Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…You have all these people who’ve never used it before. So even if you have used something like this before, your experience changes because now, the organization experience has changed. For sure. All right, let’s do a quick discussion here of a section that we inserted a few episodes back about value creation and value capture. Value creation here, tons. Oh my gosh. All these companies are paying all this money to have these new way of working that’s frictionless, real-time, live, and highly interactive, but boy, at what cost? I think you see this complaint a lot flying around Twitter. I certainly feel it a lot from co-workers who are saying, “You’ve hijacked the way that I work and it’s now an interrupt-driven workflow instead of me being allowed to go in the flow on something, and then pop my head up, and I decide when I want to check email.” It’s like the opposite of the 4-hour work week. It is always on, always stimulated, always interrupting you. I think we are early innings and understanding the impact of this very much like the studies that are starting to come out about open office space. I still use open office space, I still like it, I very much recognize the downsides of it. This is open office space in technology, and it’s someone who can always tap you on the shoulder, and of course their settings to change and stuff but there’s a cultural understanding that you are reachable by Slack. When you’re dot is green, or during working hours, or whatever the thing is. I think we don't yet fully understand the negative impacts of that style of communication being the predominant expected one in the workplace. With all that said, there’s way less to criticize here about this company than sharing economy companies like Uber and Lyft that we’ve talked about the potentially very destructive things in the world like the underpayment of wages and things like that. This company has none of those dramas. I think on the flipside, though, I absolutely agree on it. I think it’s a broader cultural issue we’re just grappling with this one time, a moment in time of being addicted to our technology. I think a big benefit I’ve definitely seen from Slack is somebody who just struggles with email.…

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