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.
I recently pointed to Bob Sutton's new blog as a good source of insight into the world of effective organizations. One of his recent posts, Crappy People versus Crappy Systems, offers an excellent case in point. The entire post is well worth your time, but here is the essence:
The worst part about focusing on keeping out crappy people, however, is that it reflects a belief system that “the people make the place.” The implication is that, once you hire great people and get rid of the bad ones, your work is pretty much done. Yet if you look at large scale studies in everything from automobile industry to the airline industry, or look at Diane Vaughn’s fantastic book on the space shuttle Challenger explosion and the well-crafted report written by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board , the evidence is clear: The “rule of law crappy systems” trumps the “rule of crappy people.”
Sure, people matter a lot, but as my colleague Jeff Pfeffer puts it, some systems are so badly designed that when smart people with a great track record join them, it seems as if a “brain vacuum” is applied, and they turn incompetent. Jeff often jokes that this is what happens to many business school deans, and indeed, these jobs have so many competing and conflicting demands that they are often impossible to do well.
I've worked in a number of organizations that do an excellent job of hiring great people, including successful startups. Sutton's post finally puts a finger on my central frustration in these organizations; they too often tolerate crappy systems that pull down the performance and potential of the great people they manage to attract.
I suspect this is partly a function of the wrong design emphasis. When you know in advance that your organizational systems must work regardless of your ability to attract the best and the brightest, you invest the time and energy to make those systems robust. If you go down the "hire the best" path, you give yourself license to under-invest in systems. Perhaps more harmfully, you don't take the time to design the organizational systems that might actually amplify the quality and capabilities of a superior workforce.
Hylton Joliffe alerted me to a great piece in the latest issue of Newsweek on the "secret sauce" in Google's management practices ("Google: Ten Golden Rules"). It's a great recipe for leveraging the talent in your knowledge workers. I wrote about the same issue briefly just last week at the Future of Work blog, stimulated mostly by Intel CEO Paul Otellini's new insights into Google as a recently appointed Google director ("Intel's Inside Scoop on Google"). Getting the most out of your knowledge workers is clearly the key to success in the future. And Google's a terrific role model. And for a more comprehensive Google story, be sure to check out the December 5 issue of Business Week ("Googling for Gold ").
The Washington Post Magazine contained a very interesting article this weekend, entitled "Heaven Can Wait" that explores how retirement is disappearing for some people. Given the demographic realities of America today, delaying retirement is an increasingly necessary thing:
Having examined the demographic trends, the labor force stats, the health and longevity data, the projected costs of Social Security, Medicare and other government programs, the experts have come to a strikingly widespread consensus: Never mind that golden-years stuff. Keep working.
Of course, the government is thinking up ways to "encourage" us to keep working. And given the benefits, there may be a moral imperative to keep working as well, for the good of others.
So one prescription is obvious. Whatever else lawmakers do or don't do -- if they raise the age of Social Security or Medicare eligibility, if they establish private retirement accounts, if they index benefits for longevity -- it would be a fine thing, the wonks agree, if we'd keep working.
It's practically the public-spirited thing to do. If we remained in the workforce longer -- and labor force participation among older workers does appear to be inching upward -- we could postpone the age at which we receive Social Security checks, thus easing the drain. The higher taxes we would keep paying (including continued Social Security contributions) would help fill the federal coffers. And we could ward off a labor shortage that might threaten the whole economy.
The article offers three "serious changes" delaying retirement requires. Do you think these are the most important three? Do you have other ideas? Please share!
(a) Modifying traditional pension practices and regulations that discourage people from working longer.
(b) Persuading employers to get as excited about retaining or hiring older workers as labor analysts are.
And (c) subjecting the societal expectations and sense of entitlement built up over 70 years to a fast U-turn.
Here's the next seven (big caveat: I know these are broad generalizations, and subject to plenty of qualifiers. But that's okay, since I'm not trying to predict an actual future, but rather stimulate conversation and thinking about what the world would be like if these conditions actually become reality):
8. Work will be more collaborative, less individualistic
People will shift their work activities to their core competencies for approximately 80% of their time. Everything else will be handed off to someone with complementary competencies. Individuals themselves will become less ‘vertically integrated’ and grow loosely coupled collaborative networks to meet their needs outside their core competencies. No more "jack of all trades.’" The remaining time will be devoted to learning new skills and competencies.
9. Corporations will morph into confederations with shared liability
Modern corporations are an artificial legal structure created within the past one hundred years to minimize the risk associated with control of large asset bases. As Peter Drucker so aptly notes, they have out lived their usefulness. The assumptions that have underlain their need are not longer valid.
Primary among those assumptions is that large organizations were required to capitalize the investments required in the ownership of the means of production, such as factories. With a shift to more knowledge work this isn’t necessary for a much larger portion of the working population. Confederations of business clusters will instead move to the forefront. They will be held together by strategy, rather than by ownership of assets.
Last month a group of 12 university students representing the global NetGen (a.k.a. Internet Generation) gathered in Budapest for Microsoft's second annual Office Information Worker Board of the Future conference. At the end of the conference, the group issued five predictions for what the workplace will look like in 10 years. They were:
1. Connectivity will be truly ubiquitous. People will be able to work virtually anyplace, at any time. Firms will support this flexibility, while employees will increasingly supply their own connected systems, blurring the line between work life and personal life.
2. Interfaces will be more natural. The user interface will become more natural, contextually intelligent and adaptive — just better.
3. Technology at home will be integrated and include all forms of entertainment. Technology’s reach will extend to clothing and housewares, and personal finance will tie to the shopping experience. Consumer technology (and content) will pour into the workplace.
4. Learning will be driven by the individual. Increasing job movement will lead to greater self-initiated learning through on-demand, continually available forms of education, both formal and informal. The highly dynamic workplace will drive the need for lifelong learning.
5. Access to information will be smarter. Improved tools for discovering and using information will make possible a “collective intelligence,” and managers will benefit by making better-informed decisions more easily.
I didn't find anything particularly new or groundbreaking in these summaries, so I thought I'd get in touch with Microsoft to find out what was going on behind these predictions. What I found was very interesting indeed.
I spoke to Daniel Rasmus, director of Information Work Vision at Microsoft and leader of the Board of the Future project and two of the students who participated in the conference, Cherie Camille Wilson of the US and Varun Sunderraman of India (who now works in London) (their bios can be found here).
My cousin Katie is turning 30 in a couple of weeks, so I felt entitled, as the all-knowing older cousin, to offer a bit of advice on a milestone I passed several years ago. Then I started to think about where I was at 29 and where she is today, and the parallels starting jumping out at me. We had both fast-tracked our careers through our twenties and arrived at roughly the same place at 29:
* A great title
* Completely and utterly exhausted
* A great salary
* Bodies that were really unhappy with us
* Passionate about the theory of what we were doing
* Bored and irritated at the details
* A nice apartment
* Single (still). With cat(s).
Being logical women, we did a cost-benefit analysis of the previous 9 years and, while the benefits were high, the costs were high too -- and growing. Both of us made similar decisions: We walked. Katie is starting her studies for her master's degree full time in the fall. I slept for about six months, fell into consulting, and realized I loved being an independent.
So what does this have to do with the future of work? Well, from an anecdotal perspective, I took a look around at many of the people I know in their 30s and realized that they have made the same decision: to leave a (relatively) high powered, high paying position to pursue something else. Those who haven't done so send me emails all the time along the lines of "You are so brave, I wish I could do that." (Number one reason they don't? Health care.)
Thirtysomethings tend to be invisible these days. You see a lot of debate about boomers vs. NetGen/entry level folks, but not a lot about those now reaching mid-career. And I think that companies should be paying attention: many of these people want to leave.
Giovanni Rodriguez
Elizabeth Albrycht
Dave Desforges
Jim McGee
Jim Ware
