Colin McEnroe Show: Coworking - It's About Playing Well With Others
Visionary entrepreneurs are pioneering new models for business in Connecticut.
In New Haven small independent businesses and self-employed people are coming together, sharing physical space, pooling money and creative energy. It's called coworking.
In a possibly more radical move, some existing businesses, like Walker Systems Support, are restructuring to push some of their profits back into the community and into the pockets of workers.
For me, this somehow ties into a much discussed New York Times article about Japan, where the economy got stuck, earlier than we did, in low growth and downward-spiraling prices.
The Times article painted a pretty dismal picture, but when you unthreaded it, what exactly had been lost. The workaholic salaryman who alternates brutal hours with furious patches of consuming. Isn't there some other way to look at employment and compensation? I think that's the thread running through today's show.
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Meaning is the new money.
Comments
This is a great idea that I
This is a great idea that I hadn't previously heard about. It makes much more sense then working out of the home, which often adds up in costs, and surprisingly, work life balance. The idea that entrepreneurs and small businesses can collaborate is even more impressive. Not only can that also reduce costs, it also encourages the success of small businesses. I hope to see this idea spread throughout the country.
Percect pair
Kate Emery and Colin McEnroe that's just about as perfect as it gets if we just added Hugo Chavez
Co-working show
Meaningful show! This is touching on the future of the workplace. I've been to the Grove and its a great place with great people and a great feel.
Self Employment
Nice show. I'm on the leading edge of self employment; the Clinton health care initiatives back in '95 or thereabouts teased me out of corporate America, and I have never looked back. I've worked out of my home, and also have rented a small office space in an office "condo" - individual offices and spaces, shared conference rooms and services. It was nice to see and connect with other tenants, although it was not quite a networked / collaborative environment.
Any shared space is going to (hopefully) permit some individual expenses (phones, internet access, copy machines, etc.) to be shared at a much lower cost.
Definitely a good idea to schedule some out of office jaunts each day - visit the post office, coffee run, etc. - because it's easy to dive into the cave. Your "Gollum" reference is not far from reality.
I think one benefit of a shared space is a branching out of skill sets and type of work. About 1/2 my work these days is stuff I'd never have considered doing for money, but somewhere along the line a contact or peer made contact and asked if I did that sort of thing. So the more contacts and networking one is able to do, the more likely one is to fall into niches and develop new skills.
E-mail from Jeff
I also wanted to mention that, in addition to having found meaningful (alternate) work, I have also found that sharing my space has really helped me maintain some bit of “productivity” while I am in the mud – often working on mundane projects.
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