Recent Work
In addition to her academic work, Zuboff and Maxmin brought their ideas to many commercial and public/private ventures in the US and UK, particularly in social housing, health care, education, and elder care. Zuboff became a popular business columnist. Most of her columns developed and disseminated new concepts from The Support Economy. From 2003 to 2005, Zuboff shared her ideas in her popular monthly column “Evolving”, in the magazine Fast Company. From 2007 through 2009 she was a featured columnist for BusinessWeek.com.
In 2009, shortly after her retirement from the Harvard Business School, Zuboff was completing the sequel to The Support Economy along with a book on the ODYSSEY program, when she was struck by lightning in her home in Maine, which then burned to the ground destroying her work along with the entire structure and contents of the family home. Aspects of this experience are described in her Huffington Post essay, “When Global Warming Ate My Life” . In that essay she also introduced the concept of "the error of predictability.".
A new publication in 2010, “Creating Value in the Age of Distributed Capitalism,” appears in the McKinsey Quarterly. This article uses accessible examples to further develop the concepts of distributed capitalism, the institutional bypass, and the federated support network. It clarifies and moves beyond some of her concepts in The Support Economy. It uses an evolutionary metaphor to introduce the contrast between innovation and mutation and describes the new " IRBRS genome" of distributed capitalism based on the functions of inverting practices from organization space to individual space; rescuing assets from legacy systems/institutions; bypassing sclerotic institutional boundaries; reconfiguring assets around individuals; and providing tools and platforms for ongoing support. It describes the characteristics of successful mutations under distributed capitalism. It provides a compelling example of achieving high quality self determining elder care at a small percentage of the cost of the traditional concentrated (and all too frequently adversarial) model.
Read more about this topic: Shoshana Zuboff
Famous quotes containing the word work:
“Parenting can be established as a time-share job, but mothers are less good “switching off” their parent identity and turning to something else. Many women envy the father’s ability to set clear boundaries between home and work, between being an on-duty and an off-duty parent.... Women work very hard to maintain a closeness to their child. Father’s value intimacy with a child, but often do not know how to work to maintain it.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)
“Erasmus was the light of his century; others were its strength: he lighted the way; others knew how to walk on it while he himself remained in the shadow as the source of light always does. But he who points the way into a new era is no less worthy of veneration than he who is the first to enter it; those who work invisibly have also accomplished a feat.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)