Linktipp: ein Interview mit Malcolm Gladwell

Nicht mehr ganz frisch (1. Oktober 2007) aber dennoch interessant und verlinkenswert: Ein Interview mit Malcolm Gladwell.

If you feel like work is getting harder, it’s not just your imagination, says Malcolm Gladwell. The bestselling author of Blink and The Tipping Point says the mental demands of the workplace are steadily growing — and we’re all going to have to smarten up if we want to succeed.

Gladwells These (nicht von der Hand zu weisen, denn darüber schreiben viele): die westliche Welt wird immer weniger Arbeitsplätze in der Industrie brauchen, und immer mehr Wissensarbeiter und kreative Denker. Das in etwa beschreibt im übrigen auch Richard Florida in seinem Buch “Rise of the creative class“, das ich gerade lese.

Aber zurück zu Gladwell. Er beschreibt in dem Interview auch die sich immer mehr ändernden Anforderungen an die arbeitetende Masse, und wie sich durch die Technologie Dinge vereinfachen lassen:

I remember having a conversation with a lawyer who told me that they now do in two weeks deals that used to take two months, and he said the reason for that is very simple: it’s FedEx and the BlackBerry. And he can now do all kinds of things in cabs and at home putting his kids to bed that he wouldn’t have been able to do before. So that’s one model where things have sped up and work has invaded home space.

Wer einen Blackberry hat, weiss natürlich auch, dass diese verschwimmende Grenze zwischen Job und Privatleben auch negative Seiten haben kann. “Einfach mal abschalten” muss man dann wirklich wörtlich nehmen.

But I know that the next problem we need to solve is, we have given people virtually unlimited access to data, to information; the next question is, can we give them better tools for making sense of that information?

Google in a sense is a symbol of the solution to an old problem. We don’t need more Googles; what we need is a way to prioritize and analyze and make sense of the information we have at our fingertips. And maybe those kinds of solutions aren’t technological at all. I’m quite prepared for the possibility that the next revolution is not going to come from a machine; it’s going to come from creating a more thoughtful work force and giving people the opportunity to be thoughtful.

Interessant ist übrigens auch die Tatsache, dass sie in Kanada anscheinend dieselben Probleme mit der Altersgrenze für die Rente haben:

The short-term goal is, we have to convince people to stay longer, that 65 is unrealistic given what we’re up against. We have to recognize as a society that 65 is an unrealistic retirement age and we have to find ways to get people to work longer.