In search of an answer I’ve been going through two books on the subject: The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style and Your Life
by Thomas W. Malone and The Shift: The Future of Work Is Already Here
by Lynda Gratton.
Malone’s study on the organizational trends is based around a core principle: as the cost of communication decreases organizational models tend to get decentralized. Ultimately, at the current cost of communication, companies start to benefit from being both big AND decentralized.
This decentralization can take different forms (or, sometimes, stages): from loose hierarchies (think Linux and Wikipedia) through democracy (where employees decide) and, ultimately, organizations based on market dynamics. The last one is definitely the most disruptive I know of, and Malone goes into great length into examples (HP, BP, Intel, …) and insights in how this might work –or not. Taken to the extreme, we might envisage a multinational with only a single person employed, all the rest being ‘e-lanced’ (his term didn’t take off… but you could easily call it crowdsourcing these days).
Of course Malone realizes that decentralized organizations do entail specific challenges (to which he often founds solutions) and that these models are not necessarily applicable to every company. The table beneath clearly shows the advantages and disadvantages of different models:
Well worth the read.
The second book ‘The shift’ I bought based on the promises from the cover –always tricky. I was expecting some insights about the evolution of work from a personal (psychological) point of view. I certainly got what I wanted from the first part of the book, where Lynda lays out potential scenarios of future working life, thoroughly analyzing their causes and their consequences.
On the dark side, Lynda paints futures in which workers would increasingly lead fragmented lives (pretty recognizable even now), live in ultimate isolation in a society that will increasingly exclude large portions of its members. Sounds stretched? Not really if you extrapolate very visible current trends (which is basically what Lynda is doing).
In the second –bright- set of scenarios Lynda pictures working life driven by self-reflection and social awareness, where workers will lead professional lives that make sense to them, through different tools that are becoming available (digital markets, crowdsourcing, etc.).
These scenarios are not an OR-OR story. Most probably, all these scenarios will unfold simultaneously. This makes these vivid accounts, taken together, as a smart and rather complete view of how working life would be like for ‘humanity’ as a whole.
In the second half of the book Lynda describes how her ‘five global forces’ (call them megatrends) lead to three shifts in working capital (intellectual, social and emotional). It’s got the merit –and the flaws- of simplicity, but is clearly aiming at young graduates choosing a direction for their career, or for experienced workers who feel trapped in their current job and working environment. I’m neither one of these, but I must recognize the advice the book contains is certainly valuable to either of these two groups.
Check out my previous book reviews:
- "Making globalization work" Joseph Stiglitz
- "2030 -Technologies that will change the world" Van Santen, Khoe, Vermeer
- "What Technology wants" David Kelly
- "Crowdsourcing" Jeff Howe
- "The next big thing" William Higham
- "Future Files" Richard Watson
- "Future savvy" Adam Gordon
- "Futurewise" Patrick Dixon
- "Ecological intelligence" Daniel Goleman
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