Newsletter Archive

This Archive includes selected reprint articles from past issues of the Future of Work Agenda newsletter.

January 2012 Newsletter

January 8, 2012

Future of Work... Unlimited logo
 

January 2012

Welcome to the future of The Future of Work...unlimited!

I am very pleased to announce that we have a whole new look, not only to this newsletter, but to our entire website. I hope you will take some time soon to visit us online, wander around the new site, and get re-acquainted with us and our capabilities.

This redesign has been a long time coming, because it reflects not only our embrace of new, more powerful web technologies, but also a continuing evolution of our business focus. While the basic services we now offer have always been part of our portfolio, knowledge creation and executive learning about the future of work have become  a higher priority.

[click to continue…]
Share It!

{ 0 comments }

You’ve Got to Know the Territory

January 8, 2012

These comments are directed at what I call “operational managers.” You know who you are: the people who make large organizations “tick” and move forward. You manage the processes and the resources that enable the rest of the organization to get its work done smoothly, efficiently, and without interruption.

You are the HR, IT, facilities, and financial operations managers who keep the wheels turning, the clocks running, and the core business processes humming. You sit right between the senior executives who demand productivity and strategic focus on the one hand, and the large numbers of employees who just want to succeed on a daily basis, on the other.

As we look ahead to 2012 each of you is faced with enormous pressure to perform day-in-and-day-out (on multiple dimensions) while simultaneously designing and driving numerous change initiatives. You often feel caught between the proverbial rock and the hard place; it’s not easy to split your time, attention, and energy between today and tomorrow, or among all the stakeholders who are competing for that time and attention.

[click to continue…]
Share It!

{ 1 comment }

2011 Newsletters

December 30, 2011

Click on any month to download a pdf version of the full newsletter, or click on a feature article  to access that individual article online:

If you have any questions or comments, please leave them here. Or contact us directly.

Share It!
Download as PDF

{ 0 comments }

Picture That!

November 20, 2011

by Jim Ware

A picture is worth a thousand words (a very old saying)

I once worked for a textbook publishing firm based in Chicago, Illinois. In the midst of the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, the President of the firm and I had a fascinating (nonpolitical) conversation about the power of the televised images of the confrontations between the police and the rioters (images that were eerily familiar to some of what we're all seeing right now as the Occupiers clash with authorities in Oakland, California, New York City, and other cities all over the world).

Anyway, the President and I were sharing our observations about the power of television to bring the unrest in the streets right into our living rooms. I also commented on how impactful television had been in exposing the entire country to the Vietnam jungles and battles with the Vietcong during that horrendous period in American history. Those images had certainly contributed mightily to the antiwar protests that filled the late 1960's.

The President agreed with me about the power of television, but then he added that the editors in our firm would certainly agree with me that "a picture is worth a thousand words"—if they could write the thousand words.

I've never forgotten that comment, partly because it is so sadly true. In spite of the continuing "invasion" of television and online video into our lives, the fact remains that most of us are still heavily dependent on the written word, even though visual images convey far more information, far more quickly.

[click to continue…]
Share It!

{ 0 comments }

Don’t Stop Talking About Tomorrow

October 24, 2011

by Jim Ware

Last month our feature article focused on scenario planning—as the only way to prepare for an uncertain, constantly changing future ("Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow"). As we have thought even more about the challenge of "futureproofing" an organization, we realized that scenario planning depends critically on an organization's ability to imagine what the future could be like.

And organizational imagination in turn depends on the collective wisdom and insights of a large group of thoughtful individuals who are willing to share their perspectives and to learn from each other. In short, the only way to develop meaningful scenarios of future possibilities is to engage in rich, extended conversations.

Thriving in the future means holding many conversations—conversations with colleagues, with staff, with customers, with shareholders, with suppliers, and with representatives of every outside group that could possibly influence your future (including even competitors when you can get away with it).

[click to continue…]
Share It!

{ 0 comments }

Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow

September 20, 2011

by Jim Ware

As the television sports announcer Jim McKay once said of a star athlete, "His whole future lies ahead of him." And of course, that's true for all of us. And one of our strongest yearnings is to know what lies ahead. What's around the corner? What's over the horizon?

Those are interesting questions for us as individuals, but they are essential for organizations. Organizations make bets on the future every day. When McDonalds buyers place an order for potatoes and ground beef, they do so on the belief that they know how many orders for Big Macs and fries they'll get next week. When General Motors sets its production quotas for Chevrolet Volts, they are betting on how many cars the dealers will be able to sell a month from now.

However, those two examples are basic, tactical management decisions that depend on sophisticated market demand analysis, complex multivariate equations, and a dose of guesswork. But while that kind of demand forecasting may require massive computing power, it's simple in comparison to the need that senior executives have for understanding the bigger, broader, and more fundamental trends in the economy and society.

Will the economy get better? Or worse? When? How will it affect your company? Will your business thrive or struggle? What's going to happen to health insurance, Medicare, Social Security, climate change, unemployment, average wages? How will terrorism, violent weather, pandemics, and public policy affect your business?

The truth, of course, is that no one can really know the future (in spite of what many pundits try to tell us). It has also been said that "the best way to predict the future is to create it." However, as much as we'd all like to create our own future, that isn't a very realistic option.

[click to continue…]
Share It!

{ 0 comments }

It’s Time to Rethink How and Why We Do What We Do

July 15, 2011

by Tim Springer

Tim Springer, the CEO and founder of HERO, Inc., is a former professor and chair of the Human Environment and Design Department at Michigan State University. He is now an active consultant and thought leader in the field of workplace strategy. He has been described often as one of the top two or three experts in the world on issues of knowledge worker performance, office ergonomics, work behavior, and the work environment.

As many of you know, Tim is also an active and thought-provoking participant in several online discussion groups on LinkedIn and elsewhere. He recently posed a very profound question in the discussion group at Workplace TV. With his permission, we're reprinting (with some minor editing for clarity and continuity) both his opening question and several of his follow-up comments. If you find these perspectives useful, we encourage you to visit the discussion online and view not only Tim's comments but the responses and additional ideas expressed by other workplace professionals.

Opening Question: Should we focus on designing the workspace user experience?

In a world of work that is rapidly becoming flat networked, distributed, remote and virtual, what role can the physical workplace serve? How can we entice workers to use a workspace?

Premise

In spite of arguments to the contrary, offices are not going to disappear entirely. There are many reasons for this; not everyone has a place to work from in their domicile, and not all work lends itself to working remotely. Certain types of knowledge work benefit greatly from face-to-face interaction, and so on. Offices can and should serve a different purpose.

The bottom line, then, is that while professional workers are spending less time in the office each week, the meaning of that time may have changed in important ways. The office has become an important location for symbolic, learning, and creative interactions. A direct result of this trend is that the design and décor of offices has taken on a renewed importance for corporate managers. Beyond simple notions of size and comfort, office design has gained attention for its ability to meet the emerging needs of workers who spend fewer, but perhaps more important, hours in the office.

(Elsbach & Bechy, California Management Review, 2007)

[click to continue…]
Share It!

{ 0 comments }

Growing Talent for Tomorrow’s Industries

May 15, 2011

by Jim Ware

Last fall I was asked to contribute to a special issue of The Futurist, the official magazine of the World Future Society. My task was to describe the most interesting jobs I could think of that don't yet exist but will be commonplace in the year 2030. I was one of a dozen or so futurists who responded.

The resulting series of speculations and predictions ("70 Jobs for 2030," published in January, 2011) was exceptionally provocative.

But if the challenge of predicting those new jobs was difficult, it was nothing compared to the question I was then asked by IEDC (The International Economic Development Council): How do we train people to fill jobs that don't yet exist?

I'm now preparing a response that question, which I'll be speaking about at IEDC's "Understanding Tomorrow's Industries Today" conference in Indianapolis June 4-7.

What follows is a synopsis of my notes for that presentation.

[click to continue…]
Share It!

{ 0 comments }

From Workplace Services to Workforce Support

April 20, 2011

by Jim Ware

It's now been the better part of a decade since Charlie Grantham and I participated in Corenet's CRE 2010 research project. That year-long effort, which involved well over one hundred real estate and workplace services professionals, produced a whole series of reports aimed at projecting how the role of CRE would change and what it would look like in the "far distant future" of 2010.

Obviously, 2010 has come and gone. And while many of the predictions that came out of the project have indeed come to pass, many have not. This is not a reprise of that study, or a "gotcha" exercise pointing out all the ideas we got wrong. Rather, I want to focus on the core message that we (the entire project team) produced: the job of infrastructure professional must become "supporting work, wherever it takes place."

Note how different that concept is than the traditional view of CRE and facilities management, which focuses on real estate, office design, and building management and maintenance. With that emphasis it's far too easy to forget about the people who use those workspaces.

[click to continue…]
Share It!

{ 0 comments }

When Did Temporary Become Permanent?

March 21, 2011

by Jim Ware

Everyone knows the workforce is becoming far more diverse—whether you look at gender, generational differences, cultural and ethnic backgrounds, or geographic dispersion. However, workforce demographic diversity is not the focus of this article. Rather, we are seeing an even more critical kind of diversity emerging in the way organizations get their work done and in the resulting variety of employment relationships.

However, as important as it is to recognize and manage workforce diversity, we believe it is even more critical to manage employment diversity.

The economic turmoil over the past eighteen months has led to new rounds of layoffs in many organizations, producing what is clearly becoming another permanent reduction in the percentage of the workforce holding down full-time jobs.

Business Week reported in January 2010 on the rise of the "disposable worker"—the growing number of temporary and part-time employees who can be easily "disposed of" (read, "laid off at low cost." See "The Disposable Worker" for details).

[click to continue…]
Share It!

{ 0 comments }

← Previous Entries