THE REORGANIZATION OF WORK
As Ben and I have felt for a while now, crowdsourcing is going to stratospherically shift the way we approach work in society, both employee/employer work environments, and community engagement/volunteerism.
The old Industrial Age work model places merit on the shoulders of those whose family ties have given them positions of strength. Legacy entrance to Ivy Leagues, the best tutors, family connections that help to rise through the ranks, and more. People who aren't necessarily the smartest or have the best ideas rise through the ranks based on credentials and not entirely based on merit. It’s the classic “who you know" system certainly still prevalent in our society.
But as we move into the Information Age, the dynamic changes. As access changes — as Harvard lectures become podcasts, as Wikipedia grows it’s database, as people reorganize themselves from walled classes of nobility to being one click away – we start to see a shift. The Internet especially in the last three years, has given birth to Crowdsourcing, which at it’s essence, is an ultimate “Meritocracy.” The smartest person with the best answer to your problem still writes with the same times new roman font into the same Gmail account. Whether someone is wealthy, upper class, Harvard grad, from a family tree with 30 more Harvard grads — or poor, from the inner-city, grew up on food stamps, and has three friends in jail – doesn’t matter. What only matters is the merit of the idea. Sure, there are barriers to entry (having a computer for example), but especially with programs like OLPC, and even more so with the introduction of cheap powerful smartphones, these barriers are being lowered everyday.
It doesn't matter what your race, income, or class status is, the only thing that matters is how great are your ideas. This approach was actually similarly applied starting in 1973 by ShoreBank, when they decided to invest in disadvantaged communities being avoided by other financial institutions.
A CASE STUDY
ShoreBank is a community development bank founded in 1973, on the south side of Chicago. A pioneer in profitably lending to underserved urban and rural communities, ShoreBank has grown to $3 billion in assets, operating in over 20 countries worldwide.
In the early 80’s, ShoreBank’s founders Mary Houghton and Ron Grzywinski helped design and launch Grameen Bank in Bangladesh with Muhammad Yunus, almost single-handedly creating the field of micro-finance. Less than 20 years later, Yunus and Grameen Bank won the Nobel Peace Prize.
In 1985, ShoreBank was invited by then Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton to set up the Southern Development Bancorporation, a community development bank serving rural Arkansans. Their work helped to lay the foundation for soon to be President Clinton’s initiatives for community development financial institutions (CDFI’s). In a 1992 speech, Clinton called ShoreBank “the most important bank in America."
I can say with pride (and for full disclosure) that my dad is the Chief Learning Officer for ShoreBank, and over the last 10 years I’ve had a unique first hand perspective of the amazing work that this organization does. Further, while some father-son relationships revolve around baseball, my dad and I spend our Sunday afternoons and Thanksgiving dinners arguing about how we can change the world. We’re pretty lame in the cultural sense, but it works for us. As The Extraordinaries has evolved, our conversations have inevitably gravitated towards an exploration of how micro-action, micro-volunteerism, and micro-time can be applied to corporations and their engagement with the communities in which they serve.
Crowdsourcing has significant implications for community development. If we were to discover that disadvantaged communities actually already had all the people they needed to improve their stock, living within their communities to begin with, we would have a revolution on our hands. The notion that “we’re not good enough,” would be thrown right out the window. Forget waiting for smart people to come help us dig out from this hole, let’s find the people with good ideas that already live in our neighborhood, and get them working together. That’s crowdsourcing.
They say, “Love is blind.” I say, “Crowdsourcing is blind too.”
THE CHANGING PARADIGM OF CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY?
I have a dear friend who works for a republican senator from a western state. We often get into heated arguments about the role of corporations in society. His conservative opinion is that “the only responsibility of a Corporation is to earn revenue for it’s shareholders.” From a purely capitalist perspective, he is right. However, as we have seen with the recent housing crisis (which has had a disastrous domino effect across the entire economy), corporations cannot only focus on their profit margins, running unchecked. There are those that would say regulation is the best approach. Maybe. But ultimately, I think that one way or another we need to reward, emphasize, and encourage community values in corporations. We don't live in one place, and work in another, we exist in both
places and our overall societal well-being is mutually interdependent. It’s not enough to simply make money off of a community — corporations need to engage, cooperate, interact with, and be a responsible member of a community. Until now, they have given the impression as such through their corporate social responsibility departments, but to truly engage with a community, I think that crowdsourcing is the best shot we’ve had in a long time to start to bridge the gap.
As we develop our product and deepen our thinking, I get closer and closer to the sense that social good and traditional companies need not exist in separate silos, but can coexist and mutually benefit each other in the same marketplace. Right now, corporate social responsibility departments are often glorified public relations departments. But, how can the concept of crowdsourcing and the way that it reorganizes societal engagement, start to redefine the old paradigm? How can corporations take the next step to being a responsible member of a community, or redefine how they work to empower the community, by leveraging skills, ideas, and micro-spare time from within that community to begin with?
This question fascinates me.
ShoreBank is a for-profit institution that invests in people and their communities to create economic equity and a healthy environment. In my opinion, ShoreBank is one of the best examples of companies trying to push the envelope. Their mission and values are deeply woven into the fabric of the communities they operate in, and they work to ensure that their work is adding value to the world in which they work and live, and not simply making a profit. They are a great starting point as an example of what is possible.
Connecting people in a community with a few minutes free, to other
people in a community with a few minutes of need, sponsored by
companies that work and interact within that community, ultimately
strengthens the entire community as a whole.
So how can we take crowdsourcing, volunteerism, spare-time, business, and community, and redefine the old paradigms? I’m not entirely sure. But we’re on to something here.
