On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 4:38 PM, Angel K <fccowork...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 1 person is intentionally leaving her steady paycheck job to start her > own event management company and she has reserved a place at Cohere 3 > months in advance b/c she has seen her friends benefit from coworking > here > Angel, that sounds like something a classical old-school economist might count as job creation: by vacating an ongoing hiring slot she had been occupying in order to pursue a new opportunity, the old job was effectively created for someone else. Alex, we faced similar measurement issues here at The Hub<http://www.HubBayArea.com/>in Berkeley (CA, US), which is a tenant in the Brower Center <http://www.BrowerCenter.org/>, construction of which was partially federally funded, and so all building tenants are required to report on job creation, and also to give fair opportunity for hiring for new jobs to residents of the affordable housing built nextdoor as part of this project. We aren't required to create jobs, just to report on our doing it, so the city can, over time, report to the feds that their money was well-spent so won't they give the city in this some more money in this category for additional projects in the future. This led to some head-scratching among us and other non-coworking building tenants about what constitutes a Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) job, and what the process of advertising and hiring looks like, when you are in a business that has a relationship with another one and contracts with it for a series of services, a few hours here, a few hours there, that they contract out for on an irregular basis. Brian, entrepreneurship/startups in general and coworking as one particular aspect of it don't necessarily fit the boxes used by the institutions (not just government, but also non-governmental organizations (NGOs) like regional business nonprofits and chambers of commerce) in the business of economic development. Rather than try to stifle our innovative impulses to fit these boxes and get measured by the old yardsticks, I believe it is incumbent upon us, as a movement, to develop new measures that reflect the creativity and enormous productivity we are creating in this new workplace revolution. As no less a local luminary than Clinton-administration US Labor Secretary Robert Reich <http://robertreich.org/> writes in his new book "*Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future*," we need a whole new set of economic indicators in order to strive to maximize productivity/efficiency as measured in those dimensions. I find particularly interesting the tendency of entrepreneurs to subcontract out work to their friends, especially those they meet through coworking communities. Rather than hire more people and create a larger business with presumptive economies of scale (and attendant infrastructural inefficiencies aka overhead), we know (or learn, hopefully not the hard ways) that focussing on our core mission/unique talent is what really matters in creating value in the long term. Also it is interesting to see, here at the Hub, for-profits (or at least those intending profit; in reality they can be elusive, as any entrepreneur knows) seeking VC/Angel funds and plotting sellout "exit strategies" working alongside classic public-interest nonprofits and advocacy groups, alongside mission-oriented sole proprietorships like ours and trying to understand/engage each other across the cultural chasms that result. Definitely a learning environment, rife with opportunities - if we take the trouble to listen to and learn from one another. Raines Cohen, Coworking Coach Planning for Sustainable Communities Berkeley, CA *Next week: NYC on Tuesday; Philly Wed-Fri; Boston area Sat-Sun; Chicago the follow Mon-Wed. Looking forward to visiting some more spaces (including seeing the new New Work City) and weaving more connections.* -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Coworking" group. To post to this group, send email to cowork...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/coworking?hl=en.
