April 2007

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This Month's Headlines

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This is our personal note welcoming you to the April 2007 issue of Future of Work Agenda and setting our theme for the month. This month we continue our exploration of knowledge work, while we rant yet again about the growing shortage of people able to succeed in a knowledge-based economy.

Accenture Japan has won a prestigious international IFMA award for workplace design. And Accenture India is growing rapidly but maintaining a highly responsible environmental management program. Future of Work member Barry Tuchfeld's BT Group is expanding its "Aikido of Leadership" workshop series. The WDC calendar of public events and Future of Work program activities continues to be full for the next several months. And we're always seeking new members for our community.

Last month our feature article revisited an old but important question: "What is a Knowledge Worker, Anyway?" This month we continue our focus on understanding knowledge work and knowledge workers by exploring in more detail the nature of work itself. The themes are similar, but approaching the question by dissecting the kind of tasks that knowledge workers typically do brings new perspective and new insights into the conversation.

This section provides you with brief summaries of several recent notes we've already posted on the Future of Work weblog. In each case we also include a live link to the original post on the blog. And we encourage you to become a regular reader of the blog, where we are posting notes, case studies, and links to other important websites on a regular basis.

This is a new section that we plan to include every couple of months from now on. We're book junkies, constantly on the lookout for good ideas and magical insights that will solve all the world's problems. We haven't achieved that nirvana yet, but our failure hasn't stopped us from trying. Here's a set of mini-reviews of books that we're currently enjoying and learning from, and we think you will too.

We end each issue of Future of Work Agenda with a personal perspective - our chance to comment on issues and developments in the world of work that we find important and interesting. This is our "editorial" page, where we enjoy offering our opinions and predictions about what's happening (or should be happening) in the world of work and beyond.

From Jim and Charlie

Finally - it's gotten warm and sunny in our little corners of the planet. Al Gore is getting more -and well-deserved - press about global warming, and we don't want to be politically incorrect, but it's really, really nice to see the flowers blooming and the sun shining (okay, okay, we know Spring comes a little earlier here on the Left Coast than it does elsewhere in North America and on "the continent," as we're fond of calling Europe (with no offense meant to our many friends in the UK, which is of course a different place altogether). As for you folks Down Under, happy Fall! And may you finally get some of that rain you've been missing for the last four years.

Back to the future - of work. This month we continue our "thinking about thinking" by featuring another analysis of knowledge work - this time focusing less on the workers and more on what they do ("Towards a Typology of Knowledge Work"). We hope you'll find our framework and accompanying thoughts both interesting and useful.

We're particularly pleased that our recent attention to the messiness and virtual "unmanageability" of knowledge work has generated a whole passel of reader comments. We've already posted them on our blog, but they're also listed here in the Best of the Blog section, below. We hope you'll read them and add your own ideas to the conversation. As we've said many times before, we want this newsletter (and the blog) to be an interactive forum for ideas and debate. That's how we - and you - will learn and grow

By the way, we didn't think "unmanageability" was a real word, but that great big Microsoft Official Dictionary hidden somewhere inside our word processor accepted it without question. What do you know about that? Maybe Bill Gates has had a lot of unmanageable knowledge workers to deal with up there in Redmond.

But we digress.

Our rant this month ("One More Time - Who's Getting Left Behind?") actually touches on the dark side of knowledge work - or, more precisely, on the coming critical shortage of people who know how to think for a living (to borrow the title of Tom Davenport's excellent book on the subject; see our mini-review of that and three other important books in The WDC Bookshelf).

Back to the rant. It's not that there's anything inherently dark and sinister about knowledge work, but rather that the skills and competencies it takes to be successful these days (creativity, empathy, playfulness, story-telling, self-initiative, imagination, and so on) just don't seem to be understood or even valued by our formal educational system. The net of that rather Big Problem is that we're facing an unprecedented shortage of talent in the next few years.

This isn't the first time we've written about that very real challenge for businesses (in fact, we're beginning to feel like the proverbial falling tree in the woods that apparently doesn't make a sound because no one hears it). But we'll keep trying: if you aren't worried about workforce development and the attraction/retention of talented knowledge workers, then you really aren't paying attention.

Anyway, we're once again offering up our humble opinions about the workforce crisis. And we hope that just maybe this time you'll find our insights outta sight.

And as always, of course, we're also pleased to bring you our regular Announcements and the Best of the Blog section summarizing our most recent posts on the Future of Work blog. We continue to believe that you'll find ideas and information here that you just can't get anywhere else.

So, on to the rest of the newsletter. Enjoy! And please let us know what you think.

Announcements and News from the World of Work

Accenture Japan Receives Award for Workplace Design

Accenture's Facilities and Services group in Japan was given the Japan Facility Management Association's highest award for excelling in Corporate Real Estate and Facility Management initiatives. Accenture was selected out of 50 applicants ranging from large Japanese companies and financial institutions to Japanese hospitals and government facilities.

Please join us in congratulating the F&S Japan team for a job well done. The award will be presented during an elaborate award ceremony held at the Japan Facility Management Forum next month in Yokohama. The Japan Facility Management Association is the organization established for the promotion of Corporate Real Estate and Facility Management practice in Japan. The association is the Japanese branch of International Facility Management Association. For more information about the award, please contact Toshiyuki Matsumoto and Masahiro Watanabe.

Accenture India Leads the Way in Sustainability and Safety Initiatives

Dan Johnson, Global Director of CRE Workplace for Accenture, has shared with us an impressive case study of how an employee grass roots campaign in India has combined rapid growth with responsible environmental management and won several certifications in the process.

Accenture India has doubled in size every year for the past four years. Today the firm has 15 buildings housing over 26,000 employees. At the same time, in Accenture's largest building in India (indeed, it's largest anywhere) the workforce has been able to reduce paper consumption by 2%, water consumption by 7%, and electricity usage by 5%, even while supporting increased headcount.

These impressive results also produced two critical certifications: ISO 14001 for environmental management and Occupational Health and Safety Assessment Series (OHSAS) 18001 for occupational health and safety. This effort has led to an aggressive global program for similar environmental focus in other Geographies.

Download the entire case study at this link:

http://www.thefutureofwork.net/assets/Accenture_India_Case_Study.pdf

New Leadership Workshop Available from the BT Group

Future of Work member Barry Tuchfeld and the BT Group (http://www.consultbtgroup.com) are busy launching their newly revised "Aikido of Leadership" workshop as part of a five-part series that includes giving powerful presentations, innovative project management, developing work/life balance, and capitalizing on personal differences. Barry's team is also collaborating with Cap Creative doing interview and survey work to support a branding project with a rapidly growing Federal contractor. The BT Group is based in Sarasota, Florida; it helps clients find innovative solutions to engage employees, resulting in more profitability and more enjoyable places to work!

WDC and Future of Work Activities

Jim and Charlie will be describing the highlights of the WIRED West Michigan project at a panel discussion at the CoreNet Global Summit in Denver, April 29-May 2. The panel, which also includes Len Pilon of Herman Miller and Michelle Cleveland, advisor to the WIRED project, will be chaired by our good friend Mark Gorman of Nortel Networks.

We'll also be featured speakers at the IFMA Industries Forum 2007 being held in Atlanta, Georgia, May 2-4. Our topic there will be "Corporate Agility," which of course is the title of our new book, due to be published in May 2007 by the American Management Association.

We are also very pleased to announce that we'll be featured speakers at the IFMA World Workplace Conference in New Orleans, October 24-26

Future of Work Continues to Seek New Members

Future of Work offers several levels of membership that depend on your status and needs: Individual and Small Business, Corporate, and Implementation Partners. We also offer special discounts to nonprofit, educational, and public sector organizations.

These membership programs are described in more detail on the Future of Work website, or feel free to contact us directly for more information about fees and benefits.

All Future of Work members are now listed on the Future of Work website, in the About Us/Members section. We encourage all our readers to consider joining the community.

Please visit our website and apply for membership today.

Feature Article: Towards a Typology of Knowledge Work

Jim Ware and Charlie Grantham

Last month our feature article revisited an old but important question: "What is a Knowledge Worker, Anyway?" That article was an excerpt from a working paper we prepared as part of our work on the West Michigan WIRED project, which we have previously described several times.

This month we continue our focus on understanding knowledge work and knowledge workers by including another excerpt from that same WIRED working paper. After the opening general discussion about knowledge workers, we discussed the nature of work itself. The themes are similar, but approaching the question by dissecting the kind of tasks that knowledge workers typically do brings new perspective and new insights into the conversation.

0ur primary objective has been to develop a way to determine whether a given task, or job, could be effectively transitioned from a traditional work environment (read, "corporate office") to a more distributed situation - whether an individual should be a candidate for home-based work, or at least a more flexible work arrangement that is more "location-independent."

Research conducted by the Work Design Collaborative over the past five years suggests that there are at least seven important dimensions of work activity that have an impact on where, when, and how that work can be accomplished:

• Purpose - whether the task involves applying existing knowledge to a well-defined problem, or generating new knowledge.
   
  
• Process Structure - the extent to which the knowledge required to complete the task is known and codified in advance or is being created as needed, drawing on the individual's experience, intuition and creativity.
   
  
• Outcome Structure - the extent to which the outcome(s) of the work activity are known, predictable, and controllable. As will be described below, work tasks can be aligned along a spectrum from "production" work in which the work products are well-defined and highly uniform, to "research" and creative tasks in which the outcomes are unknown in advance.
   
  
• Interactivity - the extent and type of interaction involved in the normal conduct of the work. Is it done primarily by an individual, or through interaction with others (whether fellow employees or "outsiders" like customers, suppliers, government representatives, or other interested parties).
   
  
• Place - whether the work is tied to a specific place like a laboratory, a geographic location, or a particular work facility, or can be carried out in many different places.
   
  
• Proximity - must the work be co-located with other specific tasks (and the people doing them), or can it be carried out in a distributed environment?
   
  
• Time - when the task is accomplished, or must be accomplished, and in particular how it relates to other tasks; must it be carried out simultaneously with other tasks, or can they be completed asynchronously?
   
  

In combination, these seven dimensions of work activity create a complex variety of differing task configurations. Together they affect information and communications support requirements, and they define the technologies, facilities, and skills that are needed for workers and teams to be effective and productive.

To simplify this admittedly complex analysis, we have found it helpful to distill these seven broad attributes of work into three primary categories of knowledge activity that affect whether and how that work could (or should) be distributed over time and space:

1. The degree of structure in the work and its outcomes
2. The type of knowledge produced, and the way it is used
3. The extent to which the work is individual or collaborative

A complete analysis of a work environment will also take into account place, proximity, and time, but those factors (and their implications for distributed work) are much simpler to measure. Thus here we focus on structure, type of knowledge produced, its intended uses, and the degree of interactivity that is inherent in the tasks.

We have found the following diagram (Figure One) a useful way to describe these dimensions of work.

Figure One: Three Kinds of Work

The questions are, first, how predictable, or structured, are the outcomes of the work activity; and, second, how structured, or well-defined are the activities or processes that produce those outcomes?

If both the processes and the results are highly structured, it's "production work." There are certainly many organizational tasks that, even though they are very information-intensive, are essentially production work. For example, many call center jobs, accounting tasks, payment processing jobs, and even some technical support jobs are relatively routine activities that would actually decline in quality if the individuals doing them were to act creatively and deviate from prescribed procedures.

On the other hand, if both the task outcomes and the processes used to produce those outcomes are very loosely structured, it is creative work, or perhaps even research. And if the results are moderately structured, and generated by moderately structured processes, we call it "problem-solving." For example, a majority of technical support jobs involve a high degree of problem-solving. There is a reasonably well-defined outcome (though it will be different for each customer the tech support person responds to), and there are some known diagnostic questions or processes that guide the problem-solving, but each case is unique. The tech support person doesn't know until he or she picks up the telephone what problem needs solving.

This typology is useful because it provides guidelines about how to manage differing kinds of work (and in particular to highlight how the management challenges increase when these activities are distributed). For example, all the work over the last decade or two about Quality Control and Six Sigma is all about removing variations, or unpredictability, from production work.

However, we have come to realize that there is actually more structure, or discipline, in a lot of creative work, than Figure One implies (See, for example, "The Three D's of Creativity," Nancy Napier's article from Future of Work Agenda in March, 2005). Some structure is necessary to guide and focus creative work, or you end up with chaos. But, that said, creative work is clearly a different beast than production work.

And that's a big reason why it can be so difficult to manage creative work and creative workers, especially when they are remote, mobile, or highly distributed. As we've said many times, you can't order up a "batch of creativity" to be delivered at precisely 10 AM on Wednesday morning the way you can produce well-defined widgets coming off an assembly line.

How Interactive is the Work?

As noted earlier, some tasks are primarily individual in nature, while others are highly interactive. Many activities, like copywriting, programming, graphic design, and legal research, are "heads down" individual tasks that require only periodic interaction with others.

Other organizational roles, however, typically require extensive interaction, sometimes with the same people (e.g., team members, supervisors, peers) and sometimes with an ever-changing mix of others (e.g., customers, suppliers, public officials, etc). Each of these activities has a different pattern of interaction and mobility, resulting in different needs for physical and IT support.

Distributed knowledge workers whose jobs require interaction with others must rely on electronic media and postal and delivery services when they have to communicate, or on travel when it is necessary to meet face to face. In fact, many interactions are just as effective - and often actually more productive - when they take place electronically.

For many issues a telephone call can actually accomplish the required information exchange far more quickly than a face-to-face conversation. While informal social conversation is just as common in telephone calls as it is in face-to-face interaction, there is typically a good deal less of it - and of course it takes much less time to dial a phone number than it does to travel to another person's office or another city.

What makes this dimension of interactivity complex is something we all know intuitively: some kinds of interaction work just as effectively at a distance as they do in a face-to-face context, while in other cases the difference in quality between face-to-face and remote interaction can be profound. We're all accustomed to interacting with many kinds of customer service representatives, airline reservations agents, and even business colleagues by telephone or even email. But few of us would be happy participating in a personal counseling session, a medical examination, or a performance review over the telephone.

Dissecting knowledge work (and understanding knowledge workers) is clearly not a simple task. We can't produce a simple set of diagnostic questions that will reliably classify a given job as knowledge-based, or as amenable to being carried out remotely or in a mobile context. Judgment will always be required, as well as taking into account the individual motivations and values of the knowledge workers themselves.

This discussion has focused primarily on the tasks that knowledge workers carry out in their work. But we would be remiss if we didn't also acknowledge that one critical characteristic of knowledge work is that it is conducted by human beings - individuals who have distinctive work styles and preferences for where, when, and how they get their work done. Most knowledge-based work can follow many different paths to the same end point. Thus human judgment, including that of the individuals who are actually doing the work, is an important and indispensable component of the work design process.

It may ultimately be impossible to develop an "objective" diagnostic tool that will reliably separate knowledge work activities into those requiring proximity and those that are location-neutral. Individual preferences, the nature of the activities in question, and managerial judgment remain important components of the analysis.

As usual, your comments and reactions are more than welcome. As always, please send your thoughts to us at comments@thefutureofwork.net.

Best of the Blog

Here's a small sampling of excerpts/lead-ins from our recent weblog posts. Please get in the habit of reading the Future of Work weblog regularly - bookmark it, or if you have an RSS news reader, subscribe to it. And please contribute as well. We're more than happy to reprint your stories, or to consider featuring you as a Guest Writer. We believe we're creating a unique knowledge base of what's going on out there today, and what's going to be going on tomorrow. If you want to learn about the future of work, our blog is the place to go (along with this very newsletter, of course). Just click on each headline below to visit the full original blog post.

The Popular Science View of the Future of Work (March 9)

Charemon Tovar of Sprint recently alerted me to the March 2007 issue of Popular Science Magazine, which includes an intriguing and rather far-out look at the future of work. That section of the magazine is currently available for online viewing as a sample - normally the content is only accessible with a subscription. But for now anyway you can look at it yourself. . .

The Future of Work will be Fueled by Coffee (March 11)

Today's San Francisco Chronicle has a front-page story ("Where Neo-Nomads' Ideas Percolate") about the increasing popularity of coffeehouses as "offices." It's hardly new news, but Chronicle staff writer Dan Fost has done a great job of capturing the "scene," with several wonderful comments by the new "Bedouins" as they've started calling themselves. . . .

Some Thoughts on "What is a Knowledge Worker?" (March 12)

We received the following very thoughtful note last week from Larry West in response to our March newsletter's lead article, "What is a Knowledge Worker, Anyway?" ...

Greetings Jim and Charlie, Your article provoked some thoughts I'd like to share. As you point out, Knowledge Work encompasses the range of activities from Knowledge Executor to Knowledge Generator. So too does the assessment of 'What is Valued'....

More Comments on "What is a Knowledge Worker, Anyway?" (March 13)

Here's another thoughtful note in response to our March newsletter's lead article, "What is a Knowledge Worker, Anyway?" This one comes from Marcus Barber, a self-proclaimed futurist (just like me). . . .

Hi Jim & Charlie. Another fine newsletter and here's my take on the mythology of the Knowledge workforce. . . .

The Future of Work Includes "Co-Working" (March 13)

Right on top of my post on Sunday about the coffehouse/workplace phenomenon in San Francisco ("The Future of Work Will be Fueled by Coffee") our friend Jan Fosse of Allsteel reminded me of a similar article that appeared in Business Week's online Small Biz section back in late February ("Where the Coffee Shop Meets the Cubicle"). . .

More "Third Place" News (March 15)

I'm very pleased to report that Jeremy Schnitker, who writes for Solegig News, has just posted a nice story about the growing importance of "Third Places" in the world of work ("Third Places offer ways for freelancers to solve the isolation problem")....

Does the Future of Work Include a Billion One-Person Enterprises? (March 20)

Francois Gossieaux, the president of Corante, recently pointed to an important article in Fast Company about the continuing erosion of the industrial, hierarchical model of organization. His blog, Emergence Marketing, featured this post earlier today: "Is the end of the hierarchical organization in sight?"...

California Management Review Special Issue on Workplace Design (March 22)

We think it's a momentous occasion, and maybe a small indicator that workplace design really is becoming more strategic. The current issue of California Management Review, the quarterly academic journal published by the Haas School of Business at University of California, Berkeley, is devoted entirely to workplace design....

The WDC Bookshelf: What We're Reading Right Now

Every once in a while we like to share with you what it is that we at WDC are reading. We are admittedly book junkies always on the lookout for new and interesting insights into our favorite subject, the future of work. So here are a few of the books that we're working our way through at present.

Note: we've included links to the where you can find these books on Amazon.com, but we want to be completely candid that we have no financial arrangements with Amazon or any other booksellers; we just want to make it easy for you to read what others are saying about our favorite authors and tomes.

So, in no particular order, here's what you'd find on our desks and nightstands this month.

Smart Communities, by Suzanne W. Morse (2004)

We learned about this smart book from our "client" and good friend in West Michigan Penny Ladd, who is Chair of the Advisory Council for our "Knowledge Workers and Economic Development" initiative there.

Author Suzanne Morse is President of the Pew Partnership for Civic Change. Her many years of experience in community development and "rebirth" come to fruition in this easy-to-read guide to using strategic thinking to enhance communities. The book is full of case studies and principles for revitalizing communities, including these critical seven that form the heart of the book:

• Investing right the first time
• Working together
• Building on community strengths
• Practicing democracy
• Preserving the past
• Growing leaders
• Inventing a brighter future

They sound almost simplistic and so true you wonder, "So what?" But we guarantee that the realities in most communities make these difficult rules to live by. It's a great resource for anyone interested in economic or community development, or in just thinking through what it takes to wake up a community and get it moving in the right direction.

The Coming Generational Storm, by Laurence J. Kotlikoff and Scott Burns (2004)

If you're looking for a book to read as you fall asleep at night, stay away from this one. It's a weighty tome about an incredibly important topic - the way demographics are changing the very fabric of our economy and our basic society. The subtitle is "What You Need to Know about America's Economic Future," but it's really about more than just economics. Think about politics, geography, recreation, health care, insurance, transportation - and that's just for starters.

Sure, we've all heard about how the impending retirements of millions of Baby Boomers are going to leave employers struggling to replace them, but how many of us understand just how the "aging" of America (the book is focused on North America) will impact the economy more broadly? Have you thought about how the stock market will behave when all of those "old fogies" starting spending their 401K's instead of investing them? Or who's going to buy all those big homes when the Boomers begin downsizing? Or what's going to really happen to Social Security and Medicare when 77 million new retirees begin drawing on those critical programs?

Like it or not, this is a book that will keep you awake at night. As well it should. Special thanks to Future of Work member Mark Lautman for alerting us to this highly unsettling account of our future.

Thinking for a Living, by Tom Davenport (2005)

As anyone who's read our March and April issues of this newsletter knows by now, we've been spending a lot of time recently trying to understand knowledge workers and knowledge work (actually, we've been studying and writing about knowledge work for several decades). But no one has thought more about this important topic, or written more cogently about it, than Tom Davenport.

Davenport holds the President's Chair in Information Technology and Management at Babson College. He is also Director of Research for Babson Executive Education and an Accenture Fellow. Not only that, but he's both smart and very likable.

The best way to position this book for you is to quote Warren Bennis (Distinguished Professor of Business at USC), from the back cover:

Finally, the long-awaited book on knowledge workers: who they are, what they do, how essential they've become, and how to harness and deploy their consequential talents. It will soon become the classic work on knowledge management.

If knowledge workers are important to your business and your future, get this book and read it.

The Medici Effect, by Frans Johansson (first edition, 2004; a later paperback edition is also available)

Our work in developing the concept of Business Community Centers^TM, along with our research on workplace design, has convinced us beyond a doubt that one critical contributor to success in the future of work is going to be a combination of individual creativity and organizational innovation.

Frans Johansson has known that for a long time, and this book is his insightful analysis of the conditions of creativity. He's taken on that core question that vexes so many of us: what is the process of creativity all about? And where does it come from? More importantly, what can we do to foster and enable creativity?

The answer is deceptively simple, and Johansson wastes no time in sharing his insight with us. In his own words, from page 2 of the Introduction: "The idea behind this book is simple: When you step into an intersection of fields, disciplines, or cultures, you can combine existing concepts into a large number of extraordinary new ideas."

The whole book is about making that notion come alive. It's filled with stories, examples, and principles that will repeatedly have you saying, "Of course" and "Why didn't I think of that?" This is not to say the book is trivial or obvious, because it's not. But if you are involved in, or responsible for, new product development, marketing and advertising, or even plain old manufacturing operations, you'll find this a wonderful journey through a very exciting field of dreams and possibilities.

In Our Humble Opinion: One More Time - Who's Getting Left Behind?

Commentary by Charlie Grantham and Jim Ware

Readin', writin' and 'rithmatic...

Well the boys is back in town. Buford brought back a big bag of worry after his visit down south of the border. Wassup with all that hoopla about sending jobs from the good 'ol U.S. of A. somewhere else? So we sent Cooter (the data sniffin' hound) out for a look-see on the Internet. And a tip of the ol' chapeau to Cousin Barry down there in Florida for pointing us in the right direction.

We could rant on and on about just how big a mess we're getting ourselves into (and you might say we're doin' exactly that). Everybody seems to have their very own numbers and it would take a dozen Philadelphia lawyers to sort it all out. And lord knows we can't afford those legal eagle fees.

So we turned to Maynard, our resident clairvoyant, who allows that a combination of things like birth rates, people getting older, and stuff changing faster than a burnt-out light bulb puts us (as in the U.S.) in a real pickle. Seems we just don't have enough smart, educated folks to handle all the jobs we're going to need filled in the next few years. Maynard's best guess is we're gonna be short somewhere north of 10 million worker-folks within a half dozen years or so. That's a lot!

And it isn't just about numbers. It's what people know and how much experience they've got at using their heads. Some of them, unfortunately, just haven't got the good sense God gave a goose. Check out some stuff Cooter dug up (he's a dog and does that kind of thing naturally):

• By 2012 the United States will need 18 million college grads but will only produce 12 million. Duh, now there is a shortfall if we ever saw one.
   
  
• More than 50% of four-year college grads today lack basic skills like reading a news story (we'll keep this here newsletter of ours out of those statistics) or understanding a document like a contract; and they can't balance their checkbook. Dear hearts, this is really scary stuff.
   
  
• 68% of new college hires fail basic literacy and arithmetic tests. Those are the ones who get through the recruiting interviews and actually get a job offer!
   
  

Look, we're not blowing smoke up your nose (don't think too much about that imagery). The smart folks at the Pew Charitable Trust and the American Institutes for Research came up with those little factoids. Go check them out at http://measuringup.highereducation.org/ or http://www.air.org/assessment/default.aspx. You'll have to do a little digging of your own, but those links will get you started.

Now that we've got your attention, let's talk. It's not like we can just open up a can of "whoop butt" and turn it loose on all those principals, teachers, and other learnin' specialists. The rock we gotta turn over is a whole lot bigger than that. "No Child Left Behind": you gotta be kidding. You have to be snortin' a lot of rock dust to believe that simply mandating test scores without funding the schoolin' needed to achieve those scores is going to work.

And it's not just one kid, it's the whole blasted country that's getting left behind. Speaking of "behinds," Buford told us that most of the folks talking about this issue remind him of the south end of a north-bound horse. Get our drift?

So, In Our Humble Opinion (kind of snuck up on ya, huh?) this mess need someone to take a whole new look at the problem. Gotta turn it upside down, inside out, and see it in a new light (enough metaphors for you there?).

We (the two of us) believe the problem is "simply" that we (all of us, together) are not developing our workforce fast enough, or well enough, to meet the challenges of the workplace of the future (okay, okay, it isn't really all that simple).

Let's get down to the bottom of this slime pit. In Our Humble Opinion (twice in three paragraphs!), four things have to happen. First, we need to find sources of talent other than what pops out the end of the assembly line of our formal education system. (We've got a nice little metaphor to describe that "output." Let's just say it's in the barnyard vernacular.) But that's a whole 'nother rant and the unions would be after us like white on rice.

Instead, we think you need to take a hard look at "retired" talent; at re-skilling programs like they do in Europe; and at setting up a formal system to connect "stray" labor (yes, we invented the term) like housewives, and husbands for that matter, who want little gigs but can't stomach being tied to a 9 to 5 schedule. Some folks call that part-time work, or contingent labor. How many HR departments have the systems, let alone the stomach, to hire folks who are only there part of the time? But part-time sure beats no-time in our book.

Now, here comes the biggy. We've got to get away from off-shoring and start "on-shoring," or moving work to lower-cost places right here in the United States (look, we never claimed to be politically correct). Just how many people living in Dubuque, Iowa (for example), have a good education and are looking for something to do, but (for whatever reason) don't want to move to where the jobs supposedly are?

Hey, we don't know how many of those kind of folks are out there, but a dollar to a donut says there's a whole bunch. Go find 'em! And, as we're fond of saying, ship the work (electronically) to the workers, rather than making them move where the work is now. And while you're at it, you may just want to take a peek at those three million or so Native Americans living on reservations who would love to find a productive way to enter the workforce but don't want to leave their culture and their homelands behind.

While we're on a rant 'n roll here, our next idea is that we've got to turn today's "economic development" model upside down. It isn't about bringing in yet another Wal-Mart (Did we say that? Must've been Maynard). It's about spiffyin' up your little village so that cool people (read "talented knowledge workers") actually want to move there and stay. You're going to hear a lot more about this approach next month. We're wound tighter than a three-dollar watch about it.

And, okay, the last thing to do is to really fix the educational system. We mean, take it apart piece by piece and put it back together again (some assembly required), but this time use the damn instruction manual. To quote Buford's ol' buddy Pogo, "We have met the enemy and the enemy is us!" (that's an age test; we'll bet most of you are too young to remember Pogo and his buds down in the swamp - but that's your loss).

To be serious for just a moment (not an easy thing for us to do), you can't take a system that spits out good, reliable, "color inside the lines" talent and expect it to succeed in today's, let alone tomorrow's, world. We need a "No business left behind" national policy (more on that idea in the near future, too). Good grief, wake up America!! Our hats are off to Earl Pitts for that one.

The big question: are we (as a nation) up to it? Do we care enough? Just ask our spiritual advisor and patron saint, Tom Friedman: Will the United States be able to compete, or even survive, in a truly flat world?

We're outta here; back next month with more rantin' and ravin'.

Please direct your comments to comments@thefutureofwork.net. We'd love to publish your reactions and suggestions. And thanks for listening.

This issue of Future of Work Agenda was produced by Jim Ware and Charlie Grantham of the Work Design Collaborative. We encourage your comments, suggestions, and submission of materials for possible future publication. Please contact us at:

Charlie Grantham, charlie@thefutureofwork.net, or Jim Ware, jim@thefutureofwork.net

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