Been looking forward to Douglas's business book Get Back In The Box, particularly since he told me it was going to foreground the presentation on play in business that he's been making for the last few years, under the title 'Follow the Fun'. He's posted some of this material on his blog:
In a renaissance society driven by the need to forge connections, play
is the ultimate system for social currency. It's a way to try on new
roles without committing to them for life. It's a way to test
strategies of engagement without being defined by them forever. It’s a
way to rise above the seemingly high stakes of almost any situation and
see it as the game it probably is. It’s a way to make one’s enterprise
a form of social currency from the beginning, and to guarantee a
collaborative, playful, and altogether more productive path toward
continual innovation.
And this play begins at work.
Establishing
a playful career or company isn't as easy as it looks. It doesn't
require expensive consultants, trips to the woods, or the reinvention
of a company's culture based on some abstract ideal. But it does mean
going against much of what we’ve been taught about competition and
survival - not just in business school, but for the past five
centuries! Still, just as people have stopped relating as individuals
to their brands and opted instead to become members of brand cultures,
producers in a renaissance era must come to think of their companies as
collaborative minisocieties, whose underlying work ethic will
ultimately be expressed in the culture they create for the world at
large.
Couldn't agree more - the first paragraph is a lovely summary of the kind of social mentality I was proposing in the Play Ethic book. I particularly like the idea of producers seeing their companies as "collaborative minisocieties".
But I also think this needs a real metaphor-shift (meaning head-and-heart shift) at the strategic and executive level, particularly with traditional companies, for that vision to have purchase. (Speaking from some direct consulting experience here). I'm sure Douglas would agree that some of that impetus comes from new business models forged by entrepreneurs, social and private, who (if they're successful enough) can generate profoundly playful productive cultures.
Recent Comments