Geostrategic Media Political Commentary, Analysis, Security, Defense
Naseem Jaweed
Freedom from cubicle slavery now creates ghost towers across downtowns: The slender, glossy vertical prisons of corporate bureaucracy once dominated the economic and political powers of the world, now with the advent of zoomerang virtual culture, half-empty, gasping for more pollution to survive.
The notion of acquiring downtown supremacy, although cultured over the last century, where a corporation only recognized as a success unless it reached the tallest tower. Corporate management obediently commuted to the spaghetti of traffic jams of downtown as a symbol of elitism, now crumbled and left for not-so-important meetings in need of crowd gathering. Smart work is currently distributed to smart minds in their habitats of choice and comfort. The dog fights on office space utilization in works.
Visible every night, around the free world, the once sparkling downtown oozing vibrancy now lay low as dimly lit clusters of ghost towers. Written on the wall decades before the Pandemic, the futurism already declared as ‘work-less,’ ‘office-less,’ and ‘job-less’ while the downtown real-estate politics in denial took a different approach. The power of urbanization is to the test here.
The small and medium enterprises were barred from downtown clusters of towers, but for a good reason; lack of luxury dollars. However, a well-planned program for SMEs may be a hidden option. Small and medium enterprises with high potential may become free tenets when they reach a point of maturity and become rent-paying tenants. This rent creation mechanism will create the ‘grand central hubs’ of innovative incubation centers for creative innovations and give downtowns a new look. Today, another option is occupying such empty towers for people experiencing homelessness.
For the last decades, almost all senior, middle, and lower management made billions of trips to downtowns of the free world daily. They paid the most expensive parking, ate day-old sandwiches, and shrugged around water coolers as a private cultural outing. Bound, gagged, and chained to their cubicles, they daydreamed of liberation. As a result, the workers suffered immensely, inhaling pollution on the way in and again on the way out while immersed in nonsensical meetings of inconsequential order. As a result, the downtown corporate bureaucracies started breaking apart a decade before the Pandemic.
Post-2000 era, the Western economies were rapidly losing to global age competitiveness. The concepts of ‘real value creation,’ as office productivity, performance, and profitability, were ignored. While a new world was opening between every lunch break, the Human Resource Management needed to make swinging hammocks a standard office issue. As it is now, the economic solutions needed to face a grand-scale challenge since that time.
What a difference a century makes! Global economic recovery demands economic intellectualism to embrace futurism, where tectonic power shifts start moving from ‘knowledge-rich-nations’ to ‘population-rich-nations’ to change economic behavior worldwide. How will all this unfold, and what preparations are needed for positive results?
Behold the ‘industrial age’ and how it was developed by cheap and hard labor; now notice how smart and fluid minds provide wings to uplift the ‘digital age’ worldwide. The free world’s economies desperately need a quick immersion in the fundamental differences between the two; the ‘physicality of work’ and the ‘mentality of performance.’ How will this new math drive human productivity, affecting performance and profitability? Why will this art save national economies?
HR ignored the inhuman issues of cubicle slavery under the billion-car-rat-race of gas-guzzling frenzy. No matter how remote, office-less productivity demands new measurements of value creation either delivered via rested minds or already exhausted water-cooler-huggers or mad-max-survivors.
Recommendations: Why will city planners hesitate to accept such realities openly? Why will they not take future issues on the ‘physicality of work’ and cope with the ‘mentality of performance’? After all, this is a new shift and new divides in the workforce. The gold watches for 50 years of service culture are now for old classic movies. The executive washroom keys lost their powers. The floors, clocks, and calendars have lost meaning as the 24x7x364 free flew productivity culture is rising. The office workers of the free world will go on strike sooner or later. Public and private organizations need new HR thinking to restructure virtual organizations to dance in virtual economics and skate on global digital platforms.
A Downtown-Less City Model: We were at this crossroads over a century ago; the horse’s replacement completed the invention of the car. The horse was not supposed to pull the car’s body, while the engine was not supposed to pull the carriage. Likewise, smart offices need smart minds working in digital space within the digital world. Offices with bodies moving around are now only gatherings of the old models.
Propagation of this new virtualization of economic models eliminates office towers, removes the centrality and supremacy of downtown, and questions their role as the most significant contributors to pollution. Nevertheless, further exploration of such thinking also destroys the meaning of modern business education and its values and powers, if any. The new change is unique. That is why it is a very different change and highly offensive to old thinking. While the pending crisis is real, testing options are about staying close to reality, as the rest is only lingering fakery.
Challenged are the free economies of the world, separated are entrepreneurial economies, and isolated are the ones who need help deciphering how the national mobilization of SME entrepreneurialism will uplift grassroots prosperity and save nations from economic collapse. Although the world is already on the precipice of some grand-scale economic collapse if it ever survives the lingering financial technocalamaties, it is already transforming to entirely different models of economic thinking and new structuring of city models with unique styles and new definitions of work. The urbanization may be cracking and downtown the epic centers.
Henceforth, failing to understand the ‘mindset hypothesis,’ the difference between the job seeker and job creator mindsets is the first step to getting eliminated from any serious dialogue on the subject of SME economic recovery. Likewise, failing to articulate the ‘national mobilization of entrepreneurialism’ is the second step to getting eliminated from any economic development activity as a whole. Study more on Google.
Summary: How long it takes a nation to set up blueprints on the national mobilization of entrepreneurialism, deploy trade groups and chambers, and help select, identify, and place 25% to 50% of high-potential SMES of the nation on the path to quadrupling manufacturing and exportability? If it takes more than 100 days, seriously question the speed; if such notions still lingering from the last decades, immediately ring the fire alarm. The rest is easy.
