6th July 2021. Bananas | Work
Yes, we have no bananas; mapping the new working arrangements
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There’s an entertaining post on how bananas became the fruit staple they now are in America (and also in Europe) at MoneyLemme’s Substack. The story, overall, is about how markets get created.
It wasn’t obvious, in 1843, when bananas were first imported into the USA, that the banana would become a staple. Those first bananas cost 25 cents—a week’s wage at the time.
Bananas do have some advantages: they come in their own packaging, they don’t need refrigeration. But,
banana growing is manually intensive and banana plants are finicky: they need at least 14 consecutive months of frost-free, sunny weather and a ton of rain. That means bananas aren’t commercially viable agriculture anywhere in the continental US.
Or in Europe. So they need to be transported long distances.
So cheap bananas are a product of massive investment, in farms, in transport and shipping infrastructure, internationally and within the US.
The end of the 19th century was a golden age for the banana, with the development of the “banana dock” in New York (it still handles 20 million bananas a week), controversies about a banana tax, and even a hit song.
Managing the banana trade also involved some imperial ruthlessness: a proxy war organised by Standard Fruit and United Fruit on Latin American workers who struck for better conditions. The US companies later re-branded as Dole and Chiquita, respectively.
The banana companies also mobilised demand. The article includes a link to a 1940s commercial in which an animated anthropomorphic banana basically educates consumers on how best to eat the things:
MoneyLemme constructs a simply flywheel to explain the whole process:
As with any product, there were a million little dents, a million lucky breaks that shaped Americans' love and acceptance of the banana. On the other side of the flywheel, banana producers bought refrigerated steamships, outfitted plantations with banana zip lines, and kept investing and building to meet that new demand. By the middle of the 20th century bananas became the ubiquitous and economical fruit we all know and love today. In 1700 only a visiting member of the royal family would have seen a banana in person. Today you can get a banana at a gas station.
MoneyLemme doesn’t mention it, but there is a large cloud hanging over this whole story. Although there are 100 varieties of banana (according to Kew Gardens), the Cavendish variety accounts for 50% of all bananas grown and 95% of those traded internationally.
And the Cavendish is threatened by aa strain of Panama disease, which killed off the previous dominant banana variety, the Gros Michel, in the 1950s.
In fact, the Cavendish is particularly vulnerable precisely because of the industrial techniques used to grow them. Cavendish bananas contain no seeds, so each new plant is an offcut from an existing plant. The result is that there’s no genetic diversity.
The Cavendish has less flavour than the Gros Michel, but it ripens more slowly, which makes it good for long-distant transport. And there are scientists trying to save the Cavendish.
But it is still possible that we will end up with different types of bananas, and probably more expensive ones, on our shelves in the future.
#2: Mapping the new work arrangements
Workplace
Over at LinkedIn there’s a slightly complicated but useful diagram that tries to map how businesses should decide the balance between office-based work, virtual work, and what is called ‘phygital’ work. This is an ugly neologism that I will explain later.
The diagram is by Gianni Giacomelli, who is Chief Innovation Officer at Genpact.
(Source: Gianni Giacmelli)
The diagram is slightly complicated because the framework has three variables: time, place, and strength of social connection. This means that it is presented as a cube.
Time ranges between synchronous and asynchronous—does the interaction need to happen at the same time?
Place is about location—is the interaction physical or digital? The “phygital” category covers a hybrid form, where some people might be in a shared location, but everyone participating is doing so through a device.
Type of connection is interesting: are the social connections within the business strong or weak?
Strong ties are often those between people connected in day-to-day, functional work; weak ties relate to more serendipitous encounters across a broader network (e.g., water-cooler) and are crucial for innovation and culture formation. Organizational network analysis (ONA) reveals that both are essential. More recent evidence points out that strong ties tend to be resilient to shocks like a lockdown and sudden change of location, but weak ties may shrink.
Giacomelli suggests that people will move between the eight cells created by the model frequently, and that the challenge is making sure that the work experience within each cell is designed correctly, as well as the hand-offs between them.
The piece goes on to break down the different types of interaction in the different cells, so I’m not going to repeat that here. But he proposes this as a checklist for businesses as they emerge from the pandemic with different assumptions about the mix of virtual and in-person work.
At the very least, this framework should serve as a checklist to identify possible blind spots. But ideally, design teams across employee experience, IT, and lines of business should use it to blueprint and then drive the adoption of new solutions: that is the new tools, and the social norms that will propagate their use.
A couple of quick observations from me.
The first is that it would be easy to fall into the trap of thinking that strong ties inevitably involve in-person contact. Strong culture, purpose and values might well create the same effects.
The second is that I suspect that Giocomelli has knowledge workers in mind when he’s thinking about this diagram, but it would be interesting to map onto it delivery and other workers who have to do their work “in place”, to see if it reveals anything about working arrangements and labour market power, or the lack of it.
j2t#128
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