Future of Work
Book: Thomas Malone. The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life.
Description
Jeff Howe:
" To state the obvious, the advent of the Internet has changed the way business is conducted, with the result that the nature of the firm has changed as well. While advances in communications technology, as Coase predicted, have generally led to larger and larger companies, information technology is exercising a strong counterforce, as the MIT management professor Thomas Malone has documented. While “the main story about the organization of business in the twentieth century was centralization,” Malone writes in The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life. “beneath the headlines we find a more complex story.” In a study conducted by Malone and his colleagues at MIT, the average size of firms in many industries was shrinking. Tellingly, Malone points out, the largest private employer in the United States today “is not General Motors or IBM or even Wal-Mart.” It’s the temp agency Manpower Incorporated, which as of 2008 employed 4.4 million people.
The dramatic increase in outsourcing is one obvious indication that the firm is no longer the discrete entity of decades past. But there is, Malone argues, a deeper dynamic at play. His central argument in The Future of Work transcends the world of business into organizational theory. Malone has identified three stages in what he calls “an amazing pattern” in the evolution of human affairs. In stage one people operate in small unconnected groups. In stage two, larger groups form and decision-making is centralized. In the third stage, “the large groups remain but decision-making becomes more decentralized.” In politics this has taken the form of democracy, and now the amazing pattern is taking hold in business. “We can expect to see more of this decentralization,” Malone writes, “wherever a) communication costs are falling and b) motivation, creativity, flexibility and the other benefits of smallness produce business gains.” Malone cites such companies as Hewlett Packard, W.L. Gore (maker of Gore-Tex fabric) and Visa International as examples of organizations that illustrate this trend toward decentralization. By this reckoning, the firm isn’t so much becoming obsolete as it is evolving into just one of many deeply interconnected species in an increasingly complex ecology. Put another way, the boundaries that once separated the firm from the other creatures in that ecology—such as suppliers, contractors, customers—have become more porous." (http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com/cs/2008/05/chapter-5-the-r.html)