February 2005

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 February 2005 issue of Future of Work Agenda and setting our theme for the month. This issue is all about technology - its wonders, its pains, and in particular its impact on our working patterns, social systems, and relationships.

We are extremely proud to announce the IBM Global Consulting has joined our Future of Work Program. Nancy Forbes of IBM's Market Intelligence group is the Executive Sponsor. Our second annual World Congress on the Future of Work is now only three months away. It's time to register and reserve a Delegate seat! And we're starting to write "the book" and want your help.

We're doing everything we can to make this newsletter interactive. In this section we print comments and reactions from readers to past articles, rants, research notes, and whatever else is bugging them about the future of work. We'd love to hear from you!

Whether you work at a large company or a small one, it is becoming increasingly likely that you or your employees are spending at least some part of your time working outside of the customary office water cooler/coffee maker/elevator speech matrix where you have traditionally had many opportunities to talk to your colleagues.

The subtitle of the book is "How the Living Web is Transforming Politics, Business, and Everyday Life." It's a compendium of stories, case examples, and vignettes that paint a multicolored picture of how not just the web but a whole collection of new interactive software tools is changing the way people communicate, connect, share ideas, promote causes, come together, and even raise money.

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.

From Jim and Charlie

Well, believe it or not, it's almost spring here in sunny California (go ahead and scream with envy all you northern and eastern state dwellers!). The days are actually getting longer again, and at least at the moment we're enjoying warm breezes, flowering trees, and outdoor tables at our local watering (and coffeeing) holes.

And so in the spirit of spring, renewal, and hope, we decided to try once again to focus on new technologies and their promise of enhancing and transforming our lives.

Alas, those of you holed up in the colder climes could have warned us to watch out and not be so naïve. Actually, to shift images, we feel a little bit like good ol' Charlie Brown. Lucy tempted us with that football once again, and once again we're flat on our backs.

The point is, we seem to be eternal optimists (naïve ones at that) about technology and how great it's going to be some day. Sorry, we should know better by now.

Truth is, our feature article this month, New Ways of Working (written by our friend and colleague Elizabeth Albrycht) did get us excited about how blogs, wiki's, and even mundane tools like instant messaging can actually make a difference in the way we communicate and relate to friends and co-workers. And we do believe in the hope and promise that Elizabeth spells out.

And we've just finished another new book that lays out the case for new web-based tools and capabilities and how they are revolutionizing politics, business, and even everyday life. We hope you will enjoy The Power of Many, by Christian Crumlish, as much as we did. Read our book review for a broad overview.

But then cruel reality reared its ugly head once again, as both of us struggled with suddenly obsolete and defunct routers, and Jim wrestled with moving all his files to a brand new (and wonderful!) desktop while simultaneously fighting with tech support people in several different countries who were trying to help him get a broken laptop back up to full speed. So our monthly rant is about the still-existing (and very large) gap between the promise of technology and the frustrating realities that almost all of us experience almost every day. IT still isn't really ready for prime time.

On a much more positive note, we are very pleased to announce that IBM has joined our Future of Work program as a corporate member. We're also more excited than ever about our upcoming 2005 World Congress on the Future of Work. Read about both in the Announcements section below. And be sure to look at our Reader Response section this month for some very thoughtful comments on last month's feature article, Closing the Talent Gap.

Please forgive us for our growling complaints about technology; we just want it to succeed, because we really do believe in its possibilities. And we know it will succeed - someday.

So, on to the rest of the newsletter. Enjoy! And please let us know what you think.

- Jim Ware and Charlie Gratham

Announcements

IBM Joins Future of Work Program

We are very pleased to announce that IBM Global Services has joined Future of Work as a corporate member.

Nancy Forbes, Manager of IBM's Headlights Program, will be IBM's representative and sponsoring executive. The Headlights Program is a methodical approach to identifying shifts taking place in the marketplace in the future. Nancy is looking forward to working with all of our corporate and individual members to develop clearer visions of the future and more effective ways to measure and predict workplace and worker productivity as well as technologies that support collaborative work.

You Should be at the 2005 World Congress on the Future of Work!

Please visit http://www.futureofworkcongress.net to learn about the 2005 World Congress.

The 2005 World Congress will be held April 26 - 28, 2005, in Philadelphia, hosted and co-sponsored by the General Services Administration. See the website for a detailed schedule of events, including five pre-event Delegates-only teleconference roundtables.

We have just enabled our online registration process, so we encourage you to visit the site - and to join us in Philadelphia in April.

This incomparable, invitation-only executive forum will bring together more than 120 director and C-level decision-makers in the fields of human resources, IT, and operations/facilities management from the world's leading organizations, all joining together to craft a set of design principles that will enable organizations to make the vision of the future of work real in their organizations.

We look forward to an historic meeting venue in our nation's first capital, in the shadow of Independence Hall, and including a tour of one of the GSA's innovative new facilities that make the future come alive right now.

Visit the website now: http://www.futureofworkcongress.net

We're also seeking Sponsors for the 2005 World Congress on the Future of Work

We invite you and your organization to participate as a select partner in the presentation of the second annual World Congress on the Future of Work.

If you are interested in becoming a Sponsor partner of Future of Work for the World Congress please download the 2005 Sponsorship Prospectus from our website:

2005 World Congress on the Future of Work Prospectus

We offer several different levels of sponsorship opportunity. Please direct inquiries about Sponsorship of the World Congress to:

Darren Eng
Sponsor/Vendor Relations
darren@thesponsorshipgroup.com
+1 310 567 4844 phone
+1 866 276 1712 fax

And We're Looking for Case Studies in All the Right Places

After suffering much badgering, cajoling, and downright pestering, we've decided to commit to writing "The Book" about what we've learned recently concerning the future of work. We've commissioned a literary agent and a writer to help us with the project.

More details will be forthcoming as we engage in the process. We expect a full prospectus to be available with a month. However, we want to start the ball rolling within our community now.

A key feature of the book will be case studies on the success, or failure, or corporate efforts to integrate IT, HR, and Real Estate strategies, functions, and operations. We know that many of you have direct experience with these efforts. And certainly all of our readers have an avid interest in the topic.

So we are asking you to think about submitting your experiences, knowledge, and learning in the form of short case studies that could be integrated into the book. Full attribution will of course be given to all case examples we include, and we will protect the identity of any organizations mentioned (unless you specifically offer permission). If you have an interesting story, please send us a note at:

charlieandjim@thefutureofwork.net.

Reader Response

We're doing everything we can to make this newsletter interactive. In this section we print comments and reactions from readers to past articles, rants, research notes, and whatever else is bugging them about the future of work.

The following comments are in response to our January article "Closing the Talent Gap" in which we offered several specific suggestions for coping with the predicted shortages of talented workers that will be developing in 2005 and 2006.

From Mike Johnson

Our view is that we are going to witness from January onwards a type of three-tier recruitment climate. By that we mean that you won't be able to just look at the market as a whole, but need to make assessments and take appropriate action depending on what sort of skills you need. And that will be further tempered by both geographic and industry sector economic climates.

Overall in the second and third tiers - that comprise junior managers, skilled workers and general frontline staff - we will be surprised if 2005 turns into any kind of banner year. A continuing partial economic recovery will move us away from stagnation, but it is unlikely - with the exception of the odd "hot" industry - to see any massive churn of employment taking place. Rather, we would be predicting more of the same.

Tier one of the employment platform looks like being a very different story.

As a professional search firm that spends most of its time seeking out the best talent available across borders and industries, our 2005 predictions of the market for business talent - senior-level middle managers, top managers and high performing specialists - is extremely robust. Why ? Well, anecdotal evidence points to a talent boom in the top tier. Points to is wrong - it's started already.

From late 2004 and on into early 2005, all signs are pointing to a growth year, a time when the churn of top managers and super-skilled specialists are going to get back to something similar to the boom years of the late 90s.

Forget what you read in the newspapers, they don't report this kind of job-swapping activity. As we have pointed out before, most of what you read in the newspapers is simply wrong. If you read the international business press you'd be forgiven for believing that most workers' jobs are still under threat and they are being told - not even asked - to work longer hours.

That may be true of employment tier three, but not of the executive and specialist talent in tier one. Here they already work long hours (that's a given), but what they are doing now is swapping jobs to give themselves more flexibility in how and where they work.

2005 is going to see the playing out of the corporate version of that old children's party game, musical chairs. As one person exits from his or her employer, another is needed. They then create a vacancy in another business and so the chain goes on. Add to that a clear need to fill some of the holes created by hiring freezes over the last few years and you have the basics for a fairly robust year in both executive and super specialist recruitment.

. . . .

Yes, 2005 is the year that top performers - managers and specialists - begin to call the tune and turn a buyer's bear market into a seller's bull run. Hope you're fit enough to keep up.

Mike Johnson is the Managing Partner of Johnson & Associates, a specialized communications firm based in London and Brussels. He is also a founder member of the FutureWork Forum (www.futureworkforum.com). These comments first appeared in Norrtman & Goffin View, a newsletter published by a boutique executive search firm in Brussels, Belgium.

From Robert Cenek

Your work dealing with the upcoming labor shortage is right on the money. I am banging those drums here in the great state of Iowa.

Your feature article, "Closing the Talent Gap," really illuminates the growing problem that's still getting lost on most corporate radar screens. While many boomers will have no other choice but to work longer due to financial and economic realities, others will have the means to exit the workforce in a more "traditional manner."

These individuals with the means to "retire early" will need to be encouraged to remain in the workforce longer if the U.S. is to alleviate the critical skills gap that's still in an embryonic stage, but poised to explode over the next five years.

Unfortunately, my experience is that many corporations, governmental bodies, and quasi-governmental entities believe that the problem will go away, or it's overstated, or relaxed immigration quotas, offshoring, and feverish recruitment of the Generation X'ers will solve the problem in just the nick of time. Very dangerous thinking I may say!

Robert Cenek
Founder
Cenek Company
www.cenekcompany.com
robertcenek@cenekcompany.com
+1.319.862.0534

The Feature Article: New Ways of Working Need New Communication Tools

By Elizabeth Albrycht

Whether you work at a large company or a small one, it is becoming increasingly likely that you or your employees are spending at least some part of your time working outside of the customary office water cooler/coffee maker/elevator speech matrix where you have traditionally had many opportunities to talk to your colleagues.

While email and phone calls can help you to stay connected, it is easy to miss that serendipitous cross-section of conversations that happen informally and keep us connected to the life of the organization. Luckily, there are a variety of new communication tools available that address this need for informal conversation.

Most important among them are blogs, podcasts, and wikis. These new tools can become important components of effective employee communications, PR and marketing efforts, sales and partner communications programs, and distributed work teams, creating important links among distributed employees, partners, customers, and colleagues. This tools help to enhance relationships and enrich the life of the organization.

Blogs are one of the hottest new developments in communications technology. A blog is an online personal publishing tool, the content of which is comprised of a series of frequent "posts" - generally short, informative articles discussing topics of interest to you, your organization, and your audiences, typically written in an informal tone. These posts are normally arranged in reverse chronological order, the most recent on top. Most blogs are updated at least once a week; the most prolific bloggers and blogging teams post new material several times a day.

"Podcasts" are personal Internet-based radio programs that "broadcast" audio of a few minutes to an hour or more. Listeners can download the programs from your website or blog and listen to them on their iPods (thus the name podcast) or other digital music players. They are not just for music anymore; people are increasingly using them, for example, to record interviews and presentations.

"Wikis" are simple websites where, depending on the permissions that are set up, visitors can directly edit existing pages, add their own pages and even delete pages. The most famous wiki to date is Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia created by thousands of contributors around the world. Wikis are an excellent tool for aggregating information and links.

Individuals and companies are beginning to adopt these tools for a variety of tasks, ranging from marketing and public relations activities, to internal employee communications, to team and project management tasks. All of these tools represent effective ways to break out of formal, third-person "corporate speak" by communicating in an informal first-person voice, speaking directly to your audiences. Another important attribute each of them possesses is that they are built around the notion of a link.

Blogs and wikis are built around links: links to other people's posts, links to news articles, links to photos and links to podcasts. Most people's blog and wiki posts also link to other sources of material either to back up their argument, or to give readers more in-depth information. Furthermore, it is good to get other blogs and wikis to link back to you, so you can, over time, build a network of connections among your key audiences.

It is sometimes easy to forget that the audiences we so often name in our corporate communications strategies (be they internal or external) are people. Newsletter articles, website content, Intranet content, employee guidebooks, letters from the CEO and so on, are typically written in a formal language that we'd never use when having an actual conversation with someone.

There are good reasons why that formal language is used in traditional organizational communications, but people are more likely to trust, believe, or take direction from someone who actually speaks to them in an informal and more personal manner. You should think of blogs or podcasts, especially, as an opportunity for an ongoing "fireside chat" vs. an occasional "press conference" or "company-wide meeting."

This network of connections, which is ever-changing and shifting and growing, can become an ongoing conversation that links your distributed employees, partners, customers, and colleagues together in an exchange of information that also serves to tie them to the life of the organization. With all of us becoming increasingly geographically distributed, and the simultaneous growing need to partner ever more closely, these new communication tools help fill an important gap between in-person and formal communications.

Elizabeth Albrycht is a founder and principal of Albrycht-McClure and Partners, a public relations and event management firm based in California and Paris, France (Elizabeth and her business partner Jennifer McClure are working closely with Future of Work to design and manage the World Congress on the Future of Work).

Book Review: The Power of Many

by Christian Crumlish ( Sybex, San Francisco; 2004)

Reviewed by Jim Ware

I was reminded many times as I read this fascinating book of one of Marshall McLuhan's best-known comments: "We shape our tools and our tools shape us."

The subtitle of the book is "How the Living Web is Transforming Politics, Business, and Everyday Life." It's a compendium of stories, case examples, and vignettes that paint a multicolored picture of how not just the web but a whole collection of new interactive software tools are changing the way people communicate, connect, share ideas, promote causes, come together, and even raise money.

We selected this book to review this month partly because we wanted to focus on collaborative technologies. However, it quickly became apparent that Crumlish, while an accomplished technical expert, is much more interested in the social consequences of these technologies than he is in the technology itself.

And that focus is precisely what makes the book so valuable. Crumlish cuts through a lot of technology jargon and arcane capability to focus on how our lives are changing because of the ways we are using technology - and he does that very well.

The book opens with a lengthy chapter on the 2004 Presidential campaign (obviously written before the November election). Crumlish cites in particular the Howard Dean campaign, which clearly moved the whole political process into an entirely new realm, much as the Kennedy/Nixon debates in 1960 showed what a powerful political tool television is. Crumlish was actively involved in the Dean campaign himself, and he also interviewed a number of political operatives from many of the other campaigns.

His stories make it very clear that the web was a powerful vehicle for connecting grass roots volunteers all over the country, enabling them to share ideas, offer advice to each other and to the campaign headquarters staff, and engage in active political debates. And of course the Internet was also the primary means by which Dean (and many of his primary opponents) raised money. But the story doesn't end there; the deeper lesson from the presidential campaign was how all these web tools supported and facilitated "real-world" organizing activities.

Perhaps the most effective of those activities was the convergence of politics with Meetup.com, a generic tool that enables anyone to sign up and then link up with others who share an interest - any interest, be it a political candidate, a passion for knitting, old Beatles songs, woodworking - you name it. Meetups are local face-to-face gatherings of "birds of a feather" that are set up, promoted, and reported on via the Internet. So the hidden power of the web is that it helps people get together in the real world - easily, inexpensively, and even when they aren't personally acquainted with each.

The various political campaigns also built a number of other tools that were inspired by Meetup.com, and those tools played an important role in the 2004 campaign. We can expect to see even dramatic and prominent use of the web as a community-builder and distributed database in future political campaigns.

But what does politics have to do with the future of work? Actually, more than you might think. And this book only begins with politics; most of the examples Crumlish cites are from other walks of life. Habitat for Humanity, for example, is a very different kind of organization that also benefits tremendously from the way the web enables like-minded people from many different socioeconomic groups to find each other and to coordinate real-world activity that would simply not happen if those folks weren't linked to each other first in cyberspace.

The most interesting sections of the book describe a wide variety of social networking software and offer some intriguing stories about these new and evolving applications are enabling all kinds of communities, information flows, idea exchanges, and collaboration across an incredibly diverse set of social spheres - including, no surprise, commerce and industry. Crumlish provides us with rich insight into these new tools foster and accelerate the formation of new networks - of relationships, ideas, and actions.

And here is where I see the lessons for those of us concerned about the world of work. Ignore the new cyber communities, information bazaars, and action groups at your peril. What's going on in the world of volunteers, students, geeks, and bloggers will be at the doorstep of "legitimate" businesses before you realize it.

Some marketing executive (probably a young one) is going to discover very soon just how powerful it is to engage in open, interactive dialogues with customers (and prospects) about new products, product experiences, and their wish lists for still-uninvented products and services.

And some HR executive will wake up one day and realize just how powerful wiki's, blogs, and social network applications are for engaging employees, recruiting talented workers, and learning what the troops are thinking about, concerned about, and doing (in stark contrast to what senior executives think the troops are thinking about, concerned about, and doing).

When business organizations and other commercial enterprises finally realize that new ways of working really do require new communication tools, they'll be turning to The Power of Many for the fundamental lessons about how to apply those tools, and what a huge difference they can make in the strength and capabilities of their organizations. After all, an organization is nothing more than a collection of many who share some common purpose or focus - and that's exactly what the Internet is really good at enabling.

The Power of Many is available is available online at Amazon.com

In Our Humble Opinion: IT Still Ain't Ready for Prime Time

Commentary by Charlie Grantham and Jim Ware

Due to technical difficulties the light at the end of the tunnel is temporarily out of service; we apologize for any inconvenience.

This past month the two of us have been plagued with a spate of technical difficulties - routers that reached their "end of life," overloaded operating systems, long delays on tech support phone lines, totally unhelpful tech support websites, and the ever-present dropped voice mails on cell networks. Just what the "bleep" is going on here? Dear hearts, we have to report it's actually business as usual.

We figure that between the two us we probably spend close to one day a week fixing stuff that ought to work all the time. Now, given our exorbitant daily consulting rate, that amounts to, maybe, $1.58 in cost to our bottom line.

But for the rest of you who work in regular jobs that kind of distraction could mean as much as a 15-20% loss in productivity. Good Lord, if all of us could recapture that time (and blankety-blank emotional energy), we could add as much as two gazillion bucks to the US economy.

Note: we actually tried to figure out what the exact number would be, but the accountants in the government could only give us total data for 2003. They must be rebooting the big computer they use, and it will probably take over a year to re-start. So please trust our swag estimate for now.

Just do the math yourself. Keep track of how much time you spend re-starting your machines, calling tech support, bitching at customer service reps, and deciphering manuals written in some archaic dialect of techno babble. If any of you out there spend less than fours hours a week engaged in this kind of worthless activity, we want to know about it!

So what's the freaking problem? What would you do if you had a car that, seemingly at random, stopped running? Or one that wouldn't re-start until it sat turned off for fifteen minutes? Or if you turn on the headlights, the heater goes off. Or requires changing the doors every week so no one could jimmy the lock and steal it? Even Yugo's were better than that.

In Our Humble Opinion the technology we use day in and day out is still flat out unreliable! And here's our point: this sad reality is an insult to consumers. We expect better; we deserve better. Does this kind of stuff happen with "mission critical" technology? Do airplane engines quit (routinely)? When's the last time an ocean liner was just cruising along and sank of its own accord? OK, OK, we may be overdoing it a bit (no surprise to those of you who know us and love us anyway), but it sure seems that consumer technology is still delivered to customers without adequate reliability testing (to say nothing of usability testing). Ship it, and see what breaks, then issue a "service pack" upgrade to fix it.

Yes, some things work some of the time, but why doesn't most of it work most of the time?

The technology that lies at the heart of this very real-world problem is software. Yes, occasionally we have a hardware failure, but the service techs are actually pretty good about coming to our door and fixing that.

So why is software such a problem? We think it's because software is becoming a commodity; it's gone cheap. When things become essentially commodities people makes lots of them and hope some will work, realizing that a lot of them won't. And who cares?

The solution? In Our Humble Opinion it lies somewhere out there in "open source land."

You've got to love penguins (you know, the Linux mascot kind). The days of closed, proprietary systems are gone - and good riddance. Sorry, Steve, that means you too.

Why open source as a solution? Well, because it totally circumvents - and short-circuits - the lengthy process by which technology has traditionally been created, improved, expanded, and supported. The technical complexity of these massive software systems has increased to the point where no one person, or even a small group, can completely grasp the entire thing. As one old sage said to us, "software isn't 'engineered,' it's just bolted together."

The technical complexity of modern day technology systems has clearly surpassed the social complexity of the human systems used to create them. Open source, to us, represents the next wave of "social evolution" needed to keep technology moving forward in the service of humanity.

What, you say? In response we say, this economy need more brains working on technology development than can be assembled in serial order, or can be "decomposed" (that's a techy word meaning breaking it into teeny, tiny parts) into understandable pieces.

We need a social system that places an emphasis on collaboration (not coordination; they are different concepts), instant feedback from every part of the system, and dynamic interaction. Let's put it this way and use an old sports metaphor (No, we aren't being sexist here either. Some of our best friends are female athletes):

We need technology development that looks more like basketball than baseball. And that's what the open source "movement" looks like to us. You want to test this imagery? Next time you have a tech problem, call up the help desk and ask to have a team of people put on the problem. Got the picture? They don't (and can't) think like that. Then try posting up a technical question to a blog that supports an open source product like any Linux application, or Firefox (the new Internet browser from the Mozilla Foundation).

Then just sit back and see whether a traditional industrial social model or a collaborative network model better supports urgent problem-solving (meaning, fixing something that ain't working) in today's tech world.

Who knows, if we could all move to open source models, maybe the two of us could save a few hours of frustration every week, the US economy could save those two gazillion dollars a year, and we'd even have more time to write columns pointing out the truth of working in today's world - and, dare we suggest, in the ever-evolving world of the future of work (we're kind of assuming that you'd like that).

Please direct your comments to comments@thefutureofwork.net. We'd love to publish your reactions and suggestions.

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

©Copyright 2005 The Work Design Collaborative, LLC. All rights reserved.