III.30.2020 - Working@Home - A New Reality
This cartoon in the Sunday Toronto Star triggered a flood of memories. That’s my daughter in the closet with a perfect portrayal of my granddaughter tracking down her mother. While I’m writing this blog, Stephen King is being interviewed on CNN about COVID-19 with the chyron: Real Life is Scarier Than Fiction. Sometimes. I don’t mean to make light of this pandemic. The situation has everyone on edge and worried about a combination of contagion, financial stress and imposed limits on our freedom. But, for me, the one thing that I am not concerned about is working from home.
I was an early advocate of working from home. I disliked having to wear a suit and tie even though I did make the corporate uniform look good. And most meetings resulted in no action except to schedule more meetings. When I was working at Xerox, I had a preview of the possibilities that a networked world could deliver. Xerox PARC in California — Palo Alto Research Center — was one of the developers of the 
ARPANET — the forerunner of the internet. In the late 70s, I participated in the exchange of very brief messages with people from connected universities and military bases. We could have used fax machines or even called each other on the phone. But the idea that we could message and exchange files with anyone in the world at any time (free) was compelling enough for me to envision a future beyond corporate dress codes and archaic communications gear. BTW, the fax machine was invented by Scottish inventor Alexander Bain in 1843. Xerox salespeople made faxing ubiquitous in American business in the 70s…130 years later.
I wasn’t the first to see the possibilities attached to communicating differently. In 1968, R.W. Taylor and J.C.R. Licklider co-authored an essay, “The Computer as a Communication Device,” which was published in the journal Science and Technology. It began with a thunderclap: “In a few years, men [people] will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face.”
In 1981, I was contemplating my post-Xerox life. We were sailing on Georgian Bay with a couple of friends and I disclosed my vision for a consulting business that would be home-based with international reach and powered by the internet. No office overhead, no boring meetings, no commute, no ties, no wasted time, no office politics — just networked knowledge workers with a bias for action. We would “meet” with clients virtually and only engage in purposeful travel to their locations with clear mandates for deliverables. When I was finished explaining my vision of the future, our friends laughed for an unnecessarily long time and handed me another beer. Four years later, we bought the first Apple Macintosh and the sound of a modem “handshake” reassured me that I was a happy, pajama-clad pioneer.
My daughter — the one hiding in the closet — crawled around my home office and played with her toys while I connected with clients and created professional looking documents directly from my desktop. Then, I would take my daughter to the outdoor pool on the top level of our condo building along with my “portable” Motorola DynaTAC mobile phone (below). I took client calls while changing diapers and catching some rays.
I understand why so many people are struggling with the new reality of working@home. But I suspect that a sizeable number of the self-isolating corporate population will realize the benefits of changing the structure of how work gets done without sacrificing their value to employers or clients. I know because my daughter has operated a successful business from home for a few years after giving up her commute to work downtown.
Relax, enjoy and be well — this working@home experience may last awhile so embrace it.
