Excellent piece by Anne Zelenka in Web Worker Daily.
The busyness economy works on face time, incremental improvement strategic long-term planning, return on investment, and hierarchical control. The burst economy, enabled by the Web, works on innovation, flat knowledge networks, and discontinuous productivity.
Here are some of the polarities she suggests:
Busy: Immediate response to email required.
Burst: Use better ways to communicate when available including blogs, wikis, IM, chat rooms, SMS, and RSS.
Busy: Always available during working hours.
Burst: Declarative availability.
Busy: Long-term planning rules.
Burst: Try agile experimentation and fast failure instead.
As Anne says at the end, we need both busy and burst approaches – and many of us will work somewhere in-between.
