Working on stuff that matters

Nowadays, everyone wants to make an impact. Nobody wants to do meaningless work. What it means to make an impact is different for everyone, but it is the driving motivation why people do the work that they do, be it helping senior citizens out of their beds, or maximizing profit for multinationals.

Indeed, some of the low points of my career as a software engineer is being part of a project that ends up in the bin. Sure, sometimes a project might fail, which in itself is ok, but if you spend a lot of time on something that ultimately did not even get a chance to make an impact is demotivating at best. If you base an entire business on something like that, you are in big trouble.

That is why Tim O’Reilly has been urging people to work on stuff that matters for over 10 years now. He talks about working on something that matters more to you than money, creating more value than you capture and taking the long view.

This does not mean everyone should do non-profit work, but it does mean the social value of businesses to be done right.

How can you apply these guidelines to your organization? What does working on stuff that matters mean to us? That is the topic of the show today!