Ever wondered why coffee houses were gobbling up all available high street retail space?
Ever wondered where you would find your next brilliant web designer or programmer?
There’s one answer common to these two very diverse questions – the emergence of the new “bedouins” who transform a laptop, cell phone and coffee house into their office. You can read all about it in today’s article in SFGate – hot off the press from San Francisco.
Further evidence of the fundamental changes that are occurring in the nature of work as profiled in Leon Benjamin’s book, Winning by Sharing, and blog of same name and also identified by Dan Pink when he wrote Free Agent Nation in 2001. According to the SFGate article, in February of 2005, the US Census identified 10.3 million independent contractors, 2.5 million workers, 1.2 million temporary help agency workers and 813, 000 workers with contract firms. Dan Pink calls it “Karl Marx’s revenge where individuals own the means of production They can take the means of production and shop from coffee shop to coffee shop”. If you buy Leon's highly readable and pleasantly short book, you also get a fold out poster that summarises the phenomenon of the emergent worker.
Some modern-day Bedouins travel further afield. Conde Nast has just commissioned a Canadian travel writer to re-discover the world the old-fashioned way, traveling no faster than 100 mph and taking the time to see, eat, drink, and blog about his experiences. You can follow his adventures here. This is presumably where the concepts of "slow tourism" and "user-generated content" merge. But what’s relevant to this blog is Mark’s video of description of the equipment used by such a peripatetic nomad as shown here.
It looks very much like history is repeating itself with major revolutionary cange emerging from coffee houses. Thomas Paine wrote muc of his revolutionary thoughts that fueled the US bid for independence in a coffee house in my home town of Lewes, Sussex; Edward Lloyd opened his coffee house in 1677 and that evolved into the largest insurance underwriting companies of the globe; and of course, there are no shortage of literary figures from Hemingway to J.K. Rowling whov'e used the warmth and companionship of such places to feed and support their creative urges. So next time, you ask your youthful companion to pass the sugar, you could be talking to another billioinaire.
Note: image courtesy of SFGate - read the whole article. ......
