For a transcript of the presentation, visit http://kasperowski.com/2013/05/diamond-age.html . This is my presentation at Rebel Jam, a global 24-hour long conference on positively changing business, government, education, healthcare, and the world itself. You can find my slides here. I do great things with great people I’m Richard Kasperowski. My vision is that I do great things with great people. Everything I do and everyone I do it with derives from my vision. I don’t do mediocre things. I don’t do things with mediocre people. I strive to do great things with great people, to do amazing things with amazing people. I am an Agile transformation leader helping big and small organizations do amazing things. I use Agile and other transformation tools to do this. I recently worked for Nokia, a rather large company. I currently work independently, helping businesses transform themselves toward greatness, and helping a community group set a world record in West Haven, Connecticut, USA. I help people understand what they have and what they want. I use a bunch of practices derived from movements like ours to help people know what they have and transform it to what they want. I’m curious: What do you do? With whom do you do it? What is your vision for yourself? What do you have? What do you want? Work hurts I woke up one morning this spring with an epiphany: work hurts, and I think I understand why. Many of us do amazingly creative work. We love what we do. Our work fully engages our hearts and our minds. But it’s painful to do our work at work. It’s painful to do it at our workplaces. It’s painful to do it within the hierarchical command-and-control structures of the organizations that we work within. Work hurts. How would you succeed in a world of limited resources? I thought about why work hurts. Work hurts because we are doing creative work, “knowledge work,” but we’re doing it within industrial control structures. Industrial control structures, industrial management systems, industrialism in general: industrialism is a good thing. It makes sense. It makes sense in a world of limited resources. If you have limited resources, limited raw materials, and you want to transform them into something good, something valuable, you apply industrialism. Your limited resources are things like coal, metals, springs, bearings, cogs, power, people, money, and time. You get the most efficient output from your limited inputs. You efficiently transform your limited inputs into wonderful products that delight people, they give you money for your work, and you profit. That’s good. What if there were no resource constraints? What if you had no resource constraints? What if everything you created derived from the abundance that the universe offers us? Our era is different from the era of the industrialists. Much of what we do is mentally creative work, information work, sometimes called thought work or knowledge work.