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This post was written by Jim Ware on March 16, 2010
This is the March 2010 issue of our free monthly newsletter, Future of Work Agenda. We welcome comments on any of these articles. You can also access the newsletter directly on our website, at this link.
Here in North America the harbingers of spring (birds, flowers, earlier sunrises) are becoming more and more evident. And we even saw a picture last week of crocuses popping up in London. Winter isn’t over by any stretch, but now with Daylight Savings Time in place again here in the U.S., we can dare to hope for warm, dry weather.
So we turn our thoughts to the future, and to change—and not just in the weather. We look this month at the shift in power, status, and trust away from institutions and towards communities, at the emergence of still more miraculous technologies, and the continuing growth in flexible/remote/distributed work (whatever you want to call it), including a new way to find those third places you’re looking for.
But we also sound a cautionary note. We may be optimists are heart, but we’re not naïve; nothing about the future is guaranteed. We also report on an important book that dares to ask the question, “What if automation is so successful it puts all of us out of work?”
Enjoy.
Charlie and Jim
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The forces of history are conspiring to shift the center of control in our society away from institutions and towards local community groups. This trend is true for education, governance, commerce, and our spiritual life. What you trusted fifty years ago can no longer be depended on. We believe the power of technology to promote increased connections among like-minded people is driving this change.
Last month it was augmented reality and 3D movies. This month we describe how a “sixth sense” technology can bring all that data out there in the “cloud” right to your fingertips (literally) when you need it. And we link to a report that highlights which new technologies are going to expand rapidly in the public sector.
We report on a new iPhone app that helps you find coffee shops and wifi hot spots, using augmented reality. And we point to a blog post on making the business case for flexible work.
This section contains mini-reviews of things we’re reading (or trying to). We’ll include links to more information online, typically at Amazon.com, though we have no stakes in whether you buy the books and articles we mention, or not.
Brief announcements and notes about where Jim and Charlie have been, are, and will be, holding forth in public conversations and other activities.
As usual, your comments and reactions to any of these articles are more than welcome. Please send your thoughts to us at any time.
This issue of Future of Work Agenda was produced by Jim Ware and Charlie Grantham of the Work Design Collaborative, LLC. We encourage your comments, suggestions, and submission of materials for possible future publication.
Our topic, “Evolving Telework: The Facilities Frontier,” focused primarily on the rising role of “Third Places” as workplaces (in addition, of course, to corporate facilities – First Places – and home offices – Second Places). Diane, as a corporate facilities director, also addressed the key question of what can be done with corporate facilities to make better use of space, break down stovepipes, and enhance collaboration and productivity.
I’ve just loaded up our combined presentation decks in Slideshare. Here’s the deck:
I hope you find these materials interesting, provocative, and even useful. Barbara discussed the reasons why Third Places make so much business sense, while Diane described how SCAN has implemented mobile work and in particular how that program has led to dramatic redesign of the corporate facilities (Glenn was our Moderator; he opened by highlighting some WDC research that clearly showed two-thirds of knowledge work is being done outside of corporate facilities.).
I focused primarily on the business case for moving to distributed work models. And if that’s an important topic for you, you may also find this article from last July’s Future of Work Agenda newsletter of interest: “What are You Waiting For?” It suggests that if your CEO isn’t insisting on implementation of flexible work programs he or she may be guilty of corporate malfeasance.
Questions or comments? Leave them here and I’ll respond as best as I can.
This post was written by Jim Ware on February 15, 2010
This is the February 2010 issue of our free monthly newsletter, Future of Work Agenda. We welcome comments on any of these articles. You can also access the newsletter directly on our website, at this link.
We’re reinventing ourselves once again. As we’ve hinted at previously, we have redesigned this newsletter once again. We’re cutting back on in-depth articles to allow us to devote more time to the members of our Private Client Network (a new offering we described in detail back in the December 2009 newsletter).
Thus this newsletter will be devoted almost entirely to short notes (with lots of links to source materials) about ideas and issues we think you should be paying attention to. We tell our private clients that they need “peripheral vision” to stay alert to the trends and discontinuities in their world that may not affect them today or even in the near future, but that could eventually disrupt their business models altogether.
And that’s what we intend to do, in smaller measure, for you. Thus, you’ll see below a series of comments and pointers on our four favorite topics (and the core of our business): The Future of Technology, The Future of Place and Space, The Future of People and Organizations, and The Future of Work Design. And for good measure every month or two we’ll provide you with a mini book review or two—-the stuff we’re reading that we think you should too.
That said, we do have one piece of unfinished business that we’ve also included here: the last of our six-part series of feature articles on designing and managing Business Community Centerssm. The first five articles are all available in the newsletter archives at this link.
Enjoy.
Charlie and Jim
Click on any Headline below to access the full story.
This is the last in a series of articles on Business Community Centerssm (BCC’s): the why, the how, and the wherefores. We conclude this month with an explanation of how to make money with a BCC. This article is also the first in our new, condensed format. We end with a note about how to get more information on this topic as well as others in this issue.
This new section contains mini-reviews of things we’re reading (or trying to). We’ll include links to more information online, typically at Amazon.com, though we have no stakes in whether you buy the books and articles, or not.
This post was written by Jim Ware on February 2, 2010
Earlier today we delivered a webinar by that title (“Managing People You Can’t See”) to over 750 people. It was sponsored by Citrix Online. Special thanks to all our good friends at Citrix, but especially Rhonda Betsill.
You can view an audio/video recording of the entire 60-minute presentation (which included materials presented by Jessica Eastman, a Product Manager at Citrix Online, and a 15-minute Q&A session) at this link:
This post was written by Jim Ware on January 18, 2010
This is the January 2010 issue of our free monthly newsletter, Future of Work Agenda. We welcome comments on any of these articles. You can also access the newsletter directly on our website, at this link.
Welcome to 2010. We are dispensing with our usual list of predictions for the coming year, as we’ve done in years past. As we suggest below, 2010 is going to be a year of massive change for just about every sector of the economy and every business. Predicting those changes with any degree of certainty takes more nerve than we can muster at the moment.
However, in 2010 we are going to create change of our own by abandoning several of our basic traditions.
First of all, we are morphing our business model to become more focused on fewer issues. In this light, as we announced last month (Special Announcement, at this link) we are re-casting our Future of Work community into a private client network. There are more details about the new program at the end of this newsletter. In parallel with that move, over the next few months we will also be simplifying and renovating our website.
But more importantly we are taking this newsletter into what we are calling a “Web 3.0 model.” This will be the last issue in which we publish complete articles. Going forward this newsletter will serve more as an invitation for those who are interested to explore a series of issues we believe are compelling, immediately relevant, and often neglected by other futurists and think tanks.
You will see headlines here, and occasional links to relevant pieces by others as well as ourselves. Data, detailed analysis, and action recommendations will be reserved for members of our private network and actively engaged clients. We hope you will find enough value in our work to join the network and to participate with us in our continuing exploration of the future of work.
This month we’ve produced the fifth of six planned articles on Business Community Centers™, along with a short continuation of our perspectives on change management and a look back at our most popular articles over the last year.
One final note: we are going to press (there’s an outdated concept!) just a few days after the earthquake that struck Port au Prince in Haiti on January 12. Our hearts go out to the victims, their families, and the entire country, while our admiration for the thousands of volunteers and the millions of citizens around the world who are reaching out to help is unbounded. There’s little we can say or do as individuals, but as a world community we’re making a dramatic difference.
Enjoy.
Charlie and Jim
Click on any Headline below to access the full story.
Business Community Centers™ must be designed to maximize the positive social experience of using them as a place to work. We propose using a design process based on stagecraft—where work in the future is seen as theatre. We propose six principles: community, learning, work/life integration, diversity of work styles, resource accessibility and egalitarianism.
There’s one thing we do know about the future: 2010 will be full of change. And the survivors will be the firms (and the individuals) who know how to “ride the tide” and turn a crisis into an opportunity. Effective leaders generate a strong and widespread sense of urgency about the need for change.
To keep pace with all the professional pundits, we revisit our 2009 newsletters and report the ten most-read articles from among the thirty-plus we offered up last year.
Brief announcements and notes about where Jim and Charlie have been, are, and will be, holding forth in public conversations and other activities.
As usual, your comments and reactions to any of these articles are more than welcome. Please send your thoughts to us at any time.
This issue of Future of Work Agenda was produced by Jim Ware and Charlie Grantham of the Work Design Collaborative, LLC. We encourage your comments, suggestions, and submission of materials for possible future publication.
To subscribe to Future of Work Agenda, click here and 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.
This post was written by Jim Ware on December 15, 2009
This is the December 2009 issue of our free monthly newsletter, Future of Work Agenda. We welcome comments on any of these articles. You can also access the newsletter directly on our website, at this link.
The holidays are upon us – and we’re ringing out the old year, looking forward to the new one. 2009 has been tough year for just about everyone we know. We—all of us together—have had to face a multitude of tough challenges and even tougher decisions. Here in the United States we’re facing raging debates about health care, unemployment, climate change, massive deficits, and Wall Street versus Main Street. And that’s just for starters.
Let’s join together in working to make 2010 a genuine “turn-around” year. The future is full of nothing but opportunity—make the best of it!
We’re doing our part by launching a new Private Client Network program; see the Special Announcement below. We intend to take a stronger leadership role in defining the future of work and charting the pathway through all the white water, speed bumps, and land mines lurking out there (did we mix in enough metaphors there?). See also our October Compass article “Pay Attention! To What?” for a discussion of why we need to get out in front of all those “weak signals” obscuring our collective vision about the future of work.
In this issue of the newsletter we’re continuing our series on Business Community Centers. The Feature article is about how to make those critical decisions about where to locate a community-based shared work center. Then, in our Compass piece we explore how to think about the one constant in all our lives: change. And finally, in Notes from the Field, we offer a much-simplified version of the kind of weak signal reports that we’ll be producing in 2010 for members of our Private Client Network.
Finally, a holiday wish: May you have nothing but peace and prosperity, from now on (we can dream, can’t we?).
Enjoy.
Charlie and Jim
Click on any Headline below to access the full story.
We’re pleased to announce that on January 1 we will be launching a new Private Client Network. Our goal is to serve as “peripheral vision” for selected clients, providing them with action-oriented executive briefings, private telephone consultation, and periodic teleconferences and web meetings with important thought leaders. We invite you to join the network.
You should choose a location for a Business Community CenterTM (BCC) using a reliable analytic process. Based on data from numerous case studies of both success and failure, we are convinced that a systematic approach to selecting a BCC location will promote a positive business outcome. There are eleven factors that must be considered even before you conduct a site-specific analysis.
Change Management: it’s one of those core ideas that everyone talks about—and everyone thinks they understand. We agree it is incredibly important, but in our experience too many people talk about change management without really thinking about how individuals and groups actually experience, and respond to, significant change. We offer here a simple three-factor model of the drivers of change that we’ve found exceptionally helpful over the years.
A key component of our Private Client Network in 2010 will be a series of “weak signal” reports. We will be an early warning system for external influences, paying particular attention to “weak signals” that may not appear to be critical today but will be impossible to ignore within 24 months. This Note is an excerpt from one those “weak signal” reports.
Brief announcements and notes about where Jim and Charlie have been, are, and will be, holding forth in public conversations and other activities.
As usual, your comments and reactions to any of these articles are more than welcome. Please send your thoughts to us at any time.
This issue of Future of Work Agenda was produced by Jim Ware and Charlie Grantham of the Work Design Collaborative, LLC, We encourage your comments, suggestions, and submission of materials for possible future publication.
To subscribe to Future of Work Agenda, click here and 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.
“The Hurrier I go, the Behinder I get. . . “(old Pennsylvania Dutch saying)
We’re not worried about whether the Internet will survive. No, the question is whether we, as human beings and workers, can survive what the Internet is doing to us.
Of course, it’s also impossible to imagine the future of work without the Internet. We’re not going to wax philosophical here about all the ways online access and the burgeoning global knowledge base have improved our lives and our work. We obviously couldn’t be distributing this newsletter around the world at almost no cost without the Net. And we couldn’t find or afford to pay for even one percent of the information we can now track down every day. Without the Internet it would cost considerably more to order goods and services, process invoices, account for transactions, or create the global virtual communities that have become so dominant in the last several years.
No, we’re not complaining about the incredible resource that we’re all so dependent on. But we are concerned about how we’re turning into a culture of “I want it right now!” and “If you don’t respond to my Instant Message within 60 seconds, our whole business will fail!” It’s the 24×7x52 “always on” world we (all of us) seem to have created that worries the two of us.
We know of an attorney (no jokes, please; he’s a good guy who does useful work) who complained a few years ago about the speed-up in his business. As he put it:
We used to get a letter or a phone call from a client who expected a response within a week or so. Then the fax machine came along and our clients wanted a response within a day. With email and now instant messaging they think we’re at their beck and call all the time. And they expect us to respond with our legal opinions just as quickly as they frame the questions.
We also heard recently about a project manager who is ready to quit and go live on a desert island somewhere. She works for a global firm that expects her to manage project staff based on at least three continents; she’s often on conference calls or web meetings at 5 AM (to Europe) and again at 10 PM (to Asia and Australia). She receives over two hundred email messages a day, and she usually has a dozen or more voice messages when she gets back to the office after lunch. She’s just plain tired of the pressure to do everything instantaneously. There’s just no time to think anymore.
Sometimes it also feels like there’s no time to live at all. A good friend of ours complained a few years ago that she “can’t sleep any faster.”
One more quick example: the “Crackberry” phenomenon is also part of this story. How many times do you find yourself checking messages right before or after (or even during) dinner, or in the middle of your kid’s soccer game?
How many “friends” do you have on Facebook? How many people do you follow on Twitter? We’re all afraid that someone out there knows something important that we’re not aware of. Sure, Twitter is a wonderful way to stay just a little more “in the know,” but each of us has to figure out (and set) our own limits. How much time each day do you spend tracking what other people are thinking or reading—versus how much time you spend actually reading original material yourself, or just plain thinking?
It’s no surprise that stress levels are up, mental health professionals have no fears of unemployment, and time management books are selling like hotcakes. And don’t forget that no one can actually “manage” time; we each have the same 24 hours every day to use as we see fit.
It’s not “time management” but self-management that matters. For a short but powerful lesson in personal productivity management, read Bary Sherman’s Notes from the Field article in the April 2009 issue of this newsletter: “Seven Ways to Manage Yourself .”
Which brings us to our basic point. It’s time to take charge of our work and our lives again. What makes that easier to say than to do is that we now have so many more many sources of information and so many more choices about what to do and where to do it. We can read, write, and communicate globally with our PC’s and smart phones just about any time, from any place. “All” we have to do is to decide where, when, what, and how.
But that’s hard because in the past we didn’t have to make those kinds of choices—they simply didn’t exist. We went to the Office because that’s where our files were, and that’s where we had to be to meet with colleagues. Or we went to a client site, or a retail store, to meet with people or to see and buy products. That’s just the way it was.
Today, of course, we have all kinds of choices. We can work at the office, at home, in a coffee shop, on an airplane. We can use a Mac or a PC. We can buy a Blackberry or an iPhone or an Android. We can answer every cell phone call, or we can turn the damn thing off and pick up the messages later. Choices certainly enrich our lives and empower us. But we’re not yet very good at making those choices in ways that enhance our lives and keep us in control, rather than someone else.
Finally, remember that traffic sign, “Speed Kills.” In the sixties the watchword was “Tune in, turn on.” Today a better guide might be “Turn off, let go, live a little,” or “Don’t just do something, think.” What’s your hurry? Life (and work) is a journey, not a destination.
This post was written by Jim Ware on November 24, 2009
Just found a very compelling report on the role that flexible work has in supporting corporate agility and strategic flexibility. It’s a new report prepared by Sandy Burud, Ph.D, of Flexpaths, a firm we know and have had many conversations with.
Here’s a distallation of the report, in Sandy’s words, from the Sloan site:
The headline is that 95% of the [Working Mother] 100 Best [companies to work for] say that flexible ways of working at their organizations is now considered the new “normal” — their standard way of doing business. Not one or two — 95%. That’s news, and a call to action for any company that competes for labor or reputation or strives to be a great place to work.
As we’ve said many times, flexible work is at the core of corporate agility, something we wrote about at length back in 2006 (see the writeup of our book by that name on Amazon.com).
This is the third part of a six-part series on Business Community Centerstm (or “BCC’s”—see “Business Community Centers as Third Places” for a detailed description of the concept and our basic business model).
In September we discussed the forces driving the economy towards less complex, smaller work organizations (“Social Forces Driving a Simpler Way of Working“). Then in October we took on the rules of industrial economics (“The Dismal Science Dives into a Dismal Swamp“), while this month we lay out just how we think commercial success will be measured, and managed, in the 21st-century post-industrial society. The principle of the “Triple Bottom Line” forms the basis of the business model embodied in BCC’s.
The triple bottom line measures not only financial performance, or profit, but also incorporates reliable measures of environmental impact (planet) and community impact (people). It brings together what traditionally were called economic success, sustainability, and community development.
But before we dive into the details, here’s a little history.
Elkington holds that for a business to be sustainable over time (think seven generations as a time scale), it not only has to make a profit that can be re-invested in the growth of its customer market, but it also has to re-invest in order to preserve both its environment and its social capital—so it will have a future labor force when it needs one.
That’s a Big Thought, so let’s break it down a bit. Investing in the environment means not only supporting the community where actual production takes place but also the places where raw materials are harvested and the environment where the end products or services are actually consumed. For example, a Chinese auto manufacturer’s environmental impact encompasses not only where the coal and iron ore is extracted and where the factory is, but also all the urban landscapes where the cars are ultimately used.
Investment in “social capital” sounds like a lofty goal best left to the philanthropists and government social service agencies. Actually, however, it is a rather simple equation. If a company doesn’t invest in developing the next (and succeeding) generations there won’t be anyone to create/build its widgets, nor will there be enough prospective customers to consume those goods and/or services.
The economic and social changes we talked about in our earlier articles represent a realization that this task can no longer be faithfully entrusted to our public sector organizations or the largess of a very rich few at the top of the economic pyramid. Everyone whines about the dysfunctional state of our educational and health care systems in the United States, but we believe the problem runs far deeper than that.
So what’s a sane person to do? Our answer: Invent a new business model that integrates profit, planet, and people. One of the significant problems in the current reality is that we don’t have financial accounting systems that are capable of capturing these very different performance metrics.
When we began designing Business Community Centers as a stand-alone business we realized we would have to develop proxy measures for some of these factors. Here’s what we came up with:
Triple Bottom Line Performance of BCC’s
Factor
Metric
Definition
Profit
Standard Financials
Extended to the larger community. For example, what’s the economic impact of creating one more job?
Planet
Environmental Impacts
Currently we measure the lessening of “bad” impacts such as reducing carbon footprints, recycling etc.
People
Increases in Social Capital
Protection of the labor force such as “fair trade” policies and direct investments in the “employability” of workers and community residents.
Sounds good. How do you do it? First, you need a totally open accounting system so everyone in the organization knows what is happening. And, yes, that includes salaries, benefits, and total compensation—the “open book” approach. Next is translating each of the metrics into measurable indicators. Each firm is unique, and each market is different, so there has to be a negotiation process among members of the organization. However, the top the senior executives must be responsible for finalizing measurements and reporting them to the Board of Directors.
For example, e “planet” or environmental metrics could include measures of re-cycling; reductions in paper use; and, of course, carbon footprint impacts. Each of these dimensions then requires an “accounting” system to be put in place to track your performance over time.
Measuring people impacts shouldn’t be that difficult. Cash contributions and volunteer time commitments to local community efforts are becoming standard items. However, more creative firms are beginning to track things like the number of local jobs created, investments in internships for local college students, and executive sabbaticals to local non-profits. The point is that the performance indicators are being consciously (and transparently) established, tracked, and reported on a regular basis.
Okay, that’s fine, but how does this “TBL” practice translate into attracting investment and pleasing shareholders? We actually believe that is the wrong question. “Shareholders” is a rather restrictive term—a hangover from the old paradigm of seeing external financial investors as the only source of “capital” for a firm. We suggest expanding that idea to include “stakeholders,” many of whom will be external to the firm, such as residents of the local community.
We submit that a firm employing a triple bottom line approach will be more attractive to a community than one that is not so oriented. And that increased attraction can be translated into business location incentives (more on that topic next month). That means tax incentives, sponsored training programs, rent reductions, and marketing support through local branding. Each of these factors can have a direct financial impact on a business. And that financial performance improvement makes a TBL firm more attractive to traditional financial investments.
What’s really needed to make this new perspective real is a creative way of putting those “community assets” on a firm’s balance sheet. And that brings us right back to our original point. This evolution in performance measurement and management is all a work in progress. Our prototype Business Community Centertm in Prescott, Arizona (see “WDC Selected to Launch a New Work Center” for details), is the living laboratory where we are experimenting with the “How do you do it?” part of the equation.
We are out of space for this month (seems to happen to us all the time). If you are interested in exploring these ideas in depth please contact us about our new “Private Client Network” where we dig deeper into these topics. Next month we’ll talk about “Location, Location, Location” and shed some light on where we think this revolution is going to happen.
This post was written by Jim Ware on November 15, 2009
This is the November issue of our free monthly newsletter, Future of Work Agenda. We welcome comments on any of these articles. You can also access the newsletter directly on our website, at this link.
It’s hard to believe the extended “holiday season” is just about upon us. It’s been a tough year for just about everyone. However, we’re seeing some encouraging signs of a genuine recovery. Even though the official U.S. unemployment rate is now over 10%, the number of job openings is actually increasing—and one search firm executive reported recently that he’d seen someone turn down a $200,000 banking position (no, we don’t know which bank or if it’s still open, so please don’t call us!).
This month we continue our exploration of new kinds of workplaces. Our Feature Article focuses on the growing importance of the “Triple Bottom Line” as a way of scoring firms on their contributions to People, Profit, and Planet (social, financial, and environment). We believe that over time this new way of thinking about performance is going to lead to new corporate location strategies and a new generation of smaller, shared workplaces located much closer to where people live (yes, you’ve heard that from us before; and we’re going to keep on pushing the idea until it takes hold).
And our Compass article expresses our deep concern about how our technology-dependent economy may be dehumanizing work, exacerbating stress and health problems, and generally making life less, rather than more, pleasant. We know there are plenty of benefits from technology, and we can’t live without it—but it’s becoming harder and harder to live with it too.
Finally, we welcome guest columnist William Arnold. who penned our “Notes from the Field” article this month. Bill is a gerontologist who offers several important insights into the role that “seniors” will play in the future economy (we’d like to think “mature middle age” is a more appropriate label), as well as some direct advice to those of us who are at the upper end of the workforce demographic scale.
Enjoy.
Charlie and Jim
Click on any Headline below to access the full story.
This is the third part of a six-part series on the emergence of Business Community CentersTM. This month we consider how to assess their value and impact. The triple bottom line measures not only financial performance, or profit, but also incorporates reliable measures of impacts on the environment (planet) and communities (people).
We’re not worried about whether the Internet will survive. No, the question is whether we, as human beings and workers, can survive what the Internet is doing to us. Of course, it’s also impossible to imagine the future of work without the Internet. But we are concerned about how we’re turning into a culture of “I want it right now!” It’s the 24×7x52 “always on” world we (all of us) seem to have created that worries the two of us.
For some time now we have been throwing out cautionary signals that in the United States there is an impending knowledge worker shortage within the next five to seven years. In spite of the current economy we believe that a shortage of 10 million knowledge workers is coming—and soon. Our guest columnist this month is an expert gerontologist who has a view that should be heard: a significant portion of that gap will be filled by seniors, but that age group has particular challenges and needs.
Brief announcements and notes about where Jim and Charlie have been, are, and will be, holding forth in public conversations and other activities.
As usual, your comments and reactions to any of these articles are more than welcome. Please send your thoughts to us at any time.
This issue of Future of Work Agenda was produced by Jim Ware and Charlie Grantham of the Work Design Collaborative, LLC. We encourage your comments, suggestions, and submission of materials for possible future publication.
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.
