December 2007

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This is our personal note welcoming you to the November 2007 issue of Future of Work Agenda and setting our theme for the month. This month we do some of our traditional looking back/looking ahead. What didn't happen this year? What did that we didn't expect? What's 2008 going to be like? You may not like our answers.

We're launching a new consortium focused on transforming communities, economic development, and working/commuting patterns. And Charlie's been appointed Chair of the Mayor's Advisory Committee on Economic Development in Prescott, Arizona.

Each year about this time we force ourselves to review our prognostications and predictions from a year ago. We're fond of saying that the nice thing about being futurists is that no one can prove us wrong. But when you've been around as long as we have, your past has a way of sneaking up on you. Besides, we actually enjoy learning from our prior predictions and trying to get better next time. So this month we reflect a bit on our expectations for 2007, admit to our mistakes, and lay a foundation for 2008.

Carolyn Burns pushed back a bit on several of the premises in our November article "Designing the Work Experience." She makes a good point that we may not have been completely fair to the architecture and design profession. However, we stand by our original position that there's plenty of room for far more creative approaches to workspace planning and design.

Clever companies are redesigning their offices to make collaboration and teamwork a more essential part of every employee's day. This article, written originally for Business 2.0 Magazine by Michal Lev-Ram, is reprinted here with the permission of the author.

The subtitle of the book says it all: "Aligning business, earth, and humanity." This book, written by a distinguished professor of business at Cornell University, is certainly a worthy follow-on to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth film and book. Hart's basic thesis is that going green is good for business.

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.

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

Believe it or not, this is our last issue for 2007. Another whole year just about gone. That's hard for guys like us who focus on the future to accept. Why is it that time speeds up as we get older?

Anyway, best wishes from us to you for the holiday season - whichever one (or ones) you celebrate. They all seem to blur together these days. Maybe we're just a bit worn out already.

Or perhaps it's because we're marking the impending end of the year with a (mildly) nostalgic and somewhat pessimistic look back at "What Didn't Happen in 2007" in our feature article.

In all candor, there have been more exciting, and more satisfying, years for the future of work. This one seems kinda flat to us. Maybe meaningful progress is just hard to see when you're in the middle of it (we were hoping to drain the swamp….). But 2007 strikes us as a time when many of the hopes and dreams we were harboring just didn't come to pass. And when things don't go as planned (or hoped for) it's important to see what blocked those changes. "Things" certainly don't go up and up forever; 2007 has apparently been a Time Out in the march of progress.

Sure, it was a good year for some technologies - the iPhone comes to mind. And social networking technologies and websites seem to have gone into orbit this year. But for those of us who measure progress by looking at the long-term health of the economy, the environment, and our local communities, it just didn't feel like the kind of year we'd hoped for twelve months ago.

As someone said once, "Rome wasn't built in a day." Then again, we're naturally impatient, and sometimes it's hard to see the baby steps this year that are a very real beginning of the Big and Very Long Journey that we know the economy has to take to survive.

Anyway, we hope you'll find our reflections at least a bit provocative. Feel free to share your own thoughts about 2007 with us, and we'll pass them on either here next month or on the blog even sooner.

Actually this issue has plenty of more uplifting material as well. We've included (with permission) a special article on Designing Workplaces for Collaboration that originally appeared in Business 2.0. And we've reviewed a fascinating new book called Capitalism at the Crossroads that is sure to make you think hard about the future.

We're also excited to announce the launching of a new membership program, this one focused on the future of communities and the very critical intersection between the corporate need for talent and the local community need for talented, successful citizens. We're tentatively calling the new venture the Community Design Institute and we'd welcome your participation.

And as always, of course, we're also pleased to bring you 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 and on the blog that you just can't get anywhere else.

But then there's our monthly rant. As much as we hate to end on a downer, we are above all realists, and the hard truth is that we think 2008 may make 2007 look like paradise. Please sit down before you get into "In Our Humble Opinion: Trouble Ahead?"

Unfortunately, we're not alone in predicting a major economic slowdown in 2008 (heck, our first draft called it a Dead Stop). Sadly, when you pile up the subprime mortgage fiasco, the weakening dollar, the federal deficit, the trade deficits, the melting polar ice caps, and that war thingie, it feels like we ought to just light a match to the whole pile and come back when the ashes have cooled off.

Of course we can't and won't give up - or light that match. We'll be back in your face in early January with a more optimistic view of the future of work - we promise. In yoga practice there is a technique focused on breathing in and out. The analogy we see is that in 2006 we were breathing in, gathering energy; 2007 turned into holding our breath; and we think 2008 will be the breathing out and getting ready for the next cycle.

In the meantime, do enjoy the holidays, and let your friends and family know how much you care about them. Every day is a blessing, and this is the season for sharing and giving. Don't forget that ultimately our future is what we choose to make of it.

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

Announcements and News from the World of Work

WDC is Launching a New Membership Program

Our recent research on the future of work and the changing values of workers has led us to identify the underlying driver of economic change as the search for, and the retention of, "talent," especially knowledge workers.

To this end we have recently been engaged in several projects focused on economic and workforce development issues. In a way, companies are the demand side of the talent equation, while local communities are becoming the supply side of the equation. And talented knowledge workers, especially twenty- and thirty-somethings, are making decisions about where to live before they make decisions about employment.

We believe this new dynamic is turning the world of economic development upside down. It requires a major re-orientation of that profession, and of communities themselves. After several visits, speeches, and presentations to organizations like the International Economic Development Council (IEDC), the National Association of Industrial and Office Properties (NAIOP), and the Building and Office Management Association (BOMA), we have concluded that the thought leadership and applied research needed to support this fundamental change does not exist today.

This situation is similar to the conclusion we reached regarding corporate real estate management in 2001, when we formed Future of Work, a consortium of organizations working together to explore and define the future of work and the workplace.

We believe the challenge for communities today is to determine how they can become both more agile in their development efforts and more attractive to talented knowledge workers. How can they develop their capabilities, position themselves, and market themselves aggressively so that they can become magnets for talent? We are convinced that talent will drive future economic success in both living and working environments.

We are therefore announcing the formation of a Community Design Institute (working title) to develop and disseminate new knowledge in this emerging interdisciplinary field. We intend to form a "community of communities" and produce an integrated set of projects aimed at articulating the challenges and opportunities facing communities and local developers in the new, global, knowledge-based economy.

CDI's purpose as we currently envision it is to connect local communities to a larger network of innovative workplace practices that can help them "export" their local talent to a global, knowledge-intensive marketplace.

CDI will accomplish this goal by conducting leading-edge applied research and development projects; by aggressively pursuing thought leadership activities; by enabling experience sharing and collaborative learning among the members; and by acting as a voice for evolving models of economic and community development.

We invite you to play a leadership role in this dynamic community. CDI sponsors will pay a single annual fee to help design and participate in leading-edge research. They will also become part of a unique peer network that includes private working sessions, teleconferences, and ongoing electronic dialogues about practices that drive organizational effectiveness, workforce productivity, and meaningful change.

Membership will be limited to no more than twenty communities and/or regional economic development organizations. Each community membership includes representatives from local government, public education, and/or economic development, with underlying sponsorship provided by a local commercial real estate or development organization.

The inaugural meeting of the Community Design Institute will be in March, 2008, in Prescott, Arizona, hosted by the newly-elected Mayor of Prescott, Jack Wilson.

For more information please contact Charlie Grantham at Charlie@thefutureofwork.net. We'll be more than happy to provide you with a formal invitation and prospectus.

Charlie Takes on a Civic Leadership Position

We are very pleased to announce that Charlie has been appointed as Chairperson of the Prescott, Arizona, Mayor's Advisory Committee on Economic Development. The appointment is for a two-year term beginning November 27th, 2007.

The committee is structured to provide policy advice and counsel to the Mayor and City council. Other committee members include the heads of local colleges and universities, major employers, and elected officials from city and county governments.

This appointment provides us with an unique opportunity to help a local government move into the future of work. Charlie's emphasis will be on developing policies and programs that help the community attract and retain knowledge workers. We anticipate transferring much of the knowledge gained in our WIRED West Michigan project to another region of the country. We'll keep you posted.

Feature Article: What Didn't Happen in 2007

by Charlie Grantham and Jim Ware

Each year about this time we force ourselves to review our prognostications and predictions from a year ago. We're fond of saying that the nice thing about being futurists is that no one can prove us wrong. But when you've been around as long as we have, your past has a way of sneaking up on you. Besides, we actually enjoy learning from our prior predictions and trying to get better next time.

So this month we'll reflect a bit on our expectations for 2007, admit to our mistakes, and lay a foundation for 2008. Look for a new set of our fearless future visions in the January issue, right when you're all in the middle of making your own New Year's Resolutions.

We're going to review the year along our three traditional dimensions of technology, real estate, and human resources. But before we begin, we feel compelled to comment on how as we get older (and it's hard not to) we're getting more and more conservative in our predictions and expectations. We may not have learned much over the years, but one thing stands out for us at this point: there are really only two kinds of change.

"Type A" changes are those unexpected, major events that seem come out of almost nowhere and catch all of us by surprise. Sometimes those surprises are genuine disasters (like Katrina, or the California wildfires, or the subprime mortgage crisis, or the more recent Bangladesh cyclones). Of course, in hindsight we can almost always figure out the underlying causes, and we always chastise ourselves for being so blind to what so quickly becomes obvious. Unfortunately, however, hindsight isn't really worth all that much. Sure, it's important to learn from experience, but when the stakes are big we'd much rather avoid surprises.

What we call "Type B" change is a whole lot more subtle. In fact, it's the kind of change that almost never makes the news. It's the slow, imperceptible kind of change that we find really, really hard to see. For example, until recently global warming and melting ice caps simply weren't visible to most of us, and so for all practical purposes didn't exist. Of course, we appear to have run right past the tipping point in that area.

Our point in highlighting slow, subtle change, is that most of us get so excited about new technologies, or new management practices, that we manage to convince ourselves that change is inevitable, and will happen as fast as we can think about it. After all, if we can see the possibilities, can't everyone else too?

Uh, no way Jose. The biggest fallacy futurists make is in expecting human institutions and human behavior to change quickly. It's not that Type A Change never happens, but that it's rare (and it's usually preceded by years of small Type B changes that are there if you look hard enough, even though most of us don't).

Thus, we approach this prediction/postdiction exercise a bit chastened and a bit "sadder but wiser" than we were a year or two ago.

So that's enough philosophizing. Here's the Big Question: What did we think was going to happen in 2007 but didn't? And How Come?

Again, we'll look at the world in three big buckets: IT, HR, and Real Estate.

Technology

We've been predicting for several years that WiFi would become ubiquitous, and Wi-Max would actually overtake WiFi in popularity.

Not yet. The most stunning examples are Chicago's decision to pull the plug (pardon the metaphor) on its WiFi network in August (Wi-Fi Networking News). That was followed quickly by the same kind of action in Atlanta. The same thing is happening in Tempe, Arizona (News.com: Lesssons Learned in Tempe). And San Francisco is also bogged down in funding issues and political conflict.

It's hard to tell exactly what's going on, but our take is that the financing model those cities were attempting to leverage just didn't work. The 2006 hype was all about "free access" for the masses. Well, businesses don't operate for free.

How come the model fell apart? Well, our vaunted 20-20 hindsight tells us the market didn't mature fast enough. Some of that may have been glitches and hiccups in WiMax product development, but we suspect it was more about resistance from existing cable and landline providers combined with a lack of political will and imagination. For those of you old enough to remember this feels like déjà vu all over again.

Remember those halcyon days of "municipal networks" promised by the cable TV industry when they wanted exclusive franchise rights in the late 80's? It's incredibly ironic (but, for us cynics, no surprise) that now that those firms are "insiders" they seem to be the ones blocking progress towards the next generation of technology.

We actually thought that municipal WiFi would be widely recognized as a 21st-century urban infrastructure that's just as critical to the common good as roads, bridges, street lights, sewers, and railroads have been for the past 200 years. And while we still believe that logic, apparently the realities of public investments in an anti-tax age kept the market growth well below what we expected. It takes a gutsy politician to invest public funds in building new technology infrastructure.

On the positive side, we've noticed more and more open and free WiFi systems in airports; on trains, planes, and even busses; in hotels; and in all those Internet café's and coffee shops.

So to be on the safe side, we're now planning on just watching this technology carefully. We still believe it's important, and we still believe it will eventually be the way millions of us access the Internet and make phone calls, but we think the general economic slowdown facing the United States in the near future will keep WiMax most definitely a Type B change for the time being.

Human Resources

The big story here is that most senior executives still don't have the faintest clue how critical the global talent shortage is becoming. This is not a new story. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) actually believes we passed the threshold for knowledge workers in 2007 - but that's hardly front-page news, even though we know it should be.

What's going on? How are organizations and communities coping? We really don't know, but we suspect that the gradual cooling off of the economy (and the increasing probability of a serious recession in 2008) are masking the shortages. Historically low unemployment rates in most parts of the country make it seem like everything is just hunky-dory.

But we've also been suggesting for some time that traditional employment statistics are inaccurate, incomplete, and actively misleading. Employment patterns have shifted so far away from traditional Industrial-Age institutions and towards small businesses and free agents that BLS statistics just don't tell the whole story - or even the real story. Our own experience tells us that there are lots of struggling, unprofitable small businesses today, and many that are still just a gleam in some entrepreneur's eye or at best an unfunded business plan in a glossy binder rather than a living, breathing business.

A 2006 article in The Economist included this observation:

"All the same, structural changes are making talent ever more important. The deepest such change is the rise of intangible but talent-intensive assets. Baruch Lev, a professor of accounting at New York University, argues that "intangible assets"-ranging from a skilled workforce to patents to know-how-account for more than half of the market capitalisation of America's public companies. Accenture, a management consultancy, calculates that intangible assets have shot up from 20% of the value of companies in the S&P 500 in 1980 to around 70% today. (October 5, 2006)

And according to Manpower Inc.'s 2007 Talent survey (PDF), 40% of companies surveyed worldwide report difficulties in finding the talent they need. And it's not just engineers. It's medical professionals, skilled trades, and sales representatives.

Real Estate

Here's where we naively expected major change in 2007. Corporate real estate portfolios have been underutilized for years; the whole profession knows there's at least 30% more commercial office space on the market than is needed (and that doesn't count corporate space that is empty even though it's still being paid for).

We genuinely believed there would be major realignments and rebalancing in 2007. But once again, we were incredibly overoptimistic.

What's happening? In part, we believe the entire real estate industry - brokers, developers, owners, lenders, facilities managers - evolved over time to support a far more stable, slower-changing world than the one we're now living in. Current lease structures actively discourage the actions almost any rational decision-maker would take. And existing facilities are not only in the wrong places but they are built to support patterns of work that no longer exist.

What's preventing change? We nominate sunk cost, and major investments valued at cost, not at market. Unfortunately, most investors are unwilling to cut their losses and invest in change. They feel tied to their past investments and remain hopeful they'll be able to recover eventually.

Perhaps more importantly, portfolio managers are stuck in functional stovepipes. There isn't enough high-level, integrated, cross-functional thinking and problem-solving going on (we call that all-too-rare commodity "Collaborative Strategic Management" - and, forgive the plug, we actually wrote a book about it that you might have heard of: Corporate Agility).

But we actually believe the problem - and the opportunity for change - is far bigger and deeper than general organizational unwillingness to face up to real estate portfolio optimization. As we've said and written many times previously, the underlying challenge is the need to completely redesign the way people work, the places where they work, the ways they get to those places, and even the whole concept of work itself. And that, friends, is a Very Big Change that simply can't be - and won't be - accomplished overnight, or even over a small number of years.

We foresee continued margin pressure on almost every organization that owns, operates, or invests in real estate. We just haven't reached a critical mass, or a severe enough crisis, to force the really basic transformation that's needed in how real estate and workplaces are brought into being and utilized. There's a need for thinking much more broadly here - not just about architecture and design, or construction processes, but more fundamentally about where, how, and when people work, why they travel to commercial buildings at all, and what the total costs (economic, social, environmental) are of commuting to and using large downtown offices.

Our biases in this area, and our frustrations with the slow pace of change, are surely showing by now. A year ago we genuinely believed there would be several physical examples of our concept of Business Community Centers^TM up and running by December 2007. But no, it turns out that we haven't had a big-enough "Type A" crisis yet to wake people up to the need for really radical - and Big - rethinking about the organization and management of work.

Most of the attention has been focused on the meltdown in residential real estate. What too many people are missing is the movement of commercial real estate dollars to non-US markets (see for example the well-written, comprehensive blog Seeking Alpha: Housing Bubble and Real Estate Tracker, edited by Judy Weil).

While no one wants to speak publicly about it, we keep hearing that the real estate money doesn't know where to go, so they are sitting on piles of uninvested cash. But that money will sit for only so long, and then who knows what will happen?

We believe that this issue is sitting right at the intersection of community economic development and corporate cash. But the talent will have to move first to create the localized demand. Traditional corporate real estate investors unfortunately are terribly strong on building in the path of growth. They tend to get on the last car of the train out of the station.

Reader Response

Carolyn Burns pushed back a bit on several of the premises in our November article "Designing the Work Experience" (PDF). She makes a good point that we may not have been completely fair to the architecture and design profession. However, we stand by our original position that there's plenty of room for far more creative approaches to workspace planning and design.

Hi Jim and Charlie,

I thought your article in the November newsletter was interesting but not particularly radical or new. In my experience the best corporate interior architects (those who focus on workplace as a tool rather than design to feature in magazines), furniture manufacturers and workplace strategists have been encouraging clients to think in new ways about how we really work, how we could work more productively and what tools and systems could be used to support work. The issue is that most clients (not necessarily the organisations who are members of Future of Work!) find it hard (too hard!) and too risky to challenge themselves or their executives.

I also beg to differ on your assertion that abductive thinking is new. Again, the concept of "what if" has been part of a good workplace strategist's tool box for decades. Similarly, the discipline of scenario planning essentially provides a framework for creating radical new realities (not necessarily the most likely) and using these scenarios to explore the implications within a specific context. You are probably familiar with the work of Dr George Cairns who has combined scenario planning, critical thinking and concepts around work and workplace for many years to challenge pre-conceived notions of what the future might be and how we might respond.

But apart from these comments I generally enjoy your newsletters and your articles so please keep it up!

Thanks, regards
Caroline

Bonus Article: Designing Workspaces for Collaboration

By Michal Lev-Ram, Business 2.0 Magazine writer-reporter

Clever companies are redesigning their offices to make collaboration and teamwork a more essential part of every employee's day.

The configuration of an office can have a dramatic impact on how employees do their jobs. No secret there.

Yet since the late 1960s, corporate workplaces have been dominated by cubicles and private offices - an arrangement that does little to encourage interaction and communication.

Some have tried eliminating private workspaces altogether, but a few early experiments, like ad agency TBWA/Chiat/Day's infamous mid-1990s "virtual office" in Manhattan, flopped, leading only to turf wars and employee strife.

Nevertheless, after sifting through the ruins of such high-profile disasters, smart companies are rethinking the fundamentals of office design, led by the realization that collaboration is an increasingly critical ingredient for business success.

"There are few organizations that don't rely on some kind of collaboration today," says Franklin Becker, director of the international workplace studies program at Cornell University. "But to make that work, you have to create a motive for people to get out of their individual space."

One-size-fits-all approaches seldom work. Software engineers need more privacy than salespeople, for example, yet they also need more encouragement to mix and mingle.

Here's how three companies redesigned their offices to make their workers more effective.

Killing Off the Cubicle: Cisco Systems

The Challenge: Cubicles [at Cisco] sat vacant 35 percent of the time; surveys revealed that workers came to the office primarily for meetings and to socialize.

The Design: Since few were using their desks to get work done, Cisco tore out the cubicles and converted the office into a flexible, multifunctional space where employees can plop down their laptops to work wherever they want.

Also Ideal for: Mobile workers or sales, marketing, and biz-dev teams.

Rolling Furniture

Desks, chairs, and dividers on wheels give employees the freedom to arrange their workspace according to their needs.

Audio-Privacy Rooms

Enclosed offices have transparent glass walls to discourage employees from "parking" in the space reserved for phone use.

IP Phones

Staffers can transfer all their calls to any phone in the office.

More Sociable Engineering: Google

The Challenge: Foster employee interaction while giving software engineers the privacy they need to crank out code.

The Design: Workers are assigned desks and offices, all of which are arrayed around "Main Street" - an airy central atrium that employees traverse several times each day. Popular Main Street amenities help lure employees away from their computer screens and into common areas.

Also Ideal for: Collaboration-oriented companies staffed with employees - such as analysts, writers, or accountants - whose jobs also require intense concentration.

Group Workstations

Engineers work together in office pods of four or five people - a configuration derived from Google's grad-school roots.

Central Stairway

An inviting slope of Brazilian hardwood doubles as an informal meeting space. Electrical outlets built into the steps keep the conversation juiced.

Meeting Yurts

Collapsible conference rooms are scattered throughout the office, so workers can always find a private place to huddle on specific problems.

Communal Areas

Kitchenettes stocked with snacks are never more than 100 feet away from any desk, while pool tables provide an excuse to linger and talk.

Do-It-Yourself Team Building: Gravity Tank

The Challenge: At a Chicago-based design strategy firm, create a flexible layout for project teams that work together for months at a time.

The Design: Groups of four or five employees cluster in semi-enclosed "bays" built from thick cardboard. The bays are easily reconfigured to suit the needs of each team. The entire workspace was built on a $20,000 budget.

Also Ideal for: Startups or small professional services firms where intense collaboration is essential but remodeling budgets are tight.

Cardboard Panels

Lightweight dividers hang from an overhead grid, making it easy to adapt workspaces to changing project team requirements.

Functional Furniture

Each bay houses a conference table and two small desks, but space is tight, so employees naturally gravitate to the larger table.

Bulletin Boards

The cardboard dividing panels also provide plenty of pinup surface area to display drawings, project timetables, or works in progress.

Table Storage/Supplies

Power outlets, Ethernet cables, and trays for office supplies are built into each large table, so employees always have convenient access to the tools they need to work.

You can contact Michal Lev-Ram about this story at mlevram@business2.com.

Book Review

Capitalism at the Crossroads. Second Edition, by Stuart L. Hart, Wharton Publishing, 2007 (Foreword by Al Gore). (link is to Amazon.com)

By Charlie Grantham

The subtitle of the book says it all: Aligning business, earth, and humanity. This book, written by a distinguished professor of business at Cornell University, is certainly a worthy follow-on to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth film and book.

Hart's basic thesis is that going green is good for business.

Business models that negatively impact the global environment are not sustainable. Perhaps cost savings can be realized in the short run, but long-term the integration of world economies will cancel this effect out. Pollution of water supplies in India to produce lower-cost computer chips for the American and European markets is not a sound strategy. Negative impacts in one area inhibit that market from growing; and that's not good business. You might achieve a great bottom line impact today with that strategy. However, there wouldn't be a middle-class market in India twenty years from now.

Hart maintains that today's capitalist model is more focused on today's business and internal capabilities, which leads to cost and risk reduction strategies. He posits that a more appropriate approach would be to look towards building tomorrow's opportunities and engaging external markets. In other words, move towards innovation and a long-term growth path. Hart has also included a great section on sorting out all the "green" buzzwords, which is worth the price of the book on its own.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the book is Professor Hart's analogy of Schumpeter's thesis of "creative destruction" to moving beyond simple "greening." 'Greening" for Hart is like continuous improvement. As examples he cites improved fuel mileage for automobiles and less pollution from agriculture. But moving beyond this thinking involves building entirely new industries, such as the biotech revolution, that have minimal ecological impact.

The book includes detailed case studies of General Electric, Burlington Chemical, and Micell Technologies among others. He also suggests that the future of mass markets lies at the base of the market pyramid; those great unwashed millions of future consumers who will be the market of tomorrow. In this vein he makes a good case for "triple bottom line" accounting that places community development investments squarely in the corporate boardroom.

We recommend you pick up a copy of Capitalism at the Crossroads. It's a quick coast-to-coast read with plenty of questions to take back to your boardroom.

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.

Happy Thanksgiving (November 24)

... I'm just back from a much-needed personal vacation. My wife and I spent 10 days in central Mexico, primarily in San Miguel de Allende, on a small-group photography workshop.... However, you didn't come here to hear about my vacation. I mentioned it only because I also had a few new insights about the global economy and the experience of traveling in a foreign country....

The Innovation Network for Communities (November 27)

As most readers of this blog know, we have spent a great deal of time over the past year working on a WIRED West Michigan innovation initiative to help that region develop strategies for more effectively attracting and retaining knowledge workers.... one of the best things to come out of the WIRED project for us has been our growing personal and professional friendship with John Cleveland.... John is a partner in the Innovation Network for Communities (INC), an organization we're just getting to know and respect....

In Our Humble Opinion: Trouble Ahead

Commentary by Charlie Grantham and Jim Ware

The cynic rides again: "We're here because we're not all there"

So here we are, almost at the end of the year. The boyz are plum tuckered out. Buford took a shotgun to his TeeVee. Claimed he just couldn't stand another "prezedental d-bait" and has gone back to his ol'-time radio. Local station hereabouts is KRAAP. (don't write in; we know that's not a real station. Thanks to the Burning Man 1999 folks for the inspiration).

Maynard allows that we are now in the swing of "Hallo-thanks-mas," the annual eight-week celebration of unbridled consumerism. Buy, shop, drop! See just how much debt you can pile on; it's the American way. But whoa, wait just a minnit. Cooter has sniffed up something quite foul - and the odor is getting p-r-e-t-t-y strong.

You folks know its our job to look around the corner, peer over the hill, and peek under the rug (tough task, but somebody's got to do it). You haven't got time to think into next Tuesday so we do it for you. After all, the boyz are all on disability (been that way since birth) and haven't got a darn better thing to do.

So there's this new guy on KRAAP talk radio. His name is Ferd. Used to work down at the Four Corners Haberdashery and Feed Emporium. Got laid off when the place was acquired by Blackpebble private equity. Replaced him with three part-timers borrowed from the County Home for the Witless and retired politicians. Go figure . . ..

Anyway, Ferd (with the help of Cooter) offers up that he thinks 2008 is going to be one big bust. No much good out there. And we think they might be on to somethin'. Lissen up here.

Try this one on for size. Ferd thinks the e-con-o-me (There's a joke in there. Get it? The con's on me) is going to go down and go sideways at the same time. He calls it "recessiflation." That means business slows way down and prices go up at the same time. Double whammy just like a two-barreled shotgun. Okay, okay, it's a homey word, and we're sure there are good folk over at the Institute for the Blinding Flash of the Obvious who would have different words (two-bit ones fer sure) for what's coming.

And big time. Seems ol' Ferd isn't the only one with these crazy thoughts. Cooter says take a look at Thoughts from the Frontline (search on "How do You Spell Stagflation?") Or how about the worst holiday season in five years? (Wall Street Journal, November 15, 2007, p. A4) Thanks to Cousin Barry down in Florida for that tip.

Buford picks up the phone and calls in. "Say Ferd, what the Sam Hill is causin' all this indigestion?" Ferd says (hold on now), "In My Humble Opinion there's three things drivin' this slow train wreck." Turns out Ferd is the resident cynic in town. He keeps hoping things won't turn out as bad as he knows they will. (see http://www.i-cynic.com).

First there's the problem with the good ol' US of A brand. The rest of the world just doesn't believe the stuff we try to sell them is worth all that much anymore. Today puttin a little piece of cotton label on the back of underwear that says "Made in the USA" automagically knocks 15% off the price. (We know underwear isn't made in the USA anymore; bear with us, it's a metaphor.) Point is, the brand has been tarnished by all kinds of stuff from dimwitted politicians, culturally arrogant business leaders, and downright ugly Americans. That's one chicken that's come home to roost.

Then there's our addiction - that's right, addiction! - to oil. We've been here before, folks - got the t-shirt and sent it back. Will somebody for God's sake pulleeze explain to us why we need a four-ton vehicle to move one 150 lb person back and forth every day to someplace they don't have to be (and often don't want to be)? We just don't get it!

We don't have the time here to go into this insanity. Ferd says as long as we keep suckin' that black goo outta the ground in copious quantities, the boyz who got the holes in the ground (and we all know who they are) are goin' to suck our wallets dry. Enough said.

Well, not quite enough. For one thing, the November issue of Fast Company Magazine has a cover story ("Motorhead Messiah,") on a good ol' boy auto mechanic in Kansas named Kevin Goodwin who can juice a Hummer up to over 60 miles a gallon, double its horsepower, and run it on used French-Fry grease - using nothing but genuwine made-in-Detroit-by-General-Motors parts! And he's jacked up a '65 Chevy Impala from 300 to 800 horsepower, left a Lamborghini in the dust on a race track, and doubled its mileage to 25 miles to the gallon, all at the same time. True story! And again with stock parts.

Don't believe us? Check it out here.

Course, our solution, well-documented elsewhere, is to stop doing all that commuting in the first place. The trouble is, those boyz who own the holes in the ground wouldn't be selling so much goo if anyone actually listened to us and Kevin Goodwin.

So we saved the best for the last. Here comes the "waky-waky" test. Hello out there, are you breathin'?

Immigrants. That's right, Immigrants. Got your attention? Now don't blame us, we're just offerin' up a conversation between Ferd and Buford. One of the things that's makin' us nuts is that we don't have enough people here to do the work that needs to get done.

Next year (that's 2008, Bunkie) we'll have more people leaving the work force than joining it. Given that, how the heck can the economy grow? Sure, there's a bigger issue here about workforce development and we'll take that one on pretty soon. Hard truth though is that labor moves to where it's needed. (University of Arizona Udall Center).

And we (as a country) are doin' our level best to inhibit that movement right now. This isn't about farm workers and landscapers (although there is something there to talk about also); it's about doctors, engineers, and talent like that that we need but can't get because of some weird paranoia.

So you got a lousy brand, spend too much money on dumb stuff, and won't let others help you grow your business. So what's the problem? Duh! Any first-year business student could see this one coming. And, as Ferd allows, 2008 is gonna be the homecoming.

Okay, let's hit the pause button fer jest a second. Trouble with predictin' the future is that someone can call you on it. Maynard, bein' the brilliant guy he is, needs to see it simple. So here's four things to watch for to see if we're right about the comin' recessification.

1. Food prices rise dramatically. The cost of energy to move them 'maters and 'taters around is getting' to be the biggest part of the cost.
    
   
2. Electricity rates take off more than general increases. The cost of energy and the power companies' need to raise margins (so they can invest in other things) drives this one.
    
   
3. Consumer credit goes through the roof. You think the sub-prime mortgage mess is over? Hold on to your britches. People load up on un-secured personal debt to save their butts with everyday things. 24 months to pay off a grocery bill? Just how long do you suspect that will last? Well, dear hearts, not through 2008. And we saved the best for last.
    
   
4. Housing prices. This is the guts of middle-class wealth, and its being eroded really fast. Watch for this one to continue to fall (especially in the median price range and in "old-stock" neighborhoods). This situation is going to look like a financial Katrina hitting the middle-priced 'burbs.

Clear as mud, huh? Now Ferd, in the best tradition of a cynic, believes all this is blindsiding us because of "masking effects." It's like three-card Monty. Keep the cards movin' around so fast people can't see 'em and they get confused. Keep people scared and afraid of the boogey man and they won't see what the other hand is doin' We'll leave you to figure that one out. Hint: that's why Buford shot the TV.

We hate to say it, but In Our Humble Opinion (saved it for the end this time), we've got a tough, tough year ahead of us.

Ferd thinks that between war, fear of the boogeyman (anybody not one of "us"), and a political paralysis (just how many people are runnin' for president, anyway?), no one has time to look at a crumbling economy (the sigh-coll-o-gists call it "denial" - and that ain't a river in Egypt).

Joe Six-Pack doesn't care anywhere near enough about the Dow Jones, or the Euro versus the buck, or global warming, because all he can deal with is his rent, electric bill, health insurance, and grocery store tab. Watch out Joe, 2008 is going to be a real kick in the buttinsky.

We close with a quote from one of our all-time favorite cynics and social observers, Mark Twain: "If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man."

Think about that for a while. Happy Holidays!

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:

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