Corporations fail at authenticity not just in the sense of connecting with consumers as genuine when it comes to their products (though some have suggested mega brands will struggle as Facebook and the like acculturate us to expect greater authenticity and apparently personal relationships from brands). Instead, the great authenticity challenge of corporate American is in relation to workers.

Author Daniel Pink took to Fast Company recently to discuss this issue in relation to his book, Free Agent Nation. In the post, he explains that one of the biggest and least discussed drawbacks of climbing the traditional corporate ladder is a need to hide your true self. He writes:

As free agents around the country told me their stories, they repeatedly used the language of disguise and concealment to describe their previous jobs. They spoke of putting on “masks” or “game faces” at work. They talked about donning “armor” and erecting “smoke screens,” because exposing themselves in a large organization could be perilous. Only when they returned home after work could they shed the costumes and protective gear and return to being who they truly were.

The double life endured by many workers employed at big firms can be stressful and draining, according to Pink, who quotes industrial psychologist Peter Krembs to illustrate the point: “’Optimizing’ the organization almost necessarily means ‘suboptimizing the individual.’”

One of the great benefits of independent work, Pink concludes, is being able to more closely align who you are with what you do. But this collapse of work self and real self isn’t without its struggles.

“In free agency, work becomes more fully integrated with who you are. That can be rewarding. But because work is more deeply woven into yourself, it can be harder to cast off–which means work can occasionally consume and even smother identity,” he writes.

In your experience, do corporate jobs require a greater sacrifice of authenticity than independent work? Is gaining authenticity by working independently worth the increase in stress?

At Net:Work, we’ll explore how independent contractors, particularly those who work remotely, often struggle with stress and workaholism. The event will be held in San Francisco on Dec. 8.

Image courtesy of Flickr user wolfgangfoto.

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Sagmeister illustrated a traditional career as a timeline comprising three distinct “eras:” learning, work and retirement, with each “era” roughly taking up a third of one’s lifetime; around twenty-five years each.

While a confident minority of people might take a traditional career sabbatical, Sagmeister keeps his perspective and his work fresh by taking periodic sabbaticals throughout his career to date. In essence, Sagmeister closes his studio every eighth year, interspersing some of his retirement years into his active working career. This new career timeline looked more like learning, work, retirement, work, retirement…and so on.

Returning from a sabbatical in Indonesia back in 2007, Sagmeister realized his work had a new clarity, vision and purpose and that his “job became a calling again.” Sagmeister felt his post-sabbatical work was stronger and edgier; his year out provided the insight, innovation and income for the following seven years. So what is his formula?

1. Talk to people who’ve taken sabbaticals about how and why they did it, and what they learned.
2. Add five years to your planned working life.
3. Intersperse those extra years into your career, taking a year off every seventh year.

Humorously, Daniel Pink himself decided to re-imagine “going on sabbatical” as “taking a Sagmeister”!

As the world of work evolves into distributed portfolio careers and job markets become more flexible — and turbulent — it’s worth reconsidering the structure of your career. We have weekends and workweeks to partition our time and recharge ourselves, yet in the arc of a lifetime, we locate our intellectual renewal at its close. Perhaps it’s worth reconsidering and questioning this orthodoxy and begin to “take Sagmeisters,” breaking up our working lives with periodic sabbaticals and rebooting our passions. Sagmeister’s solution may not work well for everyone, but there’s an opportunity to experiment and mold the structure of our working lives to suit ourselves.

How would you incorporate sabbaticals into your working life?

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The final session of the week-long conference opened with Daniel Pink, a former speechwriter for Al Gore, now a “career analyst” investigating and examining the changing patterns of work around the world.

Pink has been the subject of much attention lately, with his assertions that “right-brainers will rule this century,” as well as high-profile appearances at TED and a recent interview with Oprah Winfrey. These assertions offer some intriguing insights into “the future of work in a post-broadband world” — notably the patterns of work, business relationships, structures and skills that we’ll perhaps require in the future.

Pink’s latest book speaks of a “conceptual age” of work where “left-brained” reasoning will need to be augmented by what he describes as six critical “right-brain” qualities:

1. Design — The ability to conceive more than purely functional services or products, and develop emotionally engaging, joyful and attractive solutions.
2. Story — In a society abundant with data, the ability to weave a compelling narrative will become increasingly crucial.
3. Symphony — Being able to synthesize disparate, often disconnected, developments into something new, often straddling many industries, will be the basis of innovation.
4. Empathy — Looking beyond analytics to understand underlying motivations can provide unique and distinct insights.
   
5. Play — Wiring levity and play into cultures, experiences and solutions where appropriate.
6. Meaning — Moving past material abundance to “work on stuff that matters.”

Pink’s TED session focused less on these attributes and more on empirical analysis of how workers are usually incentivized, concluding that contemporary incentive systems actually destroy creativity and that autonomy, mastery and purpose are better notions of management than traditional compliance, citing Atlassian as a prime example of a company that incentivizes right-brain activities.

The six aptitudes discussed above may invite controversy and are there to be challenged, but I’m certain many of our readers are already exhibiting many of these qualities, though perhaps without an explicit awareness of doing so. The real value of Pink’s work is in providing labels and language that become the starting point for discussion and debate. For example, how do you get good at “symphony?”

In an interesting counterpoint to Pink’s assertions, Wired UK recently ran a piece, “Stand by for Google’s next market-changing move,” that explores the trends towards the left-brained in the advertising industry; where “data is valued more highly than relationships…and creative genius.”

Read more at TED, Daniel Pink’s site, Oprah and Cooltown Studios.

Are you practicing any of Daniel Pink’s right-brained qualities?

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Premium Content Boosts TV.com Traffic; In January, the site tripled its uniques over December while streams rose 13-fold. (TVWeek)

Uwe Boll Turns to Crowds to Finance His Next Flick; through his web site, the schlock master asks users to donate $50 to fund his terrorist film Blackout. (The Hollywood Reporter)

Cox Tests Throttling; the single market test will temporarily delay “non-time-sensitive” applications in the upstream direction only when the network is busy. (Multichannel News)

Disney Launches DisneyXD.com; TV premiere of the new series Aaron Stone will also be streamed online and on mobile. (MediaWeek)

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We Love the $199 Price Point

On the subject of iPhone pricing, Tim Cook, Apple COO standing in as CEO while Jobs is recuperating, made clear that their $399 and $199 price points were working well for the company. Quite specifically, he emphasized the company’s love for the $199 price point, which is clearly leading to high sales numbers. Interestingly, he didn’t talk about storage size, just pricing.

We could see a pricing move based on strong sales and a shrinking consumer smartphone market that may result in a $199 price point for the 16GB iPhone to stimulate sales. Whether this also leads to a lower cost 8GB phone or a 32GB model, I can’t guess, but we will mostly likely see a pricing change when sales start to dip.

We Have Some Ideas, But Right Now We Think Those Products Are Inferior

The netbook saga/flirtation/denial continues. They’re spot on about the hardware deficiencies when they point out that the keyboards on these devices are still too small, and about the software not being well-tailored to the platform as of yet. Which shows that they’re thinking much more deeply about those issues than the offhand remarks would seem to suggest.

Make no mistake, Apple is developing a device for this space. And they’ve targeted the specific issues their competitors have so far failed to address, which means they probably intend to come to the market late but with a superior product. This could be the reason they sought to separate “OS X” from the “Mac” moniker, if they’re preparing a version of the OS specifically designed to run on netbook hardware.

We Feel Extremely Good About Our Product Pipeline

This comment was made in reference to their projections about iPhone seasonality. They also made a followup comment noting that Apple has fear in terms of the danger of the economy affecting smartphone adoption, considering the higher monthly rates that come with them.

References to the product pipeline in this context are extremely tantalizing. What does Apple have in its pocket to offset the threat of smartphone contract prices? Two possibilities come to mind. Either they think that upcoming iPhone iterations will be impressive enough to attract consumers anyway, or they’re planning on moving away from the smartphone market to take advantage of lower contract costs. In either case, references to product pipelines should not be taken lightly.

That’s my take on some of the more salient points of the Q1 conference call, the content of which I reviewed thanks to CNNMoney’s transcript of their live blog of the event. You may think some of my predictions are reaching or far-fetched, but they all come from an analysis of the context within which the statements were made. Whether you agree with me or not, share you own interpretations below.

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