Domenico de Masi defines ‘creative leisure’ as a productive activity that lies at the interface between leisure and study. Technology relieves human beings of manual labor and frees their intellect for creative work. But creativity doesn’t work from 9am to 5pm, and while we can’t turn it off when we’re not working, we can’t turn it on when we want to work. The solution, according to De Masi, is creative leisure, which allows human beings to reach the full potential of their privileged brains.
I wrote this introduction to explain how, while researching my vacation, I related the proposal of a hotel industry executive, Domènec Biosca, in an interview, to the way I believe we should manage a scientific and technological development company.
He points out the possible ineffectiveness of compartmentalizing services in the hotel sector which, like so many other companies, is divided into departments with the premise of increasing productivity. For him, sectorization has prevented hotels from perceiving a change in consumer trends, which are no longer just looking for a service but for an experience: “the customer is no longer coming on vacation, he’s coming to be happy”.
Compartmentalization increases the quality of each service offered to the customer, but does not have the capacity to look at the whole of their experience. And even with every department doing everything right, the customer doesn’t come back, because their metrics were holistic and not reductionist. Departments then invest too much energy in justifying their actions and ensuring that another department is to blame for failure, rather than finding a way to solve the customer satisfaction problem.
Biosca then makes a radical proposal and says that all companies should have just one department: “the customer happiness department”.
It touched me deeply. I then started to think about what a customer happiness department would be and how it would work at Bio Bureau.
As scientists, we tend to make technical decisions in our daily lives that guarantee or maximize technical quality and minimize technological risks. It’s important that this is the case with highly complex innovative projects. But we cannot, at the expense of this important technological focus, lose sight of how these decisions impact our clients (the companies that finance our developments) and our consumers (the people and companies that have benefited – at least that is our expectation – from the solutions we have developed).
Regardless of your company’s area of activity, I believe it can also benefit from reading Biosca’s text and that’s why we’re sharing it here.