier, business which embeds compassion and the social focus of that work.
Aside from the social enterprise hub, I’ve been blocked from commenting on the Guardian since contradicting Mark Kramer of ‘creating shared value’ fame who claimed business could profit from solving social problems. My point was that I saw profit being for a social purpose not from a social purpose.
The working environment issue was something that I brought up yesterday with a parody about Google who became something of an obstacle 7 years ago, when they began hosting a defamation campaign about my colleague who was in Ukraine challenging organised crime over the neglect of children in institutions. To some this was business masquerading as charity trying to hoax an humanitarian cause. It took 5 years for the ‘Death Camps, for Children’ story to reach mainstream media and the BBC.
The playful working environment at Google reminded me of the Eloi from The Time Machine , who had become detached from all empathy for other human beings:
http://www.sunzu.com/articles/did-hg-wells-predict-google/