January 2007

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This is our personal note welcoming you to the January 2007 issue of Future of Work Agenda and setting our theme for the month. This month we take a hard look at the nature of collaboration, and in particular how it's impacted when the collaborators are separated by time and space. We also rant a bit about how different the future is likely to be from the past that we all know and love - and how hard it is to deal with the things you don't know you don't know.

We begin with an apology to our readers who receive the text version of the newsletter. We're pleased to introduce you to a new and exciting website on new workplaces. And we tally up our travel and public appearance plans over the next several months.

In December we completed our three-part series "How Come Distributed Work is Still the Next Big Thing?" (link to a consolidated white paper containing all three parts). In the course of our research for the series one of the topics that we bumped into several times was the subsidiary but equally important question, Why aren't people making greater use of all those wonderful collaboration technologies that are now available?

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

Happy New Year!

January in our part of the world is always a time for renewal, hope, and, of course, reflection. The old year is behind us; the new year is fresh and untarnished; and, even when we're snowbound by old man winter, we get excited about the prospect of spring, flowers, and fresh, fragrant breezes. The New Year is truly a time for looking ahead, and of course that's our bread and butter.

However, given that, like many of you, we've been preoccupied the last several weeks with holidays, feasting, and enjoying the great outdoors, our 2007 predictions are still incubating. We've got some ideas of what's up that we'll share in another month or two, but this month we actually chose to rant a bit about how confusing the future can be in a time of dramatic change (we're longing for a time of undramatic change, but we're not holding our breath).

Thus, our rant for the month, "Through the Looking Glass - Darkly," tries to sort out how the things we think we know "ain't so" and the things we don't know we don't know are lurking around the corner ready to bite us. We're really concerned that the whole world is racing through the dark, careening around unseen bends in the road, and going so fast that we're bumping into things beyond the reach of our collective headlights. That's unsafe driving, and we hope that by at least talking about it we'll raise some sensitivities and cautions. Maybe we all need to pay more attention to the yellow warning lights in the road ahead and not be so intensely frantic about getting ahead of the curve.

Okay, okay, enough already with the metaphors.

On a more tangible note, our feature article this month ("Does Distance Matter?") attempts to sort out the impact of distance on communication, coordination, cooperation, and collaboration. Put more simply, it's about how we (all of us) interact and get work done when we're so spread out across the entire planet.

We actually began writing the article with the intention of sorting out the benefits and limitations of the new generation of collaborative tools, but we quickly discovered we couldn't do that without first paying attention to how physical and temporal separation actually affects human interaction. We hope you'll find our analysis helpful and even a bit provocative; we'll discuss the tools themselves in a future article.

And as always, of course, we're also pleased to bring you our regular Announcements and the Best of the Blog section summarizing some of 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

Special Note to Subscribers Receiving this Newsletter in Text Format

We are mortified. We just discovered that over the past several months we've unknowingly been continuing to distribute the September 2006 text version of this newsletter instead of the more recent version each month. In all honesty, we had not realized that our distribution agent, Constant Contact, retains old versions on file, and since September we have inadvertently failed to update the text file with the current issue.

Please accept our humble apologies. We'll do our best not to let it happen again.

Catherine Adams Lee Announces the NewWorkPlaces Website

Future of Work member Catherine Adams Lee recently unveiled an exciting new website that brings together a ton of information about workplaces, work, and technology - all focused on the changing nature of work as well as the workplace per se. We encourage you to visit NewWorkPlaces and spend some time discovering what a terrific resource it is.

WDC Travel and Public Appearances

Jim and Charlie will be in western Michigan the week of January 15. We'll be continuing our research work for the WIRED project, where we're helping the region's economic developers and educators transform the seven-county region from a manufacturing-based economy to an "innovation" economy. As we have previously noted, our focus is on developing the business case for launching several Business Community Centers(tm) as a means of supporting workforce development, attraction, and retention.

Looking farther out, Jim will once again be a keynote speaker at the Human Resources Leadership Program, hosted by Santa Clara University. He'll be speaking on "The Future of Work" on March 28, 2007.

Jim and Charlie together will be describing the highlights of the WIRED project research at a panel discussion at the CoreNet Global Summit in Denver, April 29-May 2.

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.

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: Does Distance Matter?

Jim Ware and Charlie Grantham

In December we completed our three-part series "How Come Distributed Work is Still the Next Big Thing?". In the course of our research for the series one of the topics that we bumped into several times was the subsidiary but equally important question, Why aren't people making greater use of all those wonderful collaboration technologies that are now available?

As we've thought more about that question, and discussed it with a number of our Future of Work community members and colleagues, it has become apparent that technology may have more to do with the continuing skepticism about distributed work than we realized.

So this month we want to extend the conversation by taking a closer look at collaborative technologies - the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Our first challenge, however, is how to even think about "collaborative technologies," and, more basically, about collaboration itself. Part of the challenge we all face in making sense of the tools we use to coordinate, communicate, and collaborate is that there is no common understanding of what tools and technologies we're even referring to, how they enable (or disable) collaboration, and what impact they have on productivity and organizational effectiveness.

For example, when we searched Cnet (www.cnet.com) for product reviews on collaborative tools, we discovered that Cnet doesn't even have a category for collaboration. The closest thing we could find was "Groupware" - and as far as we could tell, the Groupware products that Cnet tracks are all hardware servers. That's not at all what we mean by collaborative technologies. Yes, there is one (one!) videoconferencing application listed under the Software category, and there are a few Voice over IP (VoIP) products listed, but as nearly as we could tell Cnet doesn't really pay much attention to Collaboration Technologies per se.

Last June Jim was a featured speaker at the Collaborative Technologies Conference in Boston, sponsored by CMP, another technology analysis firm. At least at that event there were several hundred IT professionals and others who were talking about collaboration tools, and there seemed to be a general consensus about what tools - and business processes - they were talking about. However, it's also interesting that CMP has just announced that they've renamed the Conference the "Enterprise 2.0 Conference," trading, we presume on all the hype about Web 2.0 (which in our humble opinion - had to sneak that in - is just as ill-defined as "Collaboration Tools").

At least there is growing awareness that new levels of communication and collaboration are at the heart of organizational success in this so-called "Information Economy." Witness this excerpt from CMP's announcement about the name change:

"The concept of Enterprise 2.0 is about a new way of work: faster, globally connected, and collaborative," said Eric Faurot, Senior Vice President, CMP Technology. "The technologies that enable this competitive advantage include everything from large scale enterprise application suites and communications infrastructure to lightweight web-based applications. The Enterprise 2.0 Conference helps IT and business leaders understand how to use technology as a strategic advantage in the global, accelerated world."

The press announcement ("CMP's Collaborative Technologies Conference Renamed 'Enterprise 2.0 Conference'") goes on to list the following as "collaborative technologies":

• Unified communications applications and infrastructure
• Integrated collaborative environments
• Team workspaces and team collaborative applications
• Group messaging software
• Wikis, blogs and other lightweight web-based team applications
• Web and video conferencing
• Web-based office applications

That's a start towards defining what collaboration and its tools are all about, but in our mind it's only a start. We believe there is a crying need for a more detailed, more behaviorally-based, way of sorting out these tools and their value (which, no surprise, we offer below).

So here's our perspective. Let's begin at the beginning. First we need to get very clear about the differences between Communication, Coordination, Cooperation, and Collaboration. We believe the differences, while subtle, are important and have a significant effect on which tools are required, and what features matter. Next we'll consider how those activities are affected by time, space, and task requirements (and we'll argue that distance does matter - there really is a fundamental difference between being together and being separated by either miles or minutes). Finally, we'll identify an inventory of the tools we think are important, and we'll ask some tough questions about how those tools affect the quality and productivity of the interactions and understandings they're designed to support.

Bear with us; that's a lot to cover in a short space (and you'll discover we couldn't do it - there's going to be a sequel to this article too). But we'll also point you to some other resources for deeper digging.

Communication is not Coordination is not Cooperation is not Collaboration

We may seem overly pedantic about the distinctions we make between these four "C's," but we are convinced that understanding how a given group is functioning and making decisions is fundamental to determining which tools will be most effective in supporting the group's work.

Here's the way we think about these four levels of group work. Communication involves the transfer of information from one person or group to another. It can happen in real time, during a face-to-face meeting, or across both space and time. But by itself communication does not ensure any level of group coordination, cooperation, or collaboration. And as most of us know all too well, many forms of communication seem to create more mis-understanding than anything else.

When a group is Coordinating its various activities, group members are informing each other of their respective activities, and there is a strong sense of "being in touch." However, coordination in and of itself does not mean, and it certainly does not ensure, agreement, approval, or effectiveness. It's entirely possible to coordinate your work with someone else with whom you do not agree, or even approve of. There may be value to each party in knowing what the other is doing, but their work activities can remain largely independent.

When a group's members are Cooperating with each other, you generally see higher levels of mutual understanding, respect, and even affection. There is a strong sense of equality among members, and they typically have clearly understood common goals. However, there is also often an equally strong commitment to individual needs and goals, and sometimes even a reluctance to compromise for the greater good.

In contrast, Collaboration involves an even more intimate level of communication and mutual caring. Members work actively together to ensure that the most critical goals are met, even if some members have to sacrifice their own priorities. There is also a much greater sense of personal commitment to achieving what is best for everyone. And perhaps the most significant component of collaboration is a strong sense of interdependence; what I do depends directly on what you do - and vice versa. In fact, when collaboration is at its best, it's often difficult to separate out individual contributions (think of an energizing brainstorming session, for example, or a basketball team that's "flowing" and whose members in complete harmony with each other - it's something beautiful to behold).

As we will see shortly, the most commonly used "collaboration tools" provide plenty of support for basic communication activities, and even for coordination and cooperation. But true collaboration, because it requires deeper and more active relationships and interactions among group members, works best when there is a level of "presence" or intimacy within the group that even the most advanced technologies rarely produce (the tools are getting better at simulating and even creating a sense of presence; but, as they say, the future is still ahead of us).

Time and Place as Key Variables

One of the basic reasons that collaborative technologies exist in the first place is that so much group work takes place when people are separated by time and/or place. Interestingly, research on the "value of presence" by our own Future of Work Senior Fellow Terri Griffith, Professor of Management at Santa Clara University, shows that project team members who are all "housed" in the same building typically meet face-to-face as a group only about 17% of the time (or less than one day a week). Even more interestingly, distributed teams (spread out over different buildings or cities) meet face-to-face an average of about 12% of the time - not all that much less than co-located teams.

The best way we have found of thinking about the implications of time and space for group work and decision-making, and to relate various collaborative technologies to group needs, is a simple framework that we first learned from Bob Johansen of the Institute for the Future many years ago. Bob's model places time and space on separate X-Y axes, ranging from "Same" at one end to "Different" at the other end of each axis, leading to a classic two-by-two:

"Same Time/Same Place is what most of us call a "face-to-face" meeting. "Different Time/Same Place" describes a situation where team members pass through a common space but at different times. The classic example would be a "team room" that members use over time, perhaps storing work products (flip charts, product prototypes, etc.) in the room so others can see them at a later time to understand what has happened, and so on.

Where distance really matters (and technology becomes essential) is of course in the right-hand column - "Same Time/Different Place" (telephone, video conferencing, web broadcasting, online chat rooms, web-based whiteboards and team rooms, and - almost - Instant Messaging) and "Different Time/Different Place" (email, shared file repositories, recorded broadcasts, podcasts, even snail mail).

The tools that most of us are most interested in clearly come to play in these latter two situations, when individuals and teams are in different places. And the goal of most of those tools has always been to make it "just like being there."

Well, like it or not, so far that just hasn't happened yet. In spite of the fact that the tools are getting better and cheaper, there is still no substitute that we know of for physical proximity. And although more and more of us are "meeting" more and more frequently in a distributed fashion, we all know in our guts that there's something powerful (and, frankly, more natural) about being physically in the same place.

In fact, we were reminded recently that the root source of the word "company" is the Italian "compaignie," which when taken apart to its roots, "con pane," translates as "with bread." Thus the meaning of the word "company" is almost literally "to break bread together." And in our experience, as in most of yours, there is no better way to bond with someone or a group than over a meal. A little wine never hurts either!

And even if teams don't meet face-to-face as a group all that often, there is clearly plenty of value to being together.

Here's a descriptive comment by a member (identified only as "CR") of a sometimes-distributed team that says it all:

. . . our experience has been that it is very difficult to keep remote workers productive over the long term. . . . I'm beginning to think that impromptu face to face conversations/brainstorms with white boards, pen and paper flying, wild gesticulation, and general excitement are the moments that really fuel inspired work. I've never really been able to recreate those moments with phone, IM, or virtual office type applications.

That's from an undated Comment on the Signals vs. Noise blog in response to "Why are you not hiring remote workers?" posted December 15, 2006 (thanks to Andrew Mahon of Nokia for alerting us to the post). There is also some extended commentary about this topic on our own blog at "More on Distributed Work - and Hiring Remote Workers," December 20).

Now, while we are sympathetic to CR's viewpoint, we also believe there is a strong case to be made for working much of the time in a distributed fashion. And of course, we all do exactly that whenever we're working alone, in conversation with someone on the telephone, or using email or instant messaging. One reason for these seemingly conflicting perspectives is that no matter what kind of team or project you are working on, the kind of brainstorming that CR is describing above is only one of the many kinds of activities that you engage in over the life of the project - and only one kind of collaboration (of course, those critical "f2f" moments can - and often do - make or break a project).

So the basic answer to the question we posed at the beginning of this article, "Does Distance Matter?" is, "Yes it does." But we don't think it matters as much as conventional wisdom still believes. While we're hardly in the camp of True Believers who swear by the collaborative tools now out there in the marketplace, we do think there is a time and a place for distance collaboration, which is often more efficient and far less costly than bringing people together every time they want to collaborate. And we're not alone; it's very clear that more and more of us are spending more and more time communicating, coordinating, cooperating, and at least attempting to collaborate, at a distance.

And the tools we need and want are getting better - and cheaper. Desktop video conferencing is a reality, and it's not at all bad. Shared file repositories are common. And online "team rooms" for multimedia presentations and even joint document creation and editing are springing up all over the place, even if they aren't being all that widely used yet.

Thus, the next set of questions, which we will take up in a future article, include these: "What tools are we using today?" "How effective are they?" "What features and functions would we really like to have?" and, most central to our research, "Why aren't the available tools being used more widely?"

Additional Resources

If you absolutely can't wait for the next installment, take a look at "Understanding Distributed Work," a white paper we prepared a couple of years ago (it's more conceptual than practical, but it's a good starting point). And check out several recent posts on our weblog, www.thefutureofwork.net/blog. In particular, scan the "Distributed Work" and "Collaborative Technologies" categories for some insights into what others are doing and thinking about right now.

Stay tuned. As usual, once we start thinking about a good question, we always seem to end up with even more questions. But that's what learning - and growing - is all about. Ain't it fun?

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.

On the Front Lines of the Future of Work Revolution . . . (December 4)

Yesterday I posted a comment about the December 3 New York Times article on distributed work ("When Work Time Isn't Face Time"). Today it's Business Week and the cover story in the December 11 issue ("Smashing the Clock").

Maybe - just maybe - distributed work, flexwork, telecommuting, and the future of work are real. After all these years of studying it, dissecting it, promoting it, and helping clients realize it, Charlie and I are having a strange and unusual feeling that the present may actually be catching up with the future. Don't misunderstand: it's a good feeling. . . .

What is it About Collaboration Tools? (December10)

Last week Future of Work member Paula Bartholome pointed me to the Anecdote blog, which recently featured a provocative post focused on "Why people don't use collaboration tools." . . .

Robert Reich on Human Capital - and How to Increase It (December 12)

There's an important conversation with Robert Reich (former Secretary of Labor, now a Professor at University of California Berkeley) in the current issue of CIO Insight ("The Economics of People," December 5, 2006). . . .Reich's insights and observations are relevant to all knowledge workers.

We The People (December 19)

You've surely heard by now that Time Magazine's 2006 "Person of the Year" is you. Yes, that's right, every one of you - every one of us. . .

If you're at all like me, you greeted that news with plenty of honest skepticism. You thought, as I did, what about Iraq? What about the Israel/Lebanon conflict? What about Korea, Iran, and the Bomb? What about those elections back in November?

But if you read the Time article, I think you'll come, as I have, to appreciate the idea. After all, 2006 was the year of YouTube and MySpace and FaceBook, and the coming of age of the blogs.

It's about person-to-person communication, collaboration, and interaction. It's about global communities. It's about the "man on the street" speaking directly to the Big Guys. And it's about beginning to hold those Big Guys - whether they be political leaders, corporate executives, or journalists - accountable for what they say and do. . . .

More on Distributed Work - and Hiring Remote Workers (December 20)

. . . . I was pleased to get a note this morning from our friend and colleague Andrew Mahon (he's sort of a technology evangelist at Nokia). Andrew pointed me to a recent post on the "Signals vs. Noise" blog, "Why are you not hiring remote workers?"

It seems that 37Signals, the group that founded the Signals vs. Noise blog, had just hired another remote worker (among many spread all over North America, apparently). And the experience led the company to ask why more companies aren't doing the same thing. . . .

In Our Humble Opinion: Through The Looking Glass - Darkly

Commentary by Charlie Grantham and Jim Ware

What you don't know you don't know can hurt you.

Well, here we are in a new year already. After hunkerin' down for the holidays Buford allows that there's a lot of stuff gettin' ready to happen that we don't even know about. Huh? Well, like Grandpa used to say, "You ain't seen nothing yet." Little down-home wisdom there. It's been a while since we received any nasty-grams so we thought we'd start the new year out by attacking a few sacred cows - after all this is a rant!

Put another way, ask yourself just what is it you don't know that you don't know (but don't spend too much time on it- you'll get your brain all wrapped 'round itself). It's sort of early Rumsfeldian thinking, but hang in there with us for a page or two. We're struggling to make sense out of what feels like a whole 'nother planet out in front of us - and we're gonna try to make your heads spin just like ours are.

We freely admit it's a bit of a mind twister to figure out. Look, we both know how to drive a car (although our respective spouses would dispute that). But neither one of us knows how to fly a plane (at least not yet; that's another whole story we'll get to someday). But we also don't know a whole bunch of stuff that we can't even comprehend, like going though some sort of space/time worm hole or some such. Anyway, we want to really stretch your brain on this rant. Look around the corner, down the rabbit hole, or whatever metaphor you want to use for contemplating the unknown.

So the boys've been sittin' in front of the fireplace ponderin' just what these unknowables are. Could have been too much nog in the egg nog or whatever. But they've come up with six things that are just starting to show up on the long-range radar. Cooter sniffed something in the wind but the scent isn't strong enough to figure it out and he's not sure if he's upwind or downwind. Ah, the great imponderables of the future of work. Let's take a whack at them, one at a time, staying between the navigational beacons, as Jimmy Buffet would say.

Brace yourself, here we go.

What's an office for? Think about it. Once upon a time a desk was a place to hold up your telephone, typewriter (if you can remember what that is) and a pad of paper. And it kept you separated from whoever was in your office reporting to you. Well, now your phone is in your pocket, you can hold your computer in your hand-and in fact the phone and the computer can easily be the same thing. And just what is paper about, anyway?

So why do you need a desk?

In Our Humble Opinion, the same question - and logic - applies to an "office." Our buddies over at Wikipedia think "An office is a room or other area in which people work." Get a grip people, that is simply not the way it works today, let alone tomorrow. (just couldn't let that one go by). The word "office" itself just doesn't make sense anymore (real world For Instance: IBM has developed a suite of software applications they call the "On Demand Workplace." The first time we heard that phrase we had visions of a physical cubicle that could be erected somewhere in just a couple of hours. Oh how wrong we were - IBM really gets it, because what they mean is that your workplace is wherever you happen to be, doing what you need to do, via your laptop PC and online connection).

Okay, now that we've got your brain sizzling, try another one.

New urbanism. Give us a break here, that's an oxymoron if we ever heard one - like jumbo shrimp, or, God help us, military intelligence. (Full disclosure here, Charlie used to be a spook so he can talk about that with impunity).

So what the heck is old urbanism? Patooey!! This is thinkin' backwards. We're sorry but this is a perfect example of "don't know what they don't know." That ain't the future, boys; that's a fancy way to look to the past and fool yourself into thinkin' it's the future. Wrongamundo. You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig.

In Our Humble Opinion (bettcha was wondering where we were going), "New Urbanism" is an oxymoron of the first order that will go the way of the buggy whip. We'll get back to you on this one sometime next summer with our Humble Opinion on what urban design really needs to be about. But putting the "New" label on it doesn't make it somehow magical.

Maynard stepped on the short side of a rake and the damned thing popped up and smacked him in the face. (This is the visualization part, dear hearts. Close your eyes and think about it). But we digress. See, that was Maynard's barnyard introduction to technology. You invent perfectly logical stuff (the rake) and it does totally unexpected things (like hitting you in the head.) Who'da thunk it? So as we were laughing at poor old Maynard's black eye the eggnog kicked in and a couple more thoughts emerged from the fog.

WiMax. What's it going do? Not a clue here. But this is another one of those imponderables. We're thinkin' this one's got the chance to, well, really, really change how we humans communicate with one another. This one's right up there with making gasoline out of corn stalks (which, if you don't mind, is also about to happen; stay tuned - film at eleven).

What if it got to the point where we really didn't need wires, none of them, to connect with folks? First of all we'd sell all our telephone stock. Gee, we could substitute "telepresence" for half our travel. Boy we're finding a lot of words this month that don't mean anything anymore. Maybe we could just toss words like "rural" and "urban" away altogether. So what, you say?

Well, In Our Humble Opinion (three times in one month!), this new technology could really upset how wealth gets redistributed through taxes. Where you earn your money could really change. What it means to be a "resident" of a town, a city, a state, or even a country could change or even become almost irrelevant. We can sit in California or Arizona and do "local" work for a client in New York, Hong Kong, or London (just like someone over there can do the same for us). So "where" did the work take place? Where was the value added? Can't you just see the guvment folks starting to twitch? And if they're not, they sure should be. Technology changes politics; what a hell of a concept.

And then think about this: where's all your money that isn't clangin' around in your pocket? You really think there's a stack of dollar bills in your bank with your name on it? Guess again. Your "money" (damn, another almost useless word) is really a bunch of atoms lined up this way and that way in some silicon chip. And you're trusting some unknown "bankers" to make sure it's there when you need it (wherever "there" is).

So, keep going with this twisted thinking. Where's all the information you can get to, that isn't on your bookshelf or in that ol' file cabinet? It's out there in that great mystical "webosphere" (some folks call it "cyberspace," as if it really were a "place"). And the stuff you use to look at that information (like software) ain't going be on "your" computer" in the very near future. You think Bill Gates wants to keep selling you those cute little silver Frisbee's they call CD's? Guess again.

Hey, what's all this about? Information has gone virtual, just like money. It's everywhere and it's "knowware," or nowhere. When we grew up all the information in town was in the little brick library by the village square - and of course we had to ride our bikes down there to get at it. No more. So what's a library for anyway? There's something else that could stand being redefined.

Well, now that we've stuck a fork in the sacred cows of real estate and technology, who's next?

People, of course. What do we not know we don't know about working folks in the future? First of all, don't run down the hall and ask the "human resource" department, 'cause chances are they're focused on coverin' their butts and pushing paper around.

Ever heard of United Artists? Sure, but (Tom Cruise aside) do you know the history of UA? It was an organization originally formed by Hollywood actors and actresses (Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford, among the many) to represent themselves in their business. They broke up the monopoly of the major studios (the General Motors of their day). The talent started managing itself.

So why not do it again, only big time? The little guy needs a talent manager. What we don't know is just what that's going to look like. Here's some growth potential for the lawyers-God bless 'em, they got to eat too. And we don't mean just someone who takes 15% just to get you a contract, but someone who helps manage your career for your interests. Bye, bye HR.

So while we're at it let's look at the other side of that coin (we're knockin' everybody off here).

Unions. What are they for? Buford ran into a shop steward type of guy down at the hog processing plant. He allowed that Buford didn't understand what a union was about. After some pondering we figured it out. Unions are about staying in power and keeping people and their bosses from figuring stuff out themselves. Another damned dinosaur that's dead but not rolled over yet. Something else from an ancient era that needs redefinition.

Well, the good news here is that something is actually happening in this sphere. Check out what the Service Employees International Union (SIEU) is up to. Lordy, lordy, they're talking about health care for all; not just themselves. These new unions (there we go again; the word is useless in today's world, not to mention tomorrow) are about social justice. And then there's that little furry mammal-like thing running around under the feet of the dinosaurs, the Freelancers Union that's pulling together thousands of highly talented people to help them learn how to run their lives, and even to manage businesses a new way too. Hum doggies, they've figured it out!

Okay, okay, the mean old editor guy is starting to look at the word count here. Now, after getting this far, you know a lot of things that you didn't know you didn't know. The invisible has been made visible once again. Maybe that means we're some sort of idea magicians materializing concepts out of thin air. Poof! There goes another myth about the future. Shazam, another sacred cow sacrificed to around-the-corner thinking.

Hey, look back at where we've just been: office, new urbanism, traveling to work, libraries, money, human resource management, and unions - all confined to the dust bin of history. Not bad to knock all those off in less than two thousand words.

Now if this rant doesn't generate some static, we just might start talking religion and politics next month. Pardon us, but the boys got to go slop the hogs of logic.

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, +1 928 771 9138
Jim Ware, jim@thefutureofwork.net, +1 510 558 1434

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