Ideation is the new manufacturing

ITHACA, N.Y., the Patent Office — “We have moved from the industrial age to the knowledge economy,” said Facebook’s CIO Tim Campos at the HP Discover conference in Barcelona last month. An economy, that is, in which a company’s “core asset” lies not in material infrastructure but rather “the thoughts and ideas that come from our workforce.”  

To which I can only say, amen. Regular readers of this column know that I am both connector and outlier, as big as Gladwell’s Goliath and as resourceful as his David, the most Ted-talkative of TED talkers and, frankly, a major sideline player in the knowledge economy. Others call it the creative economy. Business management and tech pundit Daniel Pink and I like to call it the conceptual economy. You can call it what you like — this is the age of innovation, after all. Knock yourself out.

Just don’t go all Joseph Stiglitz on us and call it a “service economy.” Yes, it’s true that as Campos was clipping on his lapel mic in Spain, the percentage of Americans in the labor force hit a 35-year low-water mark. Yes, it’s true that the fastest-growing occupations for the coming decade are projected to be in personal-care assistance, retail and fast-food prep. And yes, it’s probably also true, as Matthew Yglesias speculates, that new jobs in the quintessential growth industry of our time — eldercare — could end up being taken by robots. Robots don’t steal, and they don’t mind hearing the same story twice.

But in this age of outsourcing, offshoring, expanding capital and contracting employment, it is all the more crucial to understand that the jobs we don’t see when we open our eyes can appear in our heads when we close them. “The mind is its own place,” as Satan once remarked, finding himself in a similar pass. Ardent contemplation of such matters made Tom Friedman’s mustache bigger than yours, and it has done the same for my vocabulary. It can help you grow and enlarge, too, reader, so pay attention.

We are the post-smokestack people, people. Leave it to the elderly to talk, the robots to listen and the sooty and the wretched to make; our lot is to conceive and create. Activists who think they can embarrass Apple on humanitarian or patriotic grounds for relying on cheap overseas labor don’t get this. “Designed in California, assembled in China” is a badge of nativist honor, not a confession.

With our dynamism, folks, our design prowess, we can do more than compete with a nation of assemblers. We can vanquish them. What we need is for everyone to have some skin in the game. The great thing about a creative economy is that if we get creative about it, we can achieve 100 percent employment — bam, just like that. Faster than God flipping on the lights at the dawn of Creation, and without so much as rising from the couch and shuffling to the fridge.

Once upon a time I was a sperm donor. Thirty-five dollars a shot struck me as handsome pay until my girlfriend sold a single egg for fifteen thousand. I was chagrined. I ought instead to have taken pride in my economies of scale, just as I took pride in scanning the faces of the young for a shimmer of imagined resemblance or recognition.

Ladies and gentlemen, if we are to achieve efficiency in post-industrial work, the individual worker’s productivity target should be more than one idea per month, and fewer than 250 million ideas every three days. The worker should be more or less painlessly separated from his or her idea. The 21st century is no time to get all precious or proprietary about one’s brainchildren. It is a time to lie back and think of China. 

The vision is of a pawn shop of the mind. The receptionist offers you a seat and a cup of coffee, jots down your idea, chews a pencil, quotes you a figure.

These ideas are sorted, graded, bundled and sold in bulk to tinkerers, startups and venture capitalists, who shuck them like oysters and search for a pearl, donating the flesh to soup kitchens.

What those pawning a piece of their minds lose in terms of ownership they gain in the pleasure of expectation, of waiting and watching the world for signs of their own authorship. And in knowing that nothing is lost, nothing wasted, with even the shells going to compost.

Take the preceding section and ramp it up using economies of scale and division of labor.

Question: Is it possible to have de-skilled intellectual work? Look around, folks; I believe it is.

The next step is to Skypify our idea-supply chains. We are in the twilight days of Skype as a face-to-face, phone-call-type thing. Mark my words; as soon as the speed- and resolution-related glitches turning loved ones’ faces into pizzas are resolved, Skype will leap out of your laptop and into the architecture.

Whole walls and partitions will be borderless screens, like vertical infinity pools. A walk down the office hallway takes you past the virtual cubicles of dozens of telecommuters, who look up and say hello as you pass. The CEO’s Seattle office is in the corporate suite at one end. “He’ll be with you shortly,” smiles his receptionist in Bangkok.

At the far end is the call center in Bangalore. A good thing for the knowledge worker to do is set up shop in a beanbag in full view of the Bangaloreans. The sight of you hard at work cogitating, in all your first-world glory and covered in Cheeto dust, will inspire them to keep their heads down and their chins up, and keep on keeping on.

With a flip of a switch at the end of the workday, the screens extinguish and you’re back home again.

Finally, we should also take a page from the cigar business. Cigar-rollers are the forerunners of tomorrow’s knowledge worker.

Enormous skill is required in the rolling of fine cigars, the quality of which has as much to do with formal construction as with leaf content. Rollers in Havana are read to by a lector as they work, and supposedly the movements of the fingers and those of the mind become rhythmically joined. In the pre-Castro days, their aural diet included writers like Charles Dickens and Alexandre Dumas. The Montecristo factory got its name from “The Count of Monte Cristo,” the torcedors’ favorite book.

True knowledge workers in 21st-century America might similarly be read to as they stand there performing their invisible labor. Management guru Tom Kelley’s “The Ten Faces of Innovation: IDEO's Strategies for Defeating the Devil's Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization” would be a good place to start.

When an insubordinate knowledge worker pipes up, “For chrissake, can it already, we’re trying to think,” management should stand close, raise its voice and turn to a different book, perhaps one on multitasking.