Zuck's Instagram

From a glance at his Instagram account, Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t seem to have quite got the billionaire memo.

There’s no yacht. No trip to Art Basel Miami. No invite to the Golden Globes. There’s not even any sign of an obsession with space exploration.

Instead, it’s a much homelier affair.

Dinners with his family (I’m proud to say that we both share the same high chair) and visits to the gym sit alongside an eclectic range of interests: in the last month including building a catapult, buggy racing, and making katanas under the tutelage of a master craftsman.

Plus eating the entirety of his cattle farm in Hawaii

Very little of it is about stuff. Instead it’s about how he spends his time.

It’s at moments like this you remember that Zuck is of a different generation to his contemporaries. Jeff Bezos. 60. Tim Cook. 63. Mark Zuckerberg. 39.

So it’s no surprise his tastes are different. It’s always been the case. 

Andrew Carnegie’s library building spree. J. Paul Getty’s art addiction. Even 18th Century British aristocrats’ obsession with blowing the family silver on having a great garden.

The symbols of success shift radically from generation to generation, often leaving the old guard looking on, slack jawed. 

Exactly the same happens with companies as well.

In the 1990s it was a massive, architecturally impressive office. Art in the foyer. Good hospitality. Business class flights.

The 2010s? Campus-style places to work that valued fun as much as productivity. Snacks available on-demand. A busy conference calendar.

Supersonic luxury

But - as 2008 probably signalled the end of the gorgeous corporate lobby, the last few years have meant that we have to, once again, rethink the successful company stack.

This doesn’t mean an end to the need for status: something that will always be with us all.

But what provides access to status both shifts quickly, and almost always ends up being easier to identify when looking in the rear view mirror.

And to be an aspirational company to work for, you’ll need to provide status for the present day, not the days of the past.

And I think Zuck’s instagram holds the key to figuring out what that is.

The question for him - unlike for many others - is not about what you have, but instead about how you spend your time.

And in a world where status basically equals time spent well - whether it’s on family, fitness, or on doing interesting things - that’s where companies need to head.

An instinctive response is to just bake in more flexibility into the way your company operates.

If time is seen as valuable, then helping employees structure their lives in a way that gives them more of it makes sense.

This is also borne out in the data. The ability to work away from the office is valued as much as an 8% pay rise. And offering the ability to work flexibly reduces quit rates by 35%.

But flexibility alone isn’t enough. If the competition is time spent elsewhere, the main prerogative is surely to ensure that the time we spend on work feels so worthwhile that we’re happy to make the trade-off.

Ultimately when we are asking someone to do work for us we are simply asking for their time. To sacrifice time with their family. Or doing their own thing.

So the most valuable thing leaders can do right now is make that time feel like it’s worth it. To make work somewhere where they want to be.

That probably means a much simpler offering than what has came before. Less symbols of success, but something more akin to quiet luxury.

Focussed less on adding elements of play that sit around the work, but on making the work itself feel like play.

It’s a great leveller, and will be a major advantage for startups in the coming years.

In the same way that simply being able to prioritise your time is far more attainable than private jets and Birkin bags, building something that matters is easier to do than running an expensive programme of additional incentives and stock options.

As a result, the luxury companies of the future don’t promise flights or cars, but the ability to do great work. The joy of creation.

And the focus is on providing their teams with the tools they need to do that work - as part of a new operating model for the most innovative companies.

At Ashore, we want to build one of those tools: giving people the ability to get away, together, or alone, to create the space to do work that makes the time, the effort, the grit, worth it.

But there’ll be many more to come - to help companies do what motivates teams more than anything else. The opportunity to build cool shit. And get people to use it.

By working in a place where every second counts.

Obligatory Bear season II reference

aled@ashore.io