No, its not Tuberculosis for the 21st Century. Its a business model you should be preparing to wrap your head around; what’s mine, is ours!

http://www.collaborativeconsumption.com/

“Collaborative Consumption describes the rapid explosion in traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping redefined through technology and peer communities”.

Hopefully you are already aware of a few examples that are active in New Zealand like Freecycle - which has been an amazing source of preserving jars and free fruit for me, as well as being an efficient way to flog off my unwanted stuff without having to drag it - laden with guilt - to the dump. Then there is Freeconomy - currently I am sharing my washing machine with a chef who is teaching me to bake bread. Have you discovered Work Now? I am currently trading Strategic Business Advice for Branding Development. And then of course, Hirethings. What you have in your cupboard gathering dust could be earning you income and paying itself off.

Essentially, the premise is that you can loan, lend or offer services to others and generate direct income for it. Just what we need in a pressured economic environment.

Get your head around this people - these offerings represent a great source of income for many of us, and one of the most environmentally sensitive progressive business models yet to emerge. I’d love to hear of other local examples - let me know what I am missing out on!

I think the world of work is set to change in drastic ways, and that we should be preparing our people, our systems and our governance for the shift.

The Conchords were right. Robotic beings are set to rule the world. Well, at least the World of Boring Meaningless Work that No Human Gets Excited About.

I’ve watched The West Wing. I know how compelling “saving jobs” is as a campaign lolly - saving anything makes someone sound heroic. But c’mon. We really have to move beyond ‘jobs for jobs sake’. If our politicians were being responsible, they would help reset our expectations about what our working lives will consist of in the future, and build that into their rhetoric; “purposeful work for all!” Let’s get the robots to clean the loos.

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