Since I started freelancing there’s one tenet that I haven’t breached. I knew right away that would be a deal breaker! I have kept my weekends relatively free for friends and family. Initially I felt a knee-jerk reaction as if I was taking out time from myself and handing it over on a platter to someone else. This is what Dalton Conley talks about in his new book, “Elsewhere, USA.”
Between our professional and personal and personal lives he talks of this feeling we have, “as if we should always be somewhere else doing something else.” This has been the prerogative of working mothers for a long, long time but these days even young professionals are beginning to experience this. How often do we scroll through messages while spending quality time with our children? How often do we feel wrung out to dry trying hard to keep our work, social, and personal lives humming along. We’re not only multitasking, we are playing multiple roles at the same time! This is a slice of our new social reality. To beginning entrepreneurs it seems as if just hanging out with the family or friends seems like wasted time, hours they could be making money.
Conley maintains that we tend to live in a hypernetwhrked and hypermarketized world. Technology has changed how Americans earn and spend money. Monetizing everything from child rearing to dating and socializing has brought about a sort of devaluation of people, their work and what they desire. “Conley's insights, says Jeffrey Sachs, “ might just help to rescue the 'priceless' from the credit card ads and restore it to work, family, friends, and identity, all of which are under siege in our elsewhere society.”
Conley’s hypothesis is that because value is elusive in today’s vast marketplace, our own worth is elusive too. He further postulates that this leads to a feeling of alienation. Giving in to this feeling, one is liable to feel out of place everywhere. According to Conley, “The organization man is gone, replaced by the elsewhere dad, the blackberry mom and various other figures in our new social landscape.” Says Conley, “an ethic of fragmented selves” replaces “the modern ethic of individualism and, …… the Elsewhere Society (the interpenetration of spheres of life that were once bounded from each other)…… All these” contribute to “ the gradual--yet fundamental--ways that life has changed beneath our feet.” He predicts that what it behooves a successful company is to enable their employees to integrate the various domains of their fractured lives.
NetApp, a company that heads the list of Fortune’s annual list of best companies to work for, pays its employees for five days for volunteer work, adoption aid, autism coverage. No. 5 on the Fortune list is Wegmans supermarket which offers workers free yoga classes and Genentech, No. 7 on Fortune’s list offers its employers on-site child care, paid sabbaticals and a fitness center. Furthermore, NetApp was able to avoid layoffs, increase its market share and bank $2 billion into the bargain. Genentech is the biotech leader and in these troubled times its revenues jumped 25% last quarter. So companies that our providing for their employees are also simultaneously lining their pockets as well. Companies like Google encourage, no, even require employees to weave their professional, social and at times, family lives into one cohesive, healthy tapestry! This may well be the wave of the future for a successful company!!
Between our professional and personal and personal lives he talks of this feeling we have, “as if we should always be somewhere else doing something else.” This has been the prerogative of working mothers for a long, long time but these days even young professionals are beginning to experience this. How often do we scroll through messages while spending quality time with our children? How often do we feel wrung out to dry trying hard to keep our work, social, and personal lives humming along. We’re not only multitasking, we are playing multiple roles at the same time! This is a slice of our new social reality. To beginning entrepreneurs it seems as if just hanging out with the family or friends seems like wasted time, hours they could be making money.
Conley maintains that we tend to live in a hypernetwhrked and hypermarketized world. Technology has changed how Americans earn and spend money. Monetizing everything from child rearing to dating and socializing has brought about a sort of devaluation of people, their work and what they desire. “Conley's insights, says Jeffrey Sachs, “ might just help to rescue the 'priceless' from the credit card ads and restore it to work, family, friends, and identity, all of which are under siege in our elsewhere society.”
Conley’s hypothesis is that because value is elusive in today’s vast marketplace, our own worth is elusive too. He further postulates that this leads to a feeling of alienation. Giving in to this feeling, one is liable to feel out of place everywhere. According to Conley, “The organization man is gone, replaced by the elsewhere dad, the blackberry mom and various other figures in our new social landscape.” Says Conley, “an ethic of fragmented selves” replaces “the modern ethic of individualism and, …… the Elsewhere Society (the interpenetration of spheres of life that were once bounded from each other)…… All these” contribute to “ the gradual--yet fundamental--ways that life has changed beneath our feet.” He predicts that what it behooves a successful company is to enable their employees to integrate the various domains of their fractured lives.
NetApp, a company that heads the list of Fortune’s annual list of best companies to work for, pays its employees for five days for volunteer work, adoption aid, autism coverage. No. 5 on the Fortune list is Wegmans supermarket which offers workers free yoga classes and Genentech, No. 7 on Fortune’s list offers its employers on-site child care, paid sabbaticals and a fitness center. Furthermore, NetApp was able to avoid layoffs, increase its market share and bank $2 billion into the bargain. Genentech is the biotech leader and in these troubled times its revenues jumped 25% last quarter. So companies that our providing for their employees are also simultaneously lining their pockets as well. Companies like Google encourage, no, even require employees to weave their professional, social and at times, family lives into one cohesive, healthy tapestry! This may well be the wave of the future for a successful company!!
