- The presentation Margaret Heffernan gave felt very passionate, her use of strong phrasing and deliberate personal connections helped solidify her point of view and she was able to deliver quite a powerful TEDtalk about a topic I had yet to fully address. Humans worldwide are racing toward the future, although no one can really predict what we are racing to. Heffernan uses experiments conducted in nursing homes, supermarkets, and professional sports teams that provide solid evidence for the ideology that efficiency has become more dangerous than prosperous as we keep pushing ourselves toward the future. Many of the statements made by Heffernan resonated with me, including “What all of these technologies attempt to do is to force-fit a standardized model of a predictable reality onto a world that is infinitely surprising. What gets left out? Anything that can’t be measured — which is just about everything that counts.” Humans can use technology to make many advancements for our race, although when we start to place our own future into the hands of technology to lead us we are giving up the idea that humans and our lives are naturally unpredictable. I believe the statement resonated with the whole audience since it received an applause; it addresses human lives as being the center of attention as they should be, and something our capitalist world isn’t good at doing at all. With all the emotion flowing through the 8 billion people on this planet we must focus on creating a welcoming future, rather than creating the first future we can get to.
- Jason Fried’s approach to the idea of reforming the standard business office system is fueled with the idea that while we are working with efficiency in mind many businesses could be unknowingly slowing down productivity because of interruptions that only occur in the office. He speaks to the audience with a tone of someone who has been in the unproductive office setting that many know, and by listing examples of everyday occurrences he changes the perspective on what is actually helping people work and what only looks like it is helping people work. Fried talks about the question he has asked many people, “where do you go when you really need to get something done?” The answers vary, but all stray from the office; typically, individuals work the most efficiently when they are alone. This idea is completely offensive to the way offices work, they’re designed to be an open environment that is meant to make an organization operate together without physical boundaries separating the workforce, Fried makes this very evident in his statements. Using words like “toxic” and “poisonous” to describe a meeting, but when he breaks his opinion down into the fact that a one-hour meeting with 10 individuals is actually a 10-hour meeting, you can see how his perspective has solid points. When standards are put in place and enforced by a manager, you take away the control someone has on their specific task, forcing a team to stop what they are doing and turn their attention to a meeting only one person has on their mind can completely wipe away the deep workflow people find themselves in when they are left alone.
Writing and organizational cultures
Heffernan’s talk was very interesting because she explained why efficiency is not always the best thing. I think that sometimes we rely on technology so much without understanding that it might leave out important factors, especially in the workplace. I also thought that Fried’s talk was interesting because of the way he seemed to connect with the audience. The way he talked showed that he knew what it was like to work in the office and be interrupted while trying to get important work done. Like you said, when he says that a one hour meeting with ten people is actually a ten hour meeting, it really helped me to understand why he believes that meetings are a waste of time and energy.
I loved Heffernans TED talk personally. Identifying with her message of keeping the human element involved in things to keep them more productive instead of relying on technology to streamline everything is something that i’ve grappled with for a number of years. I don’t have any evidence behind this right now, but just a personal feeling of mine is social media/texting. I think it’s great how it can keep people connected, but at the same time it makes our traditional social skills suffer, like talking to people in real life is almost weird. I also like how you focused on the adjectives “toxic” and “poisonous” in the second talk. I think those two terms were deliberately used because how powerful they are, and they had a great effect on the speech.
Word choice is HUGE–this is often never more evident to us than when we make a poor choice and can see the impact instantly, but it’s an important matter for us to tune into as we read/listen. We can learn a lot from how other folks select words that really *land* with their audience.
I as well also was intrigued by Heffernan’s TED Talk, as it brought up thoughts and ideas I have never really considered when focusing on how rushed our lives as humans are in today’s standards. I think the acknowledgement of technology in alignment with how humans utilize it to predict the future is something I hadn’t really thought of. I think that Fried’s more laidback approach to his TED Talk allowed the audience engage within the conversation more. There was no distinction between the audience and the speaker in terms of who is at a higher power, but instead he diminishes that differentiation by being laidback.
Isaac–solid work at highlighting some of the key additions these talks make to our understanding of organizational culture (and the very real implications for human time and energy)