The Play Ethic in Oz

To herald the launch of the Play Ethic in Australia (buy it here), I was delighted to speak with James Hall of the Australian Business Review the other day, who writes on management and organisational matters for that paper (it's like the FT, only more...southern). James is articulate and interested in what lies beyond the work-life balance - see this archive of his work - and asked some great questions about the relevance of the Play Ethic to business:

When Kane talks about ‘play’ in The Play Ethic (Macmillan 2004), and he does so at length, he doesn't mean sports and games. He means that society needs to reconsider how clinging to an industrial-age work ethic limits innovation and creativity in knowledge-driven economies.

“People are realising they're in irrelevant and faulty organisational structures", Kane says. “[The work ethic] needs to be unearthed as a cultural and ideological mind-set which at the very least is not necessary. There are other ways to presume humans can add value.”

Kane believes business is the ideal testing ground for his ideas. Moreover, he says business leaders must act to keep in step with the desires, hopes and lifestyles of disengaged workers.

It's about helping staff reconcile the personal with the professional and play is a major motivator.

When we play, we explore the world around us, make mistakes and learn. Play is never wasted.

Kane believes that this can be translated to the way we work through allowing workers more freedom in the way they express themselves, communicate with others and perform tasks. “A profound attitude towards play keeps a company adaptive and healthy”, he says.

The full review is reproduced in the extended post below. More of this to come, I hope...

Australian Financial Review

Playing around with the office ethic

23/11/2004

A number of thinkers are putting 'play' ahead of work as the means to creative
business thinking, says James Hall.

Manuel Castells would be chuffed. At the end of the past decade, the University of California
sociologist asked in The Information Age trilogy (Blackwell Publishers 1996, 1997, 1998) how we could redefine work.

The Protestant work ethic (which essentially espoused working hard to acquire wealth) as defined by 19th century sociologist Max Weber had become outdated, he argued, but what would replace it?

Pat Kane, former British pop star, founding editor of Scotland's Sunday Herald newspaper and self-appointed laureate of that country's digital revolution, has come to Castells's aid. The answer, he argues in a book to be released in Australia
in December, is play.

When Kane talks about ‘play’ in The Play Ethic (Macmillan 2004), and he does so at length, he doesn't mean sports and games. He means that society needs to reconsider how clinging to an industrial-age work ethic limits innovation and creativity in knowledge-driven economies.

“People are realising they're in irrelevant and faulty organisational structures", Kane says. “[The work ethic] needs to be unearthed as a cultural and ideological mind-set which at the very least is not necessary. There are other ways to presume humans can add value.”

Kane believes business is the ideal testing ground for his ideas. Moreover, he says business leaders must act to keep in step with the desires, hopes and lifestyles of disengaged workers.

It's about helping staff reconcile the personal with the professional and play is a major motivator.

When we play, we explore the world around us, make mistakes and learn. Play is never wasted.

Kane believes that this can be translated to the way we work through allowing workers more freedom in the way they express themselves, communicate with others and perform tasks. “A profound attitude towards play keeps a company adaptive and healthy”, he says.

The so-called New Economy, which embraced the idea of work as play, didn't quite deliver the goods. Many companies were so playful and irreverent, they forgot to develop products. But companies that succeeded Hotmail, Amazon, Google, eBay broke new ground in service delivery.

“One of the things we have to say constantly is 'look beyond your boundaries and borders'”, says Kane, who works with companies through a consultancy called New Integrity.

Fortunes may have been lost on playful dotcoms, but the people who drove them are having as much, if not more, impact on the way the workforce interacts with the world through blogging, open-source software and peer-to-peer networks.

Harvard Business Press has recently published a book in the US called Got Game: How the Gamer Generation is Reshaping Business Forever, which claims this generation's attitudes will turn companies inside out. They have experienced technology as a first-person phenomenon through video games and the internet, not as passive television viewers.

This leads to self-awareness and a desire for self-actualisation that lends itself more to play than work. Rightly or wrongly, they're all about meaning and engagement. Kane says this will engender a culture of “playing around to get a result rather than planning it to death”.

Kane is by no means the first person to suggest that a looser attitude to the way we organise ourselves at work can have a positive effect on business. Brazilian author Ricardo Semler's two popular books, Maverick (Warner Books 1995) and The Seven-Day Weekend (Random House 2003), espouse the positive influence of freedom and informality in engendering a creative and fulfilling workplace.

Kane says that Semler, chairman of Brazilian engineering firm Semco Group, is a leading player. Many managers would find Semco's approach shocking. For example, every important board meeting includes two random members of staff from any level or area of the company, who get equal voting rights to permanent board members.

The emphasis is on informality and equality. "To the outside, it can seem like chaos",Kane says. "But the employee culture allows people to co-operate as they wish and set their own targets . . . Being a player means being able to be part of a group but also be individually creative."

Richard Neville, pioneering editor of Oz magazine in London in the 1960s and author of Playpower (Paladin 1970), which predicted an information age in which machines did the hard work, says Kane's ideas are a continuation of his own.

Neville, now a Sydney-based futurist and business consultant, says the principle of playfulness is “not something that can be quarantined off as a separate part of business”; and is crucial to both innovation and breaking down the “pathological workaholism”; he believes has gripped the western world. But he also points out that Enron was heralded for its innovation and playfulness. “So you do need the solid mathematical things as well”; he says.

Kane admits his play ethic is a model for an economy that barely exists yet, but he is convinced it will have its day, and radically change the way businesses provide services to customers, jobs to staff and wealth to society.

To sceptics, he points out how recently creativity has risen to the fore as a key business driver when it was previously seen as something best left to advertising departments.

“The play ethic connects to wider social, political and ethical concerns” he says. But companies could be a lot better about the way they allow people to feel good about their own explicit creativity.

“McKinsey talked years ago about the war for talent; this is part of that. If you want the brightest and best, you have to pitch for them in a different way.”

But even Kane admits he has written his book five years too early.

“There's a gap between what's happening in the private sector and what I'm proposing”, he says.

ends

Comments

[James Hall]

Hi Pat

Glad to see you liked the piece

J