“So, what do you do?”
Maybe you’ve asked someone this question when meeting them for the first time. A friend of a friend, or a stranger on a plane, or your date. It’s a “safe” question to break the ice; after all, everyone has a job, right?
Sure, but why do we let our jobs define us? Why do we love work so much?
This is the Merriam-Webster definition:
re·source, n.
Huh, that’s weird. Nowhere in there does it say “a human member of a team or organization.” So why do people insist on dehumanizing their colleagues by referring to them as “a resource?”
In the same way that you can’t “kinda like” pineapple on pizza—you either love it or you hate it, never anything in between—a company can’t “kinda care” about anything, especially if it is among the company’s publicly stated values.
Moreover, it is becoming increasingly costly for companies who want to “kinda care” about certain social, environmental, or humanitarian concerns to simply stay silent about them.
“Blitzscaling” is a distastefully martial portmanteau of “blitz,” which is German for “lightning,” and “scaling,” which in this context means business growth. It may have been invented by—and was definitely popularized by—Reid Hoffman, who wrote the eponymous book.
It’s a concept for how to grow a business very quickly, and it works. But it carries with it tremendous social costs.
Everyone is grappling with these questions right now: can remote teams produce the same results as in-person teams? Do companies need to go remote to stay competitive in the technology job market? What effects, if any, would a sea change in remote work have on the way we engage with our occupations?