YOU-TOPIA

About the Book

You-Topia

You-topia is about people and about organisations. It’s about the future of our society.
You-topia is not a utopia, but is based largely on experience and evidence.
You-topia is also a work of philosophy based on logical reasoning that is grounded in experience and evidence.
You-topia is a call to action. How can we become our own leaders in this promising, seductive world?
You-topia is, above all else, about the journey that we must make to regain the balance between desire and discipline. It is a world in which people and organisations perform better and are therefore happier and more successful.

Let the journey to You-topia begin. There’s no excuse to put it off any longer. It will be worth your while.

Welcome to the new world – You-topia! Your ideal space!
Because it’s all about the choices that you make:

•   The moments you choose to do everyday things
•   The places you choose to do your work
•   The people you choose to meet
•   The relevant discipline you choose to exercise
•   The relevant energy you choose to spend
•   The inspiration that you seek to achieve a satisfactory balance in your life

This ideal place isn’t yours alone, however. We share the place in order to do our everyday things. You can choose time and again, but your choices must always fit smoothly into the larger organisation to which you belong and into the turbulent society around you.

Ultimately, everyone has to see to their own needs. Everyone has to develop the discipline required to meet the obligations that they take upon themselves, the obligations they have towards themselves and towards their environment. The choices we make in that respect will ultimately change the way we look at life. And that might mean anything from orderly regularity to total chaos, from an anarchical free state to a safe haven, and from steady-as-a-rock to Bacchanalian licentiousness. We have to internalise the freedom we are given. We have to combine the playing field and the rules of the game into a single formula and give them meaning. If we do that respectfully and consciously, then all will be well.

Ever since Frederick Taylor introduced his Principles of Scientific Management, our work and our lives have been in the clutches of management. You-topia shows that severely curtailing our desire to manage everything will improve our lives. Every individual can harness his or her own energy and master his or her productivity. All organisations need do is facilitate this as best they can. Not only is that possible, but it is also going to happen, because You-topia is technology-driven.

•   Without digitisation, we would not have access to information any time, anywhere.
•   Without the virtual workspace, we would not be able to work whenever and wherever it suits us.

Modern technology has weaned us off desks and offices and rigid timetables. It has forced us to reconsider time and place. And time and place must be given new meaning in a future that will be entirely different from our post-industrial era. You-topia channels this innovation in a particular direction by looking holistically at our new physical, virtual, and mental reality.

In You-topia, less really is more!

About the Author

Erik Veldhoen is an engineer and author who has made his mark in the nineties with the Interpolis office concept in Tilburg, the Netherlands, the materialisation of a notion that attracted worldwide attention and made the flexible workplace common parlance. In 1995, he published The Demise of the Office. His organisation, Veldhoen + Company, has developed new ways of working for more than eighty clients, including Unilever, ABN AMRO, the Dutch Tax Authorities, Shell, the City of ’s-Hertogenbosch, the Rotterdam Chamber of Commerce, B. Braun, McKinsey, Sabic, Netherlands Railways, the Postbank, and the Hospital of the Future. Veldhoen + Company schedule frequent site visits to these organisations to acquaint interested parties with a new, different, more effective, and, above all, more interesting way of working. In the same way, The Art of Working takes readers on site visits to such examples as SOL (Scandinavia), MicroSoft, and Nortel (Toronto).