If It's Not Work...

... then it must be something else. Fascinating piece from Business Week, featuring extracts from It's Alive! The coming convergence of business, information and biology. Interesting to see how the third culture is becoming a business model. Anyway, in the midst of it all, I noted this little semantic shuffle around "work":

As the costs of change become the regular costs of doing business, people's roles in organizations are shifting from doing work to managing the evolution of their companies' capacity, whether by creating new software or new relationships.

This is very close to the definition of play given by the great play theorist Brian Sutton-Smith - play is 'adaptive potentiation', meaning that mammals play (or 'create new software or new relationships') to improve their capacity to survive and thrive. Clever, timely, promising.