Dave Desforges began piloting "Work From Home" solutions over 3 years ago. His role required identifying additional candidate requirements and necessary remote work practices for both employees and managers at Sun Microsystems. His current work encompasses blending appropriate technology, organizational practices, and workplace environments to support mobile and distributed teams.
Jim McGee is currently a Director at Huron Consulting Group. He has spent much of the last 30 years working to understand, design, and apply information and technology innovations in organizations. Before Huron, Jim taught at the Kellogg School and was one of the founding partners of DiamondCluster International. With Larry Prusak, he was the co-author of Managing Information Strategically (Wiley, 1993). Jim has both an MBA and a doctorate in Information Technology, Organization, and Strategy from the Harvard Business School.
Regina Miller has more than 18 years of experience in Organization Development, Human Resources, Leadership Development and International Operations. Regina recently launched a global consultancy called The Seventh Suite which assists growing companies bolster their competitive edge via aligned strategy and progressive people practices. Her last corporate job was as the VP HR/OD for Oskar (Vodafone) which has been dubbed “one of the fastest growing mobile operators in Eastern Europe.” More info here.
Giovanni Rodriguez - Through a combination of luck and persistence, Giovanni has worked in the company of some of the most interesting and colorful leaders in several worlds: the law, theater, and technology. Today, he is a principal at Eastwick Communications, a Silicon Valley PR agency, where he advises both emerging companies and market leaders on executive leadership, public speaking, marketing strategy and media relations. He has worked for, consulted and advised numerous businesses and organizations including HP, Stanford University, Fujitsu Computer Systems, Cadence Design Systems, VMware, the American Arbitration Association, and the Unified Court System of New York. He is a graduate of Princeton University (Religion and Anthropology), and he has done graduate course work at the Columbia School of Journalism and N.Y.U.
Jim Ware is a cofounder of the Work Design Collaborative and the Future of Work program. He has over 30 years experience in research, executive education, consulting, and management, including five years on the faculty of the Harvard Business School. He was the lead author of The Search for Digital Excellence, (McGraw-Hill, 1998), and holds Ph.D., M.A., and B.Sc. degrees from Cornell University and an MBA (With Distinction) from the Harvard Business School.
Charlie Grantham and I are are featured in a short interview column in the November issue of Fast Company. Our conversation with writer Chris Collier focused on the changing nature of distributed work.
Check it out - it's not the most profound thing we've ever said, but it's nice to see the stuff we all care about getting more recognition in such a great publication.
This is a piece I ran on my own blog before Future Tense launched. It struck me that it was worth sharing here to see how this group might react. Enjoy!
I’ve been thinking about the knowledge work as craft idea for a while now. Maybe it was the prospect of Revenge of the Sith opening, or just the slow percolating of ideas, but apprenticeship has been on my mind the last couple of weeks. I'm still working through this, but wanted to see what others might think.
In a craft economy, your craft was your birthright and you learned it through long apprenticeship. One strength of the industrial revolution was to define jobs and skills that could be taught more rapidly and systematically than craft apprenticing practices. This led to a host of cultural consequences that culminated in the social mobility that characterized the U.S. economy for so many years.
This McKinsey article relates to my previous post in that McKinsey recommends, relatively radically I think, how orgs should structure in order to make the best use of knowledge workers and talent pools. Reading between the lines of their structural recommendations, implies collaborative technologies will be required to operate in this new org configuration. This is one of my more favorite McKinsey articles. Usually, I am taking quite the opposite tact.
I challenge the notion that collaboration will increase simply because of the availability of a new set of interrelated tools, or Web 2.0. This is the same trap that allowed thousands to think of e-learning as a fast and cheap alternative to other options, when in fact it is a complex and viable approach, but not always fast, nor easy, especially when you want quality outcomes. Good elearning requires a shift in operating culture. Likewise, collaboration requires a cultural shift...
I believe there is a great deal of potential to distributed collaboration. I'd go so far as to say it will be a required competence and essential business/organization activity. It will be facilitated to some extent by tools. But it won't happen without us increasing our skills, practices and intentions for collaboration.
As readers of this blog know, Charlie Grantham and I (aka The Work Design Collaborative, or Future of Work) have been commissioned to conduct an exploratory study of the feasibility of launching a new industry association focused on distributed work.
We're well along in conducting our first round of interviews with interested and experienced thought leaders and leading practitioners. It would be premature to report findings, but I've picked up an interesting pattern that I thought might provoke some useful conversation.
One of the questions we ask each interviewee is, "What resources do you depend on for information about developments in distributed work?"
The answers have been all over the map, from naming specific market research firms and industry analysts to relying on personal networks of friends and colleagues. But what struck me this week is how many people have answered "Google" or "my RSS newsfeed."
Maybe that's not surprising, given today's technology and our increasing reliance on the Net, but I found it interesting that there don't appear to be any definitive or consensus sources (other than Future of Work and FutureTense, of course!)
So, other than Google, where do you go? What websites, blogs, analysts, or professional associations do you find helpful in sorting out trends, data, and conflicting perspectives on the future of work? I'm seriously interested in hearing from you. Where do you go? And Why?
Some advice about hot jobs and careers of the future by Michael Prospero of Fast Company who will appear on an old fashioned radio show on October 6th at 10:10 AM EST. He will appear on Joan Hamburg's show on WOR 710 AM on your dial. (PS - She's the best!) Uncertain that it will make it to podcast but you can listen live from your pc.
Richard Posner offers an economic analysis of the issue of elite professional women leaving the workforce (mainly to have children) from the point of view of the university/professional school. He states that given roughly half (see his post for numbers) of professional women from elite universities drop out of the career world, the full value of their places in the university is not achieved. This means that places didn't go to a number of (mostly) men, who would have more fully "productive careers."
But I have to try to be precise about the meaning of "more productive" in this context. I mean only that if a man and woman of similar ability were competing for a place in the entering class of an elite professional school, the man would (on average) pay more for the place than the woman would; admission would create more "value added" for him than for her.
The article is an interesting read, and his economic analysis and proposed solutions to the problem are correct from an economic perspective:
A better idea, though counterintuitive, might be to raise tuition to all students but couple the raise with a program of rebates for graduates who work full time. For example, they might be rebated 1 percent of their tuition for each year they worked full time. Probably the graduates working full time at good jobs would not take the rebate but instead would convert it into a donation. The real significance of the plan would be the higher tuition, which would discourage applicants who were not planning to have full working careers (including applicants of advanced age and professional graduate students). This would open up places to applicants who will use their professional education more productively; they are the more deserving applicants.
The problem I have is with his unspoken assumption that labor market practices (not to mention US tax policy) will remain static. Today, these labor practices (and tax policies) are problemmatic for professional women (and men who want to spend more time with their family). I am not going to go into all of the difficulties, but let's state that there are serious issues with work-life balance/family-friendly policies. Enlightened companies are getting on the bandwagon and changing these policies to keep their valuable employees. I would argue that given real change is now possible in the way work is conducted (particularly knowledge work), given technological change and new business models, that the assumption of status quo is a dangerous one.
By focusing as Posner does on economically based measures universities can take, for example, we miss the most important player for in keeping women in the workforce who want to stay: the employer. Any action the university takes in such a vacuum can only have unintended consequences. Better for universities to engage with employers to look at the problem holistically vs. from their individual silos.
Giovanni Rodriguez
Elizabeth Albrycht
Dave Desforges
Jim McGee
Jim Ware
