The "Employee" an Inefficient Model for the Future

At its core, the employee and employer relationship does not serve the new business environment. The "single job" model is a relationship where a person assigns control to an organization in exchange for a mitigation of risk. As a result of the revolution, successful organizations will rid themselves of these types of relationships because at their very core they are inefficient and no longer applicable.

The best and most innovative work comes only from true commitments freely made between people in a spirit of partnership, not from bosses telling people what to do. Leadership cannot be assigned or bestowed by power or structure; you are a leader if and only if people follow your leadership when they have the freedom not to. Conversely, those without leadership skill will quickly be rendered impotent as associates simply bypass them and align around those who can lead. In effect these mechanisms allow groups of associates to fire their boss.

If you’re uncomfortable with the idea of vesting people with the power to fire their boss, then you’re not ready for the task of running a business or managing a business in the new world that is emerging as a result of the revolution in business today. As people become more comfortable with ambiguity, they will trade the single-job model for a multiclient model, thus granting to any single organization or person less power over their lives and livelihood. Droves of mid level managers who lost jobs in the past decade, for example, suddenly learned that low ambiguity in the form of a single job comes at a price of high risk because all of their eggs were in one basket. This shift is apparent as older executives bemoan the “lack of loyalty” in the younger generation. Yet there is no less loyalty in the younger generation. Younger people are just granting less power to any single organization; they are less subservient because they have more degrees of freedom. And the complaining executives are confusing subservience to power with loyalty to cause. But they are very different concepts. Business owners and managers will need to develop the latter and eliminate dependence on the former to be effective in the new world. Eventually the single-job employment structure will be seen as a barbaricform of organization, much as indentured servitude is seen today. We will see a greater shift away from the ownership of people through employment, which is nothing other than an advanced form of owning people by owning their time. In the future every relationship, at least in the best organizations, will be viewed conceptually as a joint venture.

Exerpts from an article, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down.The article first appeared in Leading Beyond the Walls, a book edited and produced by the Peter F. Drucker Foundation on Non-Profit Management and published by Jossey-Bass books, 1999.

Manuel Castells’ The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture

In dealing with and managing the impacts of the revolution one must attempt to understand the drivers behind the change. So much of gaining understanding relating to this complex topic lies in letting go of past concepts previously relied upon and at the core of many of our belief systems. Dr. Felix Stalder (See  http://research.openflows.com), an expert in a variety of issues surrounding technology and its connection to society, published these reflections on Dr. Castell's book Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture http://annenberg.usc.edu/Faculty/Communication/CastellsM.aspx . It is enlightening literature for people to begin to understand the truly mammoth ground swell of change occurring at present and evolving more rapidly than many can grasp. Academic in nature, the observations shared by Stalder and Castell are enlightening indeed.

The Network Paradigm: Social Formations in the Age of Information by Dr. Felix Stalder

 

The Rise of the Network Society, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. I. M. Castells (1996). Cambridge, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 556 pp., ISBN 1-55786-617-1

The Power of Identity, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. II. M. Castells (1997). Cambridge, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 461 pp., ISBN 1-55786-874-3

The End of the Millennium, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. III. M. Castells (1997). Cambridge, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 418 pp., ISBN 1-55786-872-7

Manuel Castells’ The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture (1996, 1997 and 1998) is unrivaled in ambition: to make sense of the global social dynamics as they arise out of a myriad of changes around the world. It is a cross-cultural analysis of the major social, economic and political transformations at the end of this century. It is presented through interrelated empirical case studies whose number and variety are truly enormous–the bibliography alone fills 120 pages–and threatens to overwhelm the reader at times. Nevertheless, the trilogy is prodigious and sets a new standard against which all future meta-accounts of the Information Society will be measured. It will be indispensable reading for anyone interested in a grand narrative of the present.

Castells’ main argument is that a new form of capitalism has emerged at the end of this century: global in its character, hardened in its goals and much more flexible than any of its predecessors. It is challenged around the globe by a multitude of social movements on behalf of cultural singularity and people’s control over their own lives and environment. This tension provides the central dynamic of the Information Age, as "our societies are increasingly structured around the bipolar opposition of the Net and the Self" (1996, p. 3). The Net stands for the new organizational formations based on the pervasive use of networked communication media. Network patterns are characteristic for the most advanced economic sectors, highly competitive corporations as well as for communities and social movements. The Self symbolizes the activities through which people try to reaffirm their identities under the conditions of structural change and instability that go along with the organization of core social and economic activities into dynamic networks. New social formations emerge around primary identities, which may be sexual, religious, ethnic, territorial or national in focus. These identities are often seen as biologically or socially unchangeable, contrasting with the fast-paced change of social landscapes. In the interplay of the Net and the Self the conditions of human life and experience around the world are deeply reconfigured.

The trilogy concludes more than a decade of research, spanning from new social movements and urban change (Castells, 1983; 1989) to development of the high-tech industries and their organization into technopoles, clusters of high-tech firms and institutions of higher education, such as the Silicon Valley (Castells and Hall, 1994), to comparative analysis of the fastest developing countries in the Asian Pacific Rim (Castells, 1992), to research conducted in Russia before and after the 1991 revolution and the demise of the Soviet Union.

It details the diversity of social change interlinked around the globe which created the Information Age and integrates the often seemingly contradictory trends into a comprehensive analytical framework. The theoretical abstractions are developed through a broad and detailed empirical analysis "as a method of disciplining my theoretical discourse, of making it difficult, if not impossible, to say something that observed collective action rejects in practice" (1997, p. 3). This makes his account highly accessible and richly textured.