Meconomy. Markus Albers

leisure time; as soon as they become so successful that they require your undivided attention, you quit. Start-up costs are low in all other areas of the digital economy as well.

      Is thinking about these issues a frivolous luxury in times of a slowly abating crisis?

      Kleske: To the contrary, I think that they hold tremendous opportunities. With regard to the establishment and start-up of businesses, I even see a significant advantage: It has become a lot more difficult to get financial support for half-baked ideas. As mentioned before: At the same time, it has become much more affordable to try new ideas. I hope that, in the next months and years, businesses will increasingly start small and grow slowly in order to be able to focus on quality and service. The best thing the crisis can do for us is to cure us of our greed for quick growth.

      Building a Life That Suits You

      Today, the future of work and life is invented over peanut snacks and sliced peppers while electro music is playing in the background. Colored Post-its are attached to huge whiteboards, charming little models are built, and activities like crossing a river as a group or climbing a wall using hand-made rope ladders are performed to foster self-awareness. Welcome to Palomar5, a camp in which highly talented young people – i.e. Digital Natives – are supposed to explore their generation’s ideas of work and identity.

      On the spacious terrace on the Spree riverside in Berlin, hardly anything suggests that the sponsor Deutsche Telekom AG has invested a considerable amount of money to be able to impress Angela Merkel with the groundbreaking insights of the young elite at the next IT summit. The camp participants are sitting around on blankets and cushions, drinking cheap supermarket water from plastic bottles, cutting, gluing, and chatting. You can hear the muffled sound of a subwoofer, and somewhere in the background a swing is hanging from the ceiling. The whole scenario rather resembles a summer camp than a state-of-the-art think tank. However, first impressions can be misleading.

      All of the participants are bi- or trilingual designers, communication scientists, IT experts, or prospective managers in their twenties – in short: people who definitely belong to the professional elite of tomorrow. Here at Palomar5, their first task is to playfully define what they imagine their future private and professional lives will look like. In the next step, they are supposed to develop products that enable companies to meet the demands of Digital Natives. After all, the workplaces of the future will have little in common with ours.

      To these young people, it goes without saying that they can work everywhere and that they don’t have to be at the office every day. Collaborative software solutions allow them to permanently keep in touch with their colleagues, the bliss of permanent employment is a thing of the past, and future projects will be realized within a lose network of companies, subcontractors, freelancers, and experts. Consequently, it won’t matter anymore who is a freelancer and who is a permanent employee. They have entirely new ways of thinking and very concrete questions: “Why can’t you have three work contracts at once?” asks Stefan Liske, co-organizer of Palomar5. Or: “Assuming that, in the future, we will have chips implanted beneath our skin that transmit our biological data to a server, would employers be allowed to evaluate this data to find out when we’re most productive?”

      These questions might suggest that Palomar5 is basically a big science-fiction playground – and that’s what it is actually supposed to be to a certain extent. However, HR managers and executives should pay close attention to this generation’s ideas about their future jobs and lives. Companies that do not address these issues will realize that high-potential candidates will prefer to join rival companies. At the same time, questions like these contribute to the emergence of a new market with products and services that are tailored to the needs of young professionals.

      So here they are: Smart people in their mid-twenties delving into concepts like “The Next Generation of Identity,” “Knowledge Cultivation,” or “Collaborative Value Creation.” While all of this might sound like a satire on futurologists, it is highly relevant to these people’s everyday lives: “Our biographies are fragmented,” says Chinese-born Xiwen in perfect English. “We have one personality on Facebook, one on Xing, one on our blog, and one in the real world. We need new tools to manage all these facets of our lives.” The other participants are nodding portentously – obviously, these problems can be considered cross-cultural today.

      I have been invited today to give a speech on my new book. For this purpose, I’m establishing a Skype connection with mobile knowledge workers in New York, who are giving the virtual visitors from Berlin an enthusiastic welcome. While the managers of some major corporations would probably be quite impressed by something like this, the young camp participants are taking it as a matter of course, reacting in an interested, yet nonchalant manner. What I, as a 39-year-old, would definitely consider modern and kind of high-tech is no more than everyday life to the twentysomethings around me. Cheap bottled water and peanut snacks aside, they indeed seem to have the potential to discuss the camp’s official topics – such as “Business Ecosystems,” “Leadership Models,” and “Knowledge Management” – and to come up with new solutions. René Obermann, CEO of Deutsche Telekom AG, will have a lot to tell to Angela Merkel.

      Wasting Away in Middle Management

      The reality of work and life is not only changing for people in their mid-twenties and job starters. Even well-established executives and entrepreneurs start to feel uneasy about the ever-growing pace of the change. On a sunny morning, 15 successful, middle-aged businessmen are sitting in the meeting room of a design hotel in Hamburg, worried about their future, their careers, and the meaning of life. They work in different sectors: Some are bankers, some are marketing managers, and some are controllers. There is a scientist, a freelance architect, and a director of commercials among them. What all of them share is that vague feeling of discontent, that gnawing anxiety about the future. They are not afraid of failure or unemployment, but of leading an average life full of mediocrity and boredom – the idea of “that was basically it, there’s not much more to come.” What they fear is that all the exciting stuff out there is happening without them.

      What I am describing here is not a motivation seminar but a self-organized meeting of friends and acquaintances. Some of them have known each other since their childhood, others have recently joined them because they found the idea appealing. But what idea? One of the participants brings it to the point: “All of us are good at what we’re doing. We make good money and we’ve achieved something, but if we don’t watch out, we will be stuck on this level for the rest of our lives. We’re wasting away in middle management.” And this is not the way it is supposed to be – not in the Meconomy with its promise of self-fulfillment and jobs that we are burning to do. That’s why the 15 businessmen developed a schedule that mixes self-discovery with professional training and business start-up coaching. Today is their first meeting.

      In a quick round of introductions, the participants tell each others what they do and what motivates them. It soon becomes obvious that all of them attach importance to their jobs – still, the soft factors are all the more important. One of them tells the group about his last world trip that he took a sabbatical for. Another one shows pictures of him skiing and sailing. The message is clear: There is more to my existence than my job. The participants tell each other about their plans and dreams, about things that they still want to experience or achieve. The 15 men indeed form a representative cross-section of the German working population in their mid-thirties. All of them are ready – if not even dying – to reinvent themselves.

      That’s why they want to find out now how others made it. They picked a city – Hamburg – and simply called some of the most interesting and intelligent achievers, asking them: “What about this: We come over and you can give us the inside story behind closed doors. Is that a deal?”

      You wouldn’t believe this kind of strategy would be successful, but it actually worked. Within the next three days, they will talk to 20 CEOs, chief editors, company founders, and start-up businesses. During long, intensive, and confidential interviews, they will hear about what went wrong in their interview partners’ careers and businesses, what they would do the same way again and what not, what impact their jobs have on their private lives, and what goals they have.

      The list