The Future of Work

In a wide-ranging discussion moderated by Peter Jackson, Chief Scientist for Thomson Reuters, MIT’s Andrew McAfee and John Seely Brown [JSB] from the Deloitte Center for the Edge explored the impact of technology on the workspace and global workforce.

Michael Moore 01 Jul 2011Michael Moore

The face of work is changing rapidly, not only due to globalization but also because companies are becoming more data-driven and analytic, as ever-more immense amounts of information become available along with new tools to make sense of it all. At the same time, Web 2.0 technologies are making work and the workspace more collaborative.

The potential for increasing productivity is immense, and the panelists debated what these trends will mean for employment levels. For McAfee, “this is the one area where I’m pessimistic. The flip side of our incredible gains in productivity is that fewer jobs are needed.” JSB felt more hopeful, pointing out that in a relatively stable world you run out of new things to do and scalable efficiency comes into play. In a constantly changing world, not so much.

In either case, it will be essential for workers to constantly learn new skills, not just to keep up with their jobs but perhaps to reinvent their jobs and themselves many times during the course of a career. So, as JSB put it, how do we transform the workscape into a learning scape? How can we structure the partnerships within an organization to learn?

If, as Nelson Mandela observed, the job of a leader is to find the spark of genius in each person – the good news is that we now have the social tools to enable that. Unfortunately, many corporate leaders are still reticent to deploy them despite the fact that myriad corporate mission statements talk about “empowerment” and “people being the company’s greatest asset.” Claiming that the company’s top priority is its people but failing to develop them is what JSB calls the Dilbert Paradox. “If you believe your own mission statement,” McAfee challenged business leaders, “then you must deploy the tools that let your people interact with their colleagues.”

“The marriage of virtual and physical is the key,” according to Jackson. It’s about using the virtual to amplify the power of connections in the physical world. That’s essential for the growing mobility of ideas and jobs. Critical also, according to McAfee, because of “greater geographic mobility, which is hard because humans are sticky. People need to flow where the economic activity is, so they need to become good at hopscotching.”

Michael Moore is the Global Head of Internal and Online Communications at Thomson Reuters.

 

 

 




  • http://onlineguitarcoaching.com Will Kriski

    The last paragraph is untrue – people don”t need to flow where economic activity is. I live in a rural area doing large remote integration IT projects from home, using Skype, Live meeting, phone, email, VPN software, etc. You even mention jobs are more data centric and analytical, making remote work even more plausable because you don”t have to be physically present in any given location.

  • http://www.connectme360.com Anonymous

    If you look at productivity, the last paragraph is absolutely spot-on. While technology does provide rural areas with capabilities they never had before, its impact on already-dense areas is even larger because there is more economic value added for every connection that is made. 

    The performance of telecom is a great leading indicator when it comes to understanding how industries will be affected by ecommerce in the future. You can see the aggregate results by looking at the performance of the so-called Baby Bells after telecom deregulation: Bell Atlantic (now Verizon) had much lower operating costs and therefore higher margins because of the density of the Northeast, which led to industry-leading cash flows. In comparison, Qwest (my carrier) had a much larger area to cover and as a result has the worst scale economies of any of the Baby Bells. Where a Qwest truck could reach 25 customers in a day, its Verizon counterpart could do 40 or more. It may sound puny, but in an increasingly hypercompetitive world those kinds of cost characteristics, over time, are really back-breakers especially in times of fuel cost volatility. If it was performing, either Verizon or AT&T would have purchased it.
    The reality is that social tools allow companies to organize their assets to flock to opportunities as they happen. Like many innovations, however, it only seems like the tide is lifting all boats evenly. Like the movie “The Sixth Sense”, many companies are already dead but they just don”t know it yet. In the meantime, the smart companies are using social exhaust to identify as-yet unowned assets, quietly moving up the food chain to secure preferential rights to assets that most of the rest of us simply do not understand. 

  • Peter Jackson

    I think there are countercurrents at work here.  Yes, work will become more decentralized, but data collection will enable some companies to centralize decision making as never before, e.g., loan and mortgage approvals.  Yes, comms will make remote working easier, but professional people will still flock to urban areas in search of jobs and to capitalize on the serendipity of chance encounters.