The Future of work have delivered an interesting theses on why and how the future of our working lives will be different from today .
Go and have a read of the whole blog if you are interested but here are the headlines:
1. Social bonds between worker and firm will decrease
Historically workers have been subservient to corporations because companies owned the means of production, such as factories. Individuals’ livelihoods depended on companies and they formed close connections with employers, often for life. These dependencies will decrease because large organizations are not needed to create value in a knowledge-driven economy.
More on this from Soshana Zuboff in her book the Support Economy
2. People (atoms) will combine into teams (molecules)
5. Work will take place in a greater range of locations
About 50% of the workforce will work in multiple locations depending on the task at hand, the “tools” available, and the requirements of the customer. The industrial model of everyone at the same place, same time (which was built on an ‘economy of scale principle’) will begin to disappear. Work activities will be distributed across central offices (40% of time), remote locations (40% of time) and transient community locations (20% of time).
6. Work will be spread out in time (not the 8 to 5 agricultural clock)
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.
11. The stars will be "producers," not CEO’s
12. Employment law will change to recognize a new category of relationship of people to organization
There is lots more, interesting stuff and has echoes I think of Richard Florida's book the Rise of the Creative Class
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