HOME > NEWS AND EVENTS > NEWSLETTER > JANUARY 2009

January 2009

From Jim and Charlie

Happy New Year! Well, it may not be that happy for many of us, but at least it's a new beginning, and it always brings all kinds of fresh hope and a renewed sense of focus. We spent much of our time the last two weeks rethinking our own business strategies and setting out several aggressive (but still realistic) goals for ourselves. And we hope you've had a similar opportunity for reflection, refocusing, and recommitting to the goals and values that matter to you personally.

This issue, our first for 2009, appropriately looks ahead. Where last month we wrote about the virtues of near death experiences, now we're determined to take charge of our future.

Thus, in our feature article we note that it most definitely won't be "business as usual" ever again. And in the Compass piece we offer our own five-point plan for "taking charge" of the future.

Then in Notes from the Field we're pleased to offer some "radical" thinking from Bay Jordan about the value of human assets and (in our words, not Bay's) the idiocy of massive layoffs. That's an important perspective in the middle of the worst economic downturn in over 70 years (there were over 1 million layoffs in the United States in November and December 2008 alone).

Finally, we invite you to participate in an important new research project we're doing on behalf of World at Work. They – and we – want to uncover Best Practices in providing non-exempt employees with opportunities for remote and mobile work. Completing our survey will take less than 10 minutes, and it will be of immense help to the profession. And it's an easy way to contribute to improving organizational efficiencies, enhancing the quality of life of many employees, and reducing greenhouse gasses. How could you spend 10 minutes on anything more important than that?

And one final note:  we're just completing an upgrade to our Future of Work blog that will – finally – make it easier for you to comment on our posts. We hope you'll visit the blog regularly; one of our New Year's resolutions is to re-activate it to create a genuine interactive conversation about the future of work.

Charlie and Jim

Click on any Headline below to access the full story online or to download a pdf version.

Feature article:  2009 Is The Year of Hope

We resolve to be hopeful in 2009. We are at a major crossroad. This is not a normal, anticipated swing in a "business cycle." Rather it's a "reset" of the basic rules of the road that will drive major restructuring of entire industries and – we believe – a closer alignment of personal, political, and economic interests. The good news is that we get to make choices, not be whipsawed by forces beyond our control, as we have been for the last decade.

Compass: Taking Charge of Tomorrow

"The best way to predict the future is to create it." Never has that insight been truer than it is right now. The future isn't a given; it will be the result of millions of decisions made by millions of individuals and groups. How can you possibly affect your own destiny? We offer five "simple" guidelines for creating your own future.

Notes From The Field: Rethinking Redundancy

Mass layoffs, or "redundancy" as it is often called in the United Kingdom, has been an option for owners and business managers since the start of the Industrial Revolution, and a common phenomenon during the last 30 years. A new economic downturn sees it once again becoming widespread, and it is clearly one of management's primary counter-recessionary tools. Why? What if there were effective alternatives?

The Learning Agenda: Flexible Work for Non-Exempt Employees

The Work Design Collaborative is pleased to announce a partnership with WorldatWork on a new research project to discover, document, and report out "best practices" for creating a distributed work solution for non-exempt employees. But we need your help.

What's Happened/Happening?

A short note about where Jim and Charlie are, and will be, holding forth in public conversations and other activities.

©Copyright 2003-2008 The Work Design Collaborative, LLC. All rights reserved. Website development by InMotionMedia, Inc