Creative Reaction

A book I’ve been meaning to mention has been burning up the blogosphere. I haven’t seen a post about it befitting Creative Reaction until a revolutionary business think tank reviewed the book, putting the book’s premise into perspective.

The book is Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It.

The review is written by Verasage Institute founder Ron Baker.

The way to fix work is to establish a “Results-Only Work Environment” or “ROWE” (both coined by the Why Work Sucks authors), which is an environment where employees have complete autonomy to work wherever and whenever they want, as long as their work gets done.

Ron Baker frames this perfectly; “Firms are struggling with work/life balance, flextime, time management, etc.  But all these are a joke… Work/life balance is not up to firms to define, but rather their team members… they need control over their time.  They need to be trusted to do their work.  They need to be judged on results, not putting in time… After all, if a team member isn’t performing, working longer hours is not going to make a difference.”

Baker asks, “Isn’t this how we all worked in college?  We were responsible for our own schedules, getting our work done, studying for exams, etc.  What makes firms think they need to treat knowledge workers like children after they graduate?” What an apt analogy!

Baker’s own mission, banishing the Marxian “time equals money” fallacy, dovetails perfectly with the premise of ROWE. Again quoting Baker, “Work is what you do, not where you go, or where you are.” Spending hours and hours at work is not the same thing as producing results. (Creative Reaction has touched upon this here and here and here.)

So, read the full review, consider buying the book, reward those who are engaged in their work and show results, let the slackers go, and enable your business to be more creative and more focused on its customers.