The New “Company Town”

Over the past six months, my business partner and I have been on the road quite a bit, meeting with clients, friends, and prospects, and we’ve had the luck to see some of the greatest contemporary expressions of a rather ancient idea: the corporate campus. In an age where the distributed workforce is the controlling idea, there are a number of very large organizations thriving on the foundation of the well knit “society within a society” that was a mainstay of corporate life long ago.

But what about the rest of the corporate world – the many companies that do not have the resources or inclination to build corporate campuses?

My Life as An Amphibian

Starting Monday, August 10, I will be running a weekly column chronicling my learnings — and blunders — over the past 10 years as a marketing professional in Silicon Valley. The thread of the story — it began exactly ten years ago — is my struggle to survive a life that increasingly got more difficult as the demands of my profession pulled me away further and further from the physical world and more and more into the virtual world. A unique client engagement in 2008 helped me to articulate the condition that I and most of my peers have found ourselves in: we have become amphibian, living in two distinct worlds, and suffering as much as we are evolving as a result. In my weekly posts, I will try to tell the story of how we have all become this way, using my personal story as a source for insight (if not just amusement).

The story begins in a doctor’s office — an accomplished ADD expert in Belmont, California — who diagnosed me in 1999 and sent me off to my first job in marketing with a poignant warning. If you have ADD, a life in marketing in Silicon Valley can be a curse or a blessing; you’re actually in the job of creating the conditions and tools — the weapons of mass distraction — that make life so difficult for so many people. For me, the marketing life has been both a curse and a blessing. But for this column, I’ve chosen to highlight the former. It makes for a better story, and it is a bit closer to the truth.

Here Come the Social Machines

For as much as we have become aware that the machine is becoming more like man, we are blissfully unaware of how much man is become more like machine. We’re seeing more and more research – not much, however, surfacing to mainstream consciousness — that our device addictions are taxing our neural anatomy, limiting our ability to perform, limiting our ability to relate to others. So, in the end, what has been cut off from our vision is not only the coming of smarter, more useful social machines, but the extent to which we have become social machines as well.