Kleske: To me, doing things that my heart is set on is essential. That’s why I try to continuously develop my work further and to bring it closer to what I consider “fulfilling.” Still, with this approach, being stuck in an unsatisfying job is only a part of the problem. I have observed that many people don’t quit their current job because they don’t even know what job they would rather be doing. To me, the search for an occupation that my heart is set on is a lifelong journey. Each experience helps me to find out more about my personal interests, talents, and needs. I view each job as one more step toward an ideal state, while being aware of the fact that I will never reach that state as it is constantly changing together with me. Those who believe to have found their dream job at some point in this process run the risk of standing still.
Marketing expert and author Seth Godin maintains that there are an infinite number of tribes out there that are waiting for you to become their leader. Do what you love and the global platform consisting of Web 2.0, Mobile Web, etc. will reward you with followers, clients, and business opportunities. What do you think about Godin’s argument?
Kleske: I really like Godin’s definition of leadership as it isn’t based on power and managerial skills but on passion. Looking at the current state of the global economy, I believe that passion will play a much more important role again in the future. We have been accepting compromises in job choices for ages in favor of security, and now we’re flabbergasted to see that no job in the world can offer us the security we desire. I hope and believe that this insight will cause many people to say: “Security is gone anyway, so why shouldn’t I do what my heart is set on?”
What exactly do you think might happen?
Kleske: I think that, in the next months and years, we will see a new boom in trade, small businesses, and self-employment in general. My thesis is that this will ultimately lead us out of the crisis and create much more sustainability and stability than we had before the crisis. Slogans like “grow slow, grow strong” will come to the fore and quick money making will take a back seat.
On a more general note, is self-fulfillment easier in the digital economy? Is it possible to optimize your life by “hacking” it?
Kleske: This definitely holds true for ideas that can be realized in the “digital economy.” For instance, if you’ve come up with an idea for a new web application, you hardly need to invest anything – except for time. The developer tools by Google, Microsoft, and Amazon that provide programming environments and server systems have made getting started much easier. Another advantage of reduced initial costs is that you can try way more ideas today than in the past, which allows you to see which of them actually work in practice. The flexibility of the system ensures that you don’t have to quit your job before you’re sure that your ideas will catch on. Initially, you work on them in your leisure time; as soon as they become so successful that they require your undivided attention, you quit. Start-up costs are low in all other areas of the digital economy as well.
Is thinking about these issues a frivolous luxury in times of a slowly abating crisis?
Kleske: To the contrary, I think that they hold tremendous opportunities. With regard to the establishment and start-up of businesses, I even see a significant advantage: It has become a lot more difficult to get financial support for half-baked ideas. As mentioned before: At the same time, it has become much more affordable to try new ideas. I hope that, in the next months and years, businesses will increasingly start small and grow slowly in order to be able to focus on quality and service. The best thing the crisis can do for us is to cure us of our greed for quick growth.
Building a Life That Suits You
Today, the future of work and life is invented over peanut snacks and sliced peppers while electro music is playing in the background. Colored Post-its are attached to huge whiteboards, charming little models are built, and activities like crossing a river as a group or climbing a wall using hand-made rope ladders are performed to foster self-awareness. Welcome to Palomar5, a camp in which highly talented young people – i.e. Digital Natives – are supposed to explore their generation’s ideas of work and identity.
On the spacious terrace on the Spree riverside in Berlin, hardly anything suggests that the sponsor Deutsche Telekom AG has invested a considerable amount of money to be able to impress Angela Merkel with the groundbreaking insights of the young elite at the next IT summit. The camp participants are sitting around on blankets and cushions, drinking cheap supermarket water from plastic bottles, cutting, gluing, and chatting. You can hear the muffled sound of a subwoofer, and somewhere in the background a swing is hanging from the ceiling. The whole scenario rather resembles a summer camp than a state-of-the-art think tank. However, first impressions can be misleading.
All of the participants are bi- or trilingual designers, communication scientists, IT experts, or prospective managers in their twenties – in short: people who definitely belong to the professional elite of tomorrow. Here at Palomar5, their first task is to playfully define what they imagine their future private and professional lives will look like. In the next step, they are supposed to develop products that enable companies to meet the demands of Digital Natives. After all, the workplaces of the future will have little in common with ours.
To these young people, it goes without saying that they can work everywhere and that they don’t have to be at the office every day. Collaborative software solutions allow them to permanently keep in touch with their colleagues, the bliss of permanent employment is a thing of the past, and future projects will be realized within a lose network of companies, subcontractors, freelancers, and experts. Consequently, it won’t matter anymore who is a freelancer and who is a permanent employee. They have entirely new ways of thinking and very concrete questions: “Why can’t you have three work contracts at once?” asks Stefan Liske, co-organizer of Palomar5. Or: “Assuming that, in the future, we will have chips implanted beneath our skin that transmit our biological data to a server, would employers be allowed to evaluate this data to find out when we’re most productive?”
These questions might suggest that Palomar5 is basically a big science-fiction playground – and that’s what it is actually supposed to be to a certain extent. However, HR managers and executives should pay close attention to this generation’s ideas about their future jobs and lives. Companies that do not address these issues will realize that high-potential candidates will prefer to join rival companies. At the same time, questions like these contribute to the emergence of a new market with products and services that are tailored to the needs of young professionals.
So here they are: Smart people in their mid-twenties delving into concepts like “The Next Generation of Identity,” “Knowledge Cultivation,” or “Collaborative Value Creation.” While all of this might sound like a satire on futurologists, it is highly relevant to these people’s everyday lives: “Our biographies are fragmented,” says Chinese-born Xiwen in perfect English. “We have one personality on Facebook, one on Xing, one on our blog, and one in the real world. We need new tools to manage all these facets of our lives.” The other participants are nodding portentously – obviously, these problems can be considered cross-cultural today.
I have been invited today to give a speech on my new book. For this purpose, I’m establishing a Skype connection with mobile knowledge workers in New York, who are giving the virtual visitors from Berlin an enthusiastic welcome. While the managers of some major corporations would probably be quite impressed by something like this, the young camp participants are taking it as a matter of course, reacting in an interested, yet nonchalant manner. What I, as a 39-year-old, would definitely consider modern and kind of high-tech is no more than everyday life to the twentysomethings around me. Cheap bottled water and peanut snacks aside, they indeed seem to have the potential to discuss the camp’s official topics – such as “Business Ecosystems,” “Leadership Models,” and “Knowledge Management” – and to come up with new solutions. René Obermann,
