Sweeping in front of your doors

David Buchan points to the quote by Jim McGee that I missed with my vacation:

There’s an old story that I’ve heard described as a Russion proverb. It says that if each one of us takes care of sweeping the sidewalk in front of our own home, we won’t need streetsweepers. It’s worth thinking about how that might apply to the world of knowledge work, both on the level of being an individual knowledge worker yourself and on the level of helping make the other knowledge workers that surround you more effective.

1. Great metaphor to use thinking about knowledge workers.

2. I was curious about Russian proverb as I can’t easily recall it (although it looked familiar). I did a search and found that this is a citation from Leo Tolstoy that is used in slightly different variants as a proverb (or may be he used the proverb in his writing?).

In original it looks like (my not perfect translation from Russian version):

Don’t ask others to do things you can do yourself. Let everyone sweep in front of his or her door. If each [of us] will do it, the whole street will be clean.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/06/25.html#a645; comments are here.

• How far from activity theory?
• True knowledge work cannot be automated
• Knowledge networker skills: ‘getting more’ and ‘giving up’

Tagged as: knowledge networker