September 2007

A Free Monthly Newsletter.

This Month's Headlines

Click on any Headline to go to the full story.

This is our personal note welcoming you to the Septemeber 2007 issue of Future of Work Agenda and setting our theme for the month. This month we're celebrating the publication of our new book, Corporate Agility, with a feature article about why that elusive organizational capability is so important. And we offer additional thought pieces from Dr. Jac Fit-Enz of the Human Capital Management Institute and Bill Benman, CEO of IVN. Finally, our rant focuses on the excessive amount of greed in the world and offers a few humble thoughts on what to do about it.

The big news is that Corporate Agility has (finally) been published. It's now (or will be soon) available online and in bookstores near you. Lynda Gratton also has a recently published new book, and we tell you about a new blog dedicated to research and design.

This month's feature article is another excerpt/adaptation from our new book, Corporate Agility. The book has been "in the works" for over three years. It's meant to be a guidebook, a roadmap, if you will, to help executives make their organizations more adaptable, more sustainable, and more able to deal with an increasing amount of change.

We recently had the pleasure of working with our good friend and long-time colleague, Dr. Jac Fitz-Enz, who invited us to help kick off his latest research project, the Predictive Initiative. Dr. Jac designed the Initiative to address that incredibly challenging need we all have for measuring, managing, and increasing the value of the human capital in our organizations. This brief article describes the Predictive Initiative and invites our readers to participate.

The Web or Internet is becoming the medium of choice for the distribution of content. As such, the Web is evolving with higher speed and more sophisticated interfaces. There are some predictions that 80% of Internet users will be participating in virtual worlds within four years. Unfortunately, however, while many current 3D web sites do present compelling 3D environments, they cannot put people into the environment in a truly realistic way.

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

Its September - and we're baaack!

And back in a big, big way. We're very excited that our new book, Corporate Agility, is hitting the streets and the bookstore shelves literally this week. We hope you'll all rush out and buy a copy, or order one online (see our Announcement, just below, for ordering information).

And, on top of that, we've got an incredibly full newsletter for you this month (that's what happens when we don't publish in August and take two whole months to cook up a new issue). So these opening remarks are going to be a bit shorter than usual.

Here's what's ahead. Our feature article, Corporate Agility - Why Now? is an excerpt from The Book, focused on why we did the research and wrote the book in the first place. We hope you'll find it enough of a teaser to get the whole magilla.

Our rant, on the other hand, is a real doozy of a diatribe ("What's So Great About Greed?"). We decided it's time to tell it like it is - our society seems to have completely forgotten about the whole idea of community and social capital. We (all of us) have got to get back to paying attention to our common interests and building a true civil society, not just a collection of individuals who happen to live near each other.

Investing in various kinds of capital seems to be our theme this month. We've also included a short piece ("Managing Tomorrow Today") by our good friend Dr. Jac Fitz-Enz about investing in human capital (now there's a radical idea!). And we're introducing another new, semi-regular section to the newsletter, The Technology Corner. The inaugural piece ("Virtual 3D Worlds"), by Bill Benman, just might give you a good reason to invest in some new technology that promises to make distributed communication far more meaningful than it is today.

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 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

Corporate Agility is Available Right Now!

We are exceptionally pleased to announce the publication of our long-awaited (at least by us) new book, Corporate Agility.

The book is due in bookstores in mid-September, but you can order it right now from Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, or directly from the American Management Association (our publisher).

We're very pleased that it comes highly recommended by many very smart people who we deeply respect, including author and futurist Alvin Toffler; University of Michigan Professor of Management David Ulrich; Brian Walker, CEO and President of Herman Miller; Colin Dyer, CEO and President of Jones, Lang, LaSalle; John Igoe, Vice President, Saris-Regus Group; and University of California San Diego Professor Judith Bardwick.

And if you like the book, please send us a note and write a review at either (or both) Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com. We'd love to hear your thoughts and suggestions (we're already beginning to think about a sequel).

Finally, if you are interested in booking one or both of us to speak to your corporate executives or professional group, please contact us at CorporateAgility@thefutureofwork.net. We're eager to spread the word!

Future of Work Member News

Future of Work Senior Fellow (and London Business School Professor) Lynda Gratton just sent us a note about her newest book, Hot Spots: Why Some Teams, Workplaces, and Organizations Buzz with Energy - And Others Don't.

It's an exciting new look at how to generate employee engagement, energy, and creativity. More importantly, Lynda is launching a whole movement out of the book and her continuing research on collaboration, distributed work, and hot spots. See her new website, Hot Spots, for more information, including an open invitation to a special event in London on September 10.

Lynda also co-authored an article on managing complex teams that was published this summer by MIT Sloan Management Review. You can download an abstract of the article for free at:
http://sloanreview.mit.edu/smr/issue/2007/summer/11/.

We've Just Launched a Brand New Blog

We are pleased to announce the launch of a brand new blog, MyIdealWorkplace. It's focused on the workplace and how people in workplaces around the globe feel about where and how they get their work done.

Our goal is really very simple: we want to foster a global conversation about what makes workplaces likable - or not; what makes them productive - or not; what makes them inviting - or not; and what makes them effective - or not.

Our vision for MyIdealWorkplace is quite different from our goal for the Future of Work blog. There we focus on trends, stories, and predictions about the future of work, broadly defined.

In contrast, at MyIdealWorkplace we'll post questions and suggest conversation topics from time to time, but we're going to get out of the way and let you - collectively - not only participate actively in the conversation, but even create it.

We have also invited our corporate and small business Future of Work members to contribute their questions and comments - and to post some thought-provoking ideas for everyone else to chew on.

We want MyIdealWorkplace to be an active, lively forum that's filled with opinions, ideas, suggestions, and rants - from all corners of the globe. And if you're interested in posting an original question or conversation-starter, let us know. We'll be more than happy to turn the "stage" over to you.

So please visit MyIdealWorkplace now; respond to our initial question ("Where Do You Work Best?"), or tell us what you'd rather talk about. Feel free to post anonymously if you're worried that your critique could get you in hot water, or brag about your current employer if you wish. Almost anything (decent) goes.

Another New Blog Connects Design and Science

Research Design Connections (RDC) has launched a pioneering new blog to connect design practitioners with recently released scientific research. The blog also links members of the design community focused on environment-behavior research and practice.

The RDC blog, which will be updated daily by RDC's editors, provides immediately applicable study results to architects, interior designers, landscape architects, urban planners, design researchers, educators, and facility managers. The initial blog entry covers using the color red in academic, professional, and sports environments, for example. Discussion of each entry by blog readers is encouraged.

RDC is a content-rich electronic newsletter published four times a year as well as an online archive of past articles. Its brief and straightforward articles summarize key findings from recent research on people and environments. In its articles, RDC extracts and integrates the essence of an article's information, emphasizing its relationship to practical design solutions.

RDC promotes design enhanced by science. It routinely reviews research published in hundreds of journals - in the sciences, the social sciences, and the architecture and design research fields. RDC scours professional databases and current academic publications, selects the articles that are most useful to practitioners and recruits proven experts as guest columnists.

The RDC blog is available to everyone, even people who are not Research Design Connections subscribers.

To reach the blog, start a 14-day free trial to RDC, or to subscribe to Research Design Connections, visit www.researchdesignconnections.com.

For more information contact Dr. Sally Augustin (Senior Editor, Research Design Connections) at sallyaugustin@placecoach.com or +1 323.244.9850.

WDC and Future of Work Activities

Jim will be presenting his perspectives on managing remote workforce to a Conference Board working group via a webinar being held on Tuesday, September 11.

Jim and Charlie will be featured in a webinar titled "Remote Work and Productivity" on September 12, 2007, at 9 AM Pacific Daylight time. The webinar, sponsored by Success Factors and hosted by Research Director Erik Berggren, is free. Click here for more information at the Success Factors website.

And to complete a busy week, the two of us will also be presenting our views on Corporate Agility at an IIDA meeting in Seattle on Thursday, September 13. If you are in the Seattle area and want to attend, contact Mark Gribbons of IA Interior Architects for more information. This will be our first public appearance following publication of the book at the end of August.

Charlie will be leading a panel discussion on "Targeting the Free Agent" at the IEDC (International Economic Development Council) meeting in Phoenix on September 18. Other panelist include Future of Work member Mark Lautman of Forest City Covington, Cindy Larsen, President of the Chamber of Commerce of Muskegon, Michigan, and Noreen Moore, Director of Economic Development for Routt County, Colorado.

Future of Work member Jill Duncan and Herman Miller have invited Charlie and Jim to present their core ideas about Corporate Agility at the HMI Design Center in Dallas on September 20. Contact Jill directly if you are interested in attending.

We have also just agreed to deliver a webinar on Corporate Agility and distributed work for Citrix on Tuesday, October 23. Watch for details next month.

We are also pleased to announce that Jim and Charlie will 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: Corporate Agility - Why Now?

by Charlie Grantham, Jim Ware, and Cory Williamson

This month's feature article is another excerpt/adaptation from our new book, Corporate Agility. The book has been "in the works" for over three years. It's meant to be a guidebook, a roadmap, if you will, to help executives make their organizations more adaptable, more sustainable, and more able to deal with an increasing amount of change.

While no one can sketch the business world of the future with any accuracy, one thing is certain-it will be as different from its predecessors as the factory was from the farm. And while the great drivers of change in the past century-i.e., globalization, the diffusion of technology, and shifting demographics-may not have combined to create a world that is truly flat, the playing field is unquestionably far more level than it once was.

The flow of manufacturing jobs from the traditional centers of production in Europe, North America, and the Pacific Rim to the developing economies of China, India, Central and South America has been well documented. But while the economic giants of the 20th century have been able to soften the blow of that loss through the realignment of their labor forces, the long-term consequences of the transformation have not yet been fully understood.

At the very least, however, those companies whose decades-long reliance on traditional product lines-whether they be automobiles, electronics, or pharmaceuticals-have begun to realize that it is not only production that has fled their shores. Accompanying those jobs, it seems, was the culture of education and innovation upon which the West was founded. As a result, forward-thinking corporate managers have been forced to rethink their cost structures, their management priorities, their market strategies, and their product development.

As successful as they have been, however, they are but products themselves of a far more important core function-the "institutionalization of innovation." Since the workplace programs of today will age just as surely as the workforce will, it is only by continually reviewing market conditions, reexamining corporate strategies, and reallocating resources accordingly that businesses can prosper in the increasingly volatile and unpredictable global economy of our day. We believe there are three major challenges facing businesses today:

• reducing fixed operating costs
• confronting the coming talent shortage
• institutionalizing innovation

Those experiences have reinforced our belief that corporate agility can be achieved only through the continuous, collaborative management of HR, IT, and CRE. We call this approach Collaborative Strategic Management, or CSM for short.

That said, Collaborative Strategic Management involves much more than the simple integration of those traditionally separate functions. CSM means putting processes and practices in place that will allow HR, IT, and CRE managers to create a unified approach to the organization's business imperatives, and to resolve them while respecting a core of shared corporate values. Seen from this perspective, CSM is as much about the "why" of strategy as it is the "how," affecting not only strategic decision-making, but plans made in the larger pursuit of corporate agility.

CSM is meant to ensure that HR, IT, and CRE work together towards common goals. It does not demand that the boundaries and differences among these three professional disciplines be eliminated; rather, it recognizes and values those differences, and the unique contributions to the business that each of them make, but it requires that those contributions be made within a context of mutual respect, and with the understanding that all three perspectives are needed to produce an effective, sustainable, agile, organization.

CSM is strategic in the sense that it anticipates-in fact, even expects-continual change in the broader business environment. In that sense, it is about management over time, because continuous environmental change demands continuous organizational and managerial change. CSM, then, is the dynamic and ongoing process of internal decision-making that is the essence of corporate agility.

Of course, agility is a continuous process, so we can virtually guarantee that just as you master the techniques and ideas we've discussed here, the rules will change again.

But why now, you ask? What is so unique about the present time that it requires such foresight, reinforced by so much hard work? In three words-The Information Age. Taken together, the two decades from 1990 to 2010 have brought us to a moment of unprecedented change. A failure to adapt to this change, which affects both our society and the global economy, will leave the "dinosaur" organizations of our day lumbering about vainly in search of food and water, while more the more agile creatures of recent business evolution run circles around them.

In order to understand what we as managers need to be doing, let's look at two different but highly complementary perspectives on this issue. First, let's consider the sociological view.

Why Now? Change is More Dramatic Than Ever

At first glance the present economic climate hardly seems like the time to begin planning and testing new models of corporate infrastructure and strategic planning. Many organizations are still recovering from massive layoffs, and in some cases-although mostly in manufacturing-continuing to shed resources.

As we write, therefore, corporate human resources are being challenged to deliver like never before, and at the same time being forced to transform the way they operate. Information Technology, on the other hand, is rapidly becoming a commodity, leading to the routine outsourcing of most IT services. And Corporate Real Estate has its own problems, what with facilities vacancy rates varying widely around the world, and continuing financial pressures to consolidate space.

Under these circumstances why should a prudent company allocate scarce management time and funding to integrate these diverse functional areas, even though in so doing it can make itself an "Employer of Choice," enhancing the quality of its employees' work experience while reducing its fixed operating costs?

Well, the short answer to "Why Now?" is that business cycles haven't gone away. But our experiences within those cycles has changed. By that we mean that as the economy moves beyond its current contraction into its next phase of expansion, forward-thinking leaders cannot afford to make strategic management decisions the same way they did during the last cycle.

Why do we think the next cycle will be so different? What's changing? Well, the table below may help to explain our views on some fundamental aspects of the interplay between our society and the current direction of the global economy.

As we have said repeatedly, to remain sustainable through the next cycle organizations must become far more agile than they are today. They will need to know how to operate as a real-time enterprise with daily, or even hourly, business processes supporting parallel operations constantly focused on the future.

Agile corporations know how to staff up (and down), not only over the course of the annual budget, but overnight. They will also know how to partner with others for technology support, and they know how to move from offering a desk and a workspace for everyone, to providing the workforce with just what they need at a given moment, whenever and wherever they need it. Further, they know how to integrate those assets and how to develop innovative ways of measuring the return on investment they get by embracing new ways of working, and new way of organizing work.

All talk of "collaboration" aside, human capital is still a businesses' most precious strategic asset; this one thing, at least, has not changed. Right now, in this period of economic consolidation, there appears to be an excess of talent. Unemployment rates hover around 6% in a static business climate. What will happen when we enter the next phase of the business cycle? Will unemployment go to 4%? 3%? Unemployment was at 4.2% at the height of the "dot.com" craze (2000) and that was probably the lower limit for the kind of talent that will be in high demand in the future.

Enjoy the talent surplus while you can, therefore, because it won't last long. By 2010 we and many others predict that there will be a net shortage of around 10 million creative workers in the United States!

Now put yourself in the shoes of a CEO in that environment. If your firm is not a "talent magnet," or an "Employer of Choice," or located in a place the "emerging" workforce finds attractive, you won't be able to compete for that talent. You can have the capital, you can have the product, and you can even have the process of product development under control. but without a plan to attract new labor you are doomed. And if you wait until the talent demand equation is inverted you will be about eighteen months behind the curve. What can your competition do to you in eighteen months when they have the talent and you don't? It is an ugly, ugly picture. Will you depend on growth through acquisition? Don't count on it. The rapid deflation of the equities market has left most companies with little trading equity for that strategy to succeed.

Now look where the talent is. It's global, which means there is an even higher premium on integrating support infrastructures that rely on information technology to connect work and workers across the globe. Salaries outside the United States range anywhere from 10% to 20% of US equivalents, and therefore it's pretty clear that your new workforce is going to speak English as a second language. No, that isn't back office tech workers either. The point is that for US-based companies, the talent they need for growth will in many instances not be located in the places where they currently have a physical presence. They will have to integrate their work support infrastructure in new and innovative ways if they want to remain competitive.

Why Now? Technology is Reshaping the World of Work

There is much more going on today than the "Make things more efficient" focus of the office automation era and the "Oh, Gee Whiz" of the Internet bubble. We take our lead here from our friend and colleague Rex Miller and his book The Millennium Matrix (Jossey-Bass, 2004). While Rex's focus was on technology and the organization of our spiritual life, we choose here to dig a little deeper into the way he sees technology changing the ways we work and communicate.

Miller's basic thesis is that our dominant communication technologies profoundly shape the way in which we perceive the world, make meaning of it, and behave accordingly (he's something of a modern-day Marshall McLuhan). Over the centuries in human history we have moved progressively from a literal world without books, to a print world, and then to a broadcast world over the last sixty years. Now we are entering the digital era, in which communication has shifted from the one-to-many paradigm of broadcasting to a many-to-many mode enabled by the Internet and all its associated technologies.

The digital era introduces some very basic changes into the work world: the focus of work; how we build wealth; how we manage the processes of work; what we value (and how value is added); how production is carried out; and, finally, what we use as a medium of exchange. This transformation is clearly a sweeping set of changes in how we work and provides, yet again, another motivation for agility.

Finally, let's also consider the perspective of senior executives.

Leadership and Strategy

If the 70's, 80's, and 90's were the decades of management, the 00's and beyond will be the decades of leadership. We really don't have the vocabulary to talk about these things yet. Peter Drucker brought us the language of management beginning the 1940's. We await the next guru with that kind of sweeping power to describe an important emergent phenomenon.

We are convinced that the days of Jack ("Neutron Jack") Welch are gone. And perhaps even the day of Bill Gates is also gone. We believe there is a basic requirement to match strategy with leadership style and ability that has become far more important today.

A feature article in the McKinsey Quarterly in November 2005 struck us as a first salvo in this development ("Leadership as the starting point of strategy" Tsun-yan Hsieh and Sara Yik, McKinsey Quarterly, 2005, Number 1). Let's start, as the article did, with a question. "What do we mean by "leadership"? Whereas good managers deliver predictable results as promised, as well as occasional incremental improvements, leaders generate breakthroughs in performance. They create something that wasn't there before by launching a new product, by entering a new market, or by more quickly attaining better operational performance at lower cost, for example."

We also like the more folksy way of putting it: Managers do things right. Leaders do the right things.

And the authors of the McKinsey article point out that if your strategy is to deliver breakthrough performance you need a different type of leader to make that happen. Seems logical enough; but the problem, we believe, lies within existing workplace structures and business processes that are constructed not for breakthroughs, but for predictable performance. Simply put, successful leaders in the 21st century will not be cut from the cloth of managers of old. Can't you just see General Motors recruiting Richard Branson as its new CEO (as if he would want the job)?

So therein lies the rub. How do companies that recognize this fairly simple truth - that new leadership is required - prepare for the future? Certainly not by staying inside their own boundaries. That's too confining, too stuck in the old ways.

This recognition leads us to predict that in 2007, with M&A activity picking up and private equity firms on the hunt for new targets, we will begin to see radically new types of leaders emerging. We may even see the development a "talent agency" pool of leaders - sort of a central casting for leadership. What exact form it will take we don't know-but certainly the old systems of succession planning won't suffice.

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

If you want to learn more about corporate agility and Collaborative Strategic Management - and incidentally how to measure the impact of this new approach to strategic planning - please pick up a copy of the book (click here to order it today from Amazon.com) and enjoy.

Managing Tomorrow Today

We recently had the pleasure of working with our good friend and long-time colleague, Dr. Jac Fitz-Enz, who invited us to help kick off his latest research project, the Predictive Initiative. Dr. Jac designed the Initiative to address that incredibly challenging need we all have for measuring, managing, and increasing the value of the human capital in our organizations. This brief article describes the Predictive Initiative and invites our readers to participate.

By Dr. Jac Fitz-Enz

It is more useful to predict what will happen than to report what has occurred. That is the difference between predictive analytics and benchmarking. Given the marketplace of the 21^st century, competitive advantage is going to those who can predict the future from current investments.

In that context, effective management of people is inhibited by two shortcomings. One is the non-alignment of functions. Today the fabric of organizations is being stretched in several directions simultaneously until its integrity weakens; the metaphor of falling through the cracks describes it exactly. To restore it each unit within a function must be rewoven around a strategic core.

Unfortunately, another metaphor, silos, is the predominant operating model. In this case, integration refers to all units committed to synchronous planning and delivery. Staffing, compensation, development, engagement, and retention programs must be coordinated and harmonized. Research across 740 companies by Workforce Intelligence Institute (WII) in 2006 proved that integration to be a rarity. The main reason behind Fast Company's 2005 blast, "Why We Hate HR" is precisely because one unit does not work in concert with another - and employees are the losers.

The second inhibitor to effective people management is the information system. Accounting, sales, production, and human resources churn out mountains of data reporting on the past. Measurement systems in HR display costs and numbers of people hired, paid, and trained last month. Their dashboards are about as useful as yesterday's weather report. Surveys continually show that HR's application of decision science and technology to generate and manage information is woefully behind that of the rest of the organization. Together, lack of integration and old data are formidable barriers to effective performance tomorrow.

Jac Fitz-enz, founder and CEO of WII, who has been acknowledged for decades as the father of human capital analytics, has launched The Predictive Initiative to solve this crippling problem. Through the Initiative, twenty of America's premier management organizations (including American Management Association, Accenture, Google, Monster, Oracle, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Ceridian, Countrywide Finance, SuccessFactors, Fidelity Investments, Target Stores, The Conference Board, and others) have joined together to build the first integrated and predictive, strategic planning/management system.

Jim and Charlie helped launch the development phase of the Initiative during the first group meeting, held at Oracle headquarters last June 28-29. The participating organizations shared their work on prediction through lively discussions of problems and solutions. At the conclusion the group charged Dr. Jac with organizing his staff to deliver:

• an integrated and predictive human capital planning model with
• a data mining software program and
• a future-facing metrics system featuring leading indicators and intangible measures.

The first progress report meeting will be held on October 9 in Chicago. A second review will take place in January with delivery in April/May 2008. Thereafter, an exchange will be organized to share data and experiences going forward. Companies that wish more information or want to participate in this landmark program can contact Dr. Jac through source@netgate.net or by calling him at 408 223-7750.

Technology Corner: Virtual 3D Worlds

Editorial Note: As we emerge from the recent valley of despair in the technology world, we return to a long sought-after goal. How can we use technology to improve the performance of people working TOGETHER? PC platforms, broadband telecommunications, wireless and handheld computing have made great strides in enabling improvements in individual worker productivity. However, since 1980 when we first heard of "groupware" there really haven't been many positive strides in enhancing group productivity. Sure, we've seen some efforts like Groove and a few web-based multi-user platforms come and go. But none have really taken off.

Now, however, we believe we may have finally reached a plateau. Ubiquitous bandwidth, switching technologies, lower-cost HD displays, and raw computing power have reached a point where a meaningful breakthrough is possible. The first hint of change was probably IBM's commitment to Second Life and similar applications like Activeworlds. But like other technologies such as word processors, spreadsheets, PDAs, touchscreen PC's, and even mp3 players, the first ones out of the block aren't necessarily the ones that ultimately make the new market.

We nevertheless believe that a new breakthrough technology is at hand. Its core capability is to provide reliable, realistic three-dimensional interactivity over the Web to a desktop or off-the-shelf laptop PC. The technology, described in this brief thought piece by Bill Benman, provides a sense of "presence" for distributed work that has been missing in collaborative platforms up to now.

By William Benman

Bill Benman is the founder and CEO of IVN, a software company that is actively developing a new generation of virtual capability.

The Web or Internet is becoming the medium of choice for the distribution of content. As such, the Web is evolving with higher speed and more sophisticated interfaces. The higher speed is currently associated with the rapid worldwide broadband deployment rate.

The worldwide broadband subscriber base is currently approximately 200 million, and it is expected to reach 500 million over the next five years (however, an even faster pipe, Internet 2.0, is on the way). This rapid deployment of high-speed Internet access is laying the foundation for the next major evolutionary step for the Internet, a transition to a three-dimensional (3D) space.

On the interface side, the 3D Internet allows for content distribution via a shared space. This capability enables business interaction, entertainment, social networking, education, e-commerce and a variety of other applications, to name just a few.

Numerous 3D web sites have already been created and many companies are currently rushing into these kinds of sites, including IBM, Cisco, Dell, Sun, Microsoft, and many others. See these articles about Second Life and Activeworlds for more details.

Some see 80% of Internet users participating in virtual worlds within four years. See http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=503861.

Unfortunately, while many current 3D web sites do present compelling 3D environments, they cannot put people into the environment in a truly realistic way. We believe that IVN's patented Silhouette^TM technology provides a solution to this problem.

IVN is facilitating the transition of the Internet to a 3D space by "placing" people in 3D environments as live images with accompanying audio via the Web. Silhouette^TM allows people to see and interact with each other via live avatars (representational images) in shared 3D virtual environments over the Web at real-time frame rates with fully synchronized audio.

Silhouette^TM represents a significant advance as it allows people to see each other as live video images instead of conventional gamy, static computer-generated "cartoon" avatars that are not appropriate for business use. In contrast, Silhouette^TM allows for many simultaneous, impromptu (unscheduled) multi-user virtual conferences in a massively multi-user shared space.

IVN intends to offer Silhouette^TM through its 3D world called The Nexos. As discussed in its patents, Nexos will also include distributed intelligence through application linking and intuitive control.

Silhouette^TM is a child-safe solution that provides an enhanced communication experience for a wide-range of business, ecommerce, education and entertainment applications. We're very excited about its possibilities.

For more information, please visit www.ivn3.com.

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.

Online Ads Get Up Close and Personal (July 3)

Yesterday's New York Times carried an intriguing article by Louise Story about the future of online ads ("Online Customized Ads Move a Step Closer"). The gist of the article is that we're soon going to be receiving highly personalized (and theoretically more relevant) online ads. We had to know this was coming - look at all the "mashup" web sites already in existence. We've all been hearing about the prospect of combining all that data about us that's floating around in cyberspace to create ads that are pushed out to us as individuals, based on our known buying habits, or even propensities....

On Keeping Up With - The French? (July 23)

Paul Krugman's July 23 column in the New York Times ("The French Connections" - Times Select subscription required to access link) highlights the sad reality that the United States is falling well behind France, Japan, and many other countries in the speed and quality of Internet access... Not only do we in the United States have fewer broadband subscribers, but we pay more in monthly access fees and ... we have slower service too. And the net result is that we're also lagging in new applications that depend on high-speed access....

The Future of Work Will be Filled with Quasi-Entrepreneurs (July 31)

The movement of people out of large organizations into free-agency and small business continues unabated. Interestingly, in the last few days the New York Times has carried stories about the appeal of franchises to both aging boomers ("Older Workers, Tired of Routine, Turn to Franchising," July 24) and recent college graduates ("Don't Go West, Young Man. Buy Yourself a Franchise Instead," July 26)....

Managers Continue to Resist Telecommuting (August 6)

The news over the past few weeks is a bit discouraging to those of us who believe that telecommuting is - or at least should be - a win-win-win-win proposition (for employers, employees, local communities, and the environment). On the plus side, a new survey by Robert Half International reports that there are indeed more people telecommuting more often, and there are clear benefits to it.... So why am I discouraged? It's those ever-critical middle managers, who still find telecommuting problematic and difficult....

In Our Humble Opinion: What's So Great About Greed?

Commentary by Charlie Grantham and Jim Ware

Bring 'em on...

We trust all of you out there have had a wonderful, relaxing summer. We tried to relax, but, well, work kept getting in the way - at least most of the time. Okay, we promised you a doozy of a rant for September, given that we've had two whole months to think it up. The boyz are still out there on the back forty diggin' in the dirt, so we're flying solo this time. And we think we're up to it, so here goes.

You've heard us rant repeatedly about what's wrong with Education, the Environment and Energy (the three big E's, as opposed to the one small "w"). So, stepping back, margaritas in hand, looking for our lost shaker of salt, we take on what we think might be underneath all of this mess we're in. In a word (or four): pure and simple greed - especially that practiced by corporate America. Jerry McGuire, where are you when we need you, baby?

A couple of things got us to thinking recently about good old-fashioned greed. First was a really great book by Larry Mitchell. It's called The Speculation Economy: How Finance Triumphed Over Industry (no, we don't know the guy; and he's not plugging our book-at least not yet).

Hey, here's the bottom line: "An economy grounded in rapid-fire finance will self-destruct over the long haul." Enough said? Maybe not - but back to that later. Mitchell believes that Finance all too often dominates over things that actually improve the working of a business. That perspective got us to thinking that the same reality may well apply to the management of social capital.

See, there's been this brouhaha over private equity, buy-outs at incredible prices, and more greed. Do you know that the janitors in those private equity firms pay a higher tax rate than the CEO and partners? Go figure. Anyway, there is so much money floating around that the world of Wall Street has gone totally insane, and we do mean that in the psychological sense.

In Our Humble Opinion (getting there quickly this month), at least a third of that money should be invested in building social capital (hey, now we're back to those three E's) and not just chasing more bucko's - which is exactly Mitchell's point.

So how big a deal is this thing? Hold on to your britches dear hearts - it amounts to about $480 billion smacker's right here in good ol' 2007 (see "The business of making money," The Economist, July 7, 2007, pp. 68-70)!

Good God, that's more than the Iraq quagmire is costing us. (see "Cost of Iraq war could surpass $1 trillion" and The National Priorities Project).

And if that doesn't get your blood to boilin', nothing will. That amount of financial capital sloshing around that isn't being invested in building societal capability is ten times - that's right, ten times! - larger than all the pork barrel, "earmarked" dollars we hear about every night on the news. Could we say that the private equity markets are ten times less efficient than the public sector? Oh, dear God! Better get some progressive soap to wash out our mouths.

It gets even uglier. Let's translate this picture into something even Buford and the boys could understand. It basically means that we've got so much "free capital" (that's a fancy-schmancy term for excess wealth) floating around that if it were invested in things that build capability we could:

• Build four million homes
• Hire 7.8 million teachers
• Provide 21 million college scholarships

And that's just in the United States; we'll tackle the rest of the world after we calm down.

So let's re-cap. If some of this "free" cash flow were invested in improving society, just think about what we could do. (But, God, ya gotta love economists. "Free," like there is no cost? Come on!)

But noooo! That "free" stuff gets petered away in pursuit of greed (the finance game gone bonkers), or in pursuit of some misguided, mismanaged, and misinformed crusade (yes, we said that) to convert the great masses of the unwashed to an "enlightened" way of believing.

Okay, yes, In Our Humble Opinion once again (we told you it would be a doozy): Patouey, and Yeech! Hey, did you know that the opposite of "greed" is "liberality" and the opposite of "pride" is "humility"? Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_deadly_sins if you don't believe us.

Let's ponder that idea for a moment. Are we proposing that a change from greed and pride would be a liberal, humble way to live? Just think about that for awhile (we double dare you). Those whom the Gods would destroy, they first make....

So just where is this train of thought (or is it emotion) going? Well, all this blather actually leads us down yet another alley: Neuroeconomics (that's our five dollar word of the month).

Yes, modern psychology is finally showing us that money isn't everything. A fundamental tenet of post-Keynesian economics is that men (and women too - we ain't about to be accused of sexism here) behave rationally and seek to maximize immediate benefits to themselves. That logic seems to describe (quite well, thank you very much) the greed of short-term industrialists and managers of private equity funds that bugs us so much. However, deep down inside, what people really strive for is relative rather than absolute gain. In reality they would be willing to take less gain today rather than see a rival get ahead. So that old, basic sense of competition is alive and well.

This idea brings it all full circle to buttress our point that current corporate financial behavior is out of whack with the behaviors that would lead to growing and preserving our social capital base. Put another way, what's going on today is simply about playing the financial game for the sake of the game, and it's not contributing much, if anything, to long-term economic health, growth, and sustainability. Those three E's we keep beefing about are really symptoms of a much, much more fundamental problem.

In the words of our philosophical guru, Maynard, "They're stepping over a dollar to pick up a dime." This isn't a problem about today, this is a problem about systematically destroying our ability to build a future that is better than today. In Our Humble Opinion what we are facing is a moral crisis. We, as a society, are not making conscious choices about our values and our future. In fact, it appears that behavior that runs counter to our basic evolutionary psychology is at least tolerated, and perhaps, even glorified by the Jerry McGuire's among us.

Or in the words of one popular pundit: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."

Trying saying that now to the folks who fell off that bridge in Minneapolis literally hours after the Governor had once again refused to support a tax increase to fix it. That bridge was undermaintained even in the face of hard evidence that it needed repairs because fixing it was considered "too expensive." And consider all the other parts of our national infrastructure that are underfunded because of the currently popular anti-tax mentality that has crippled our ability to act as a nation. We have to remind ourselves that the "commonwealth" is about the common wealth - the things we can do far more effectively together than we can do separately.

We've come full circle now. Without adequate investment in infrastructure, including social systems, the future of work (and living) would be bleak. In Our Humble Opinion, there is enough wealth out there to invest once it gets diverted from simple, greed-driven schemes that only benefit a select few. Well, we suppose we could drag that government into the bathroom now. But is that what we really want? A future that isn't?

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

To subscribe to Future of Work Agenda, register on our web site. Please pass this newsletter on to other interested individuals and encourage them to subscribe as well. The newsletter is free, and will remain free as long as possible.

To end your subscription, send a message to newsletter@thefutureofwork.net and write Unsubscribe in the Subject line.

For republication rights, contact Jim Ware at jim@thefutureofwork.net.

 Future of Work | 966 Creston Road, Suite 150 | Berkeley, CA 94708

©Copyright 2007 The Work Design Collaborative, LLC. All rights reserved.