Religion, not Working, and Google

November 26, 2008 | Written by

Yesterday I presented to a group of my colleagues at Ruder Finn about Twitter and brainstormed some uses for our corporate clients.

One point that resonated was imploring people to explore Web 2.0 on their own to discover tools and services that may be of use to them or clients. Ruder Finn social media coordinator Tyler Pennock put it this way at the PR Week Next Conference:

#nextprweek One skill I think future PR pros need to have: curiousity – the desire to always look for more questions to answer

This curiosity is often fostered by a healthy dose of "wandering." And wandering has a long history of success in developing breakthrough thinking and ideas. There are ancient examples that Boston University professor Stephen Prothero presented in a lecture series entitled: The Work of Doing Nothing: Wandering as Practice and Play

From Bostonia, the BU alumni mag (disclosure: I’m a Boston University alum):

Prothero explores wandering as one of the great themes in the world’s religious and literary traditions, and as an antidote to our contemporary obsessions with efficiency, productivity, and the purpose-driven life. Adam and Eve were wanderers, as were Moses, Abraham, Jesus, Paul, and the Buddha. Ulysses wanders across the pages of the Odyssey and the Pandhavas across the chapters of the Hindu epic the Mahabharata. To wander is to move without destination into the unknown, and to open yourself up to surprises. But wandering is often disparaged as deviation and digression. These lectures seek to redeem wandering from its critics by championing it as both practice and play. Although wandering aims at nothing, it is work of a sort. And on occasion, it can do some of the hardest work of all: liberating us from the tyranny of those voices — of parents and gods and friends and governments — that tell us (with authority, and sometimes coercive power) who to be, what to think, how to live.

A more contemporary example of "wandering" comes in Google’s 70/20/10 model:

The 70/20/10 Model is a business resource management model pioneered by Eric E. Schmidt. This model dictates that, to cultivate innovation, employees of a company should utilize their time in the following ratio:

* 70% of time should be dedicated to core business tasks.
* 20% of time should be dedicated to projects related to the core business.
* 10% of time should be dedicated to projects unrelated to the core business.

(source: Wikipedia)

More on the 70/20/10 concept here.

How much time do you spend working at not working?