I have a pet peeve having to do with stock photos on the pages of many enterprise software company websites (including our own - see our solutions page).  Why?  Because I don't know these people...or anyone that looks like them for that matter.  They are a little too perfect...a little too smiley without actually laughing...I don't work with those people and frankly, they don't look like a lot of fun either.

This picture from Flickr is more like the people I work with - and like the people with whom I want to work.  A bit less than perfect, a bit quirky...but very creative and talented.  Which gets me to my point.  Who was the person who decided that work shouldn't be fun and that we should all be widgets doing a very narrowly specified job?  Was it IBM/Big Blue and their blue suit/white shirt diktat?   And why did we collectively accept that?  People are much more creative and talented than any job description and if we don't let people explore, reach out, and participate in new ways everyone loses.  We lose people's passion and commitment but we also lose a great deal of their productivity.  And yes, that includes having a lot of fun.  People learn best by playing games - it allows us to abstract out a problem and solve it in a different context. By doing so, we often learn how to solve a problem in its original context.  In my last job, an engineer (who is also a great friend) attached a dancing hampster to our payment gateway. He put it right on top of our multual cube wall and people could pay 25 cents to turn it on...annoying as hell because I was the poor sucker who had to either listen to three verses of hamster singing or pay another 25 cents to turn it off.  But so funny...so inventive...and such a good example of how flexible our product was and everyone in the company knew about it (it probably helped that it was a really amusing way to annoy me!).

How does this relate to my general theme of enterprise social media?  Because enterprise social media should allow individuals to express themselves - with all their quirky, interesting, creative...and sometimes weird...ideas. It lets us connect to each other, it lets us display all our talents...and hopefully it allows us to make work fun. Why not?  And if you want to see who I really work with go to www.mzinga.com - Barry, Aaron, and Mike are incredibly talented AND a lot of fun.