I’ve come across several posts and articles recently that have gotten me thinking about the pros – and cons – of working independently.
Generally I am a serious advocate of small firms and free-lancers and a genuine cynic about large organizations (but I’ll hold back and express that cynicism some other time).
A friend recently pointed me to a post by Tina Brown on The Daily Beast (one of those many, many political blogs). I don’t read the Beast very often, but this one isn’t about it politics - it’s about “The Gig Economy.”
“Gigs” are, obviously, projects – the things we free-lancers and small businesses depend on for a living.
Brown has become intrigued with what she calls “gigonomics” – the explosion of people working this way. She reports on a recent survey conducted by The Daily Beast and Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates. Five hundred employed U.S. citizens aged 18 and over were interviewed via the Internet on January 8 and 9.
Here’s what got Brown interested:
A full one-third of our respondents are now working either freelance or in two jobs. And nearly one in two of them report taking on additional positions during the last six months.
Just as startling, these new alternative workers are not overwhelmingly low-income. They’re college-educated Americans who earn more than $75,000 a year.
Welcome to the club Tina! Regular readers of this blog are probably all practitioners of gigonomics. So what’s the big deal?
Consider this, for one: none of the job statistics we’ve been hearing about daily since last September come close to measuring the impact of the economy-on-free-fall on small businesses. Traditional unemployment data comes from reports from large businesses and applications for unemployment compensation. It just doesn’t capture the slowdown or flat-out stoppages of work being experienced by all of us small business types.
Just about all the “gigworkers” I’ve talked with recently are reporting that while they may have a project right now, the outlook for the next gig is pretty bleak. In fact, that’s being kind – the outlook is grim indeed.
Now, there’s either going to be a whole lot of creative scrambling (and some pretty intense competition) for the next gigs, or there’s going to be a whole more people “on the street” (hopefully not literally) than even the most thoughtful economists and government leaders seem to be expecting.
This thing could get a whole lot worse way before it gets any better.
But there’s another side to this explosion of small businesses and gigs. And that’s what Jon Husband wrote about just the other day right here (“The Mass Customization of Work“). A more or less unrecognized consequence of this mass customization of work and the “atomization” of business is the loss of rhythm and synchronization that Jon highlighted.
When we’re all working independently and in our own offices (either at home or at Starbucks, etc) it takes a whole lot more effort and awareness to “sync up” with peers, colleagues, clients, vendors, and so on. We no longer have all those “signals” from the workplace that you see in large organizations – from the mundane clock on the wall to the progression of colleagues towards the cafeteria or the parking lot at lunchtime – let alone the boss scheduling meetings, directing your work, setting deadlines, and so on. And of course we’re not doing anywhere near as much “same time/same place” work as we used to.
As Jon rightly points out, thank god for the proliferation of Web 2.0 social networking tools – though we still have a lot to learn about people use them.
Anyway, this all something to think about on a Monday morning – and one that’s supposed to be focused on national service instead of ruminating on the future of work. I guess I’m just a bit out of sync with everyone else!
Dave Pollard, who thinks and writes about the future of the world, has a good post on tools, technologies, and artifacts that will go the way of FAX and CDs. Included on his list: hard drives, “wall of text” reports & documents, “best practices,” email & groupware, corporate intranets, corporate libraries and purchased content, cell phones, classrooms, meetings, job titles, and offices. The notion of job titles going away resonated with my own recent post on the importance of well defined roles in some circumstances.
Pollard says,
“Generation Millennium members expect to have 12 jobs in their lives on average, and to work on varied projects with cross-disciplinary teams rather than in a defined role. Companies are outsourcing, offshoring, fragmenting, moving to Peer Production. What value or meaning do titles have in such an environment? (If titles are still a useful status symbol, companies could simply follow the example of the banks and make everyone a Vice-President.)”
I agree that titles in this case are meaningless, but that does not mean that people should not be clear about their roles in each of the projects that they contribute to. And sometimes these roles may also be “titles.”
Meanwhile, Dave Snowden has been developing an organizational model to support working across organizational silos; he refers to this concept as crews. A crew is an organization formed for a particular project, mission, or task. It “ritualizes and formalizes” cross-silo activity by ensuring that the crew starts with identifying the specific roles that it needs and then fills those roles by selecting people from different silos. This is, prima facie similar to the “Hollywood model,” which many researchers and writers have used to exemplify a potential future state of work wherein individuals belong to professional associations (“guilds”) and come together to work on specific projects. As Snowden goes on to say,
“A crew works because its members take up roles for which they are trained, and where their expectations of the other roles in the crew is also trained and to a large extent ritualised … A crew has cognitive capacity beyond the sum of its members, members occupy their roles for limited time periods…”
Being Snowden, Dave also integrates his concept of network stimulation into the crew model, in which he sees “people swapping between roles to allow for continuity. ” Within an organization (or, in the case Dave is writing about, a network of organizations) the requirement for working cross silos and swapping people in and out ensures that the network ties broaden and deepen over time.
Back to Hollywood: I found it very interesting to read “Can Hollywood Help LinkedIn?” in the New York Times this week. It appears that LinkedIn is looking for a niche in an industry that has long used a networked, “crew,” guild-based model in which roles and titles identify precisely what skills a person offers as well as access to relationship information that reveals context.
In our research on very small (fewer than 5 employees) and personal businesses (one person businesses) we consistently find that work flexibility, work/life balance and the ability to work on their own terms are key reasons people start or work for very small businesses. Often these small business owners and employees left corporate jobs in search of more flexible work and the ability to work on their terms.
Leaving corporate America for more flexible work has clearly captured the imagination of the public. The hugely popular book The Four Hour Workweek celebrates self-employment, work flexibility and work/life balance. More recent is career coach Pamela Skillings book Escape from Corporate America, which is a how-to book for those “stressed out, burned out, or just plain bummed out” by their corporate jobs.
The desire for increased job flexibility and work/life balance is so strong and the appeal is so broad that we consider it a major driver of the growth of small business (see our research report Demographics and Small Business). Because technology is making it cheaper and easier to form and operate a small or personal business, corporate employees can easily leave for more flexible small businesses. This is resulting in small business becoming a growing talent competitor for larger corporations.
Flexible work is also prized by those continuing to work at larger corporations. Competing for Talent, a recent report by Deloitte’s consulting group, discusses this topic and points out:
“For today’s workers, hefty compensation packages and fancy retirement plans just aren’t as appealing as they used to be. What they really want – more than anything else – is to control when, where, and how they work. They’re happy to work hard, but want to do it on their terms. And by the way, we’re not just talking about “Gen Yer’s”, also known as, “Millennial.” As it turns out, recent retirees who are re-entering the workforce want many of the same things as their younger counterparts. So do “Gen X’ers,” although most are too afraid to ask.”
The next decade will see the talent war between big and small business intensify. Web 2.0 technologies are making work flexibility and small business employment more viable. High performance employees are increasingly attracted to the flexible work options provided by owning or working for very small and personal businesses. To compete effectively for talent, larger corporations will need to provide much greater job, career and work flexibility.
Every week or two it seems that another example of ways that software, network dynamics, bidding and negotiation between sets of skills, collaboration, cooperation and similar activities are leading to an emerging synthesis of social networking, brainstorming, collaborative work, predictive markets, and peer-to-peer negotiations (see Michel Bauwen’s work on Peer-to-Peer Economies)
.
“Knowledge workers own the means of production in a Knowledge Economy” – P. Drucker
.
Kluster is a platform for crowdsourcing and then organizing and putting to use skills, energy and availability on projects and initiatives. It presented (unveiled itself ?) at the recent TED conference in Monterey, California.
Here’s an excerpt of the early review from ReadWriteWeb.
Crowdsourcing firm Kluster officially launched yesterday at the TED conference, which is underway this week in Monterey, California. Founder Ben Kaufman, who bankrolled the company in part with money from the sale of his last company Mophie, has organized a gimmick over the course of the TED conference he hopes will prove Kluster’s worth. Kaufman intends to let TED attendees — and users from around the world — design a completely new product over the course of 72 hours.
The idea behind Kluster is that a group of passionate people working together can come up with better solutions for any decision-making problem than a single person. Whether that is planning an event, designing a new logo, or creating a new product, Kluster believes their system can.
[ Snip ... ]
The Kluster system works by breaking down products into manageable chunks. For each chunk (or “phase”), people submit what are called “sparks.” Sparks are proposed solutions for that phase. For each spark, other participants can submit “amps” — which are improvements to that idea. Users also assign “watts” to sparks and amps they like. Watts work kind of like investments. You accrue points based on participation and other factors, and can invest those points (watts) in ideas you like.
Then an algorithm that takes into account “each user’s successes, failures, reputation, areas of expertise, and overall history” goes to work to determine which sparks are the best. Companies interested in using the Kluster system, put up cash prizes that are doled out along the way (at the completion of each phase).
It seems more like wirearchy than hierarchy as an organizing principle to me .. though I am sure that pertinent elements of hierarchy based on direction (setting up of initiatives), ranking and filtering will come into play.
It will be very interesting to see how much organized work will resemble this form of organization in another ten years. I hope I am around to see and comment.
Of course it’s silly .. but this post by Hugh Macleod titled “Buckets” got me thinking …
If nature was designed like today’s business and software, water would trickle down the valley in buckets, from bucket to bucket.
More specifically:
We have wireless in coffee shops, Skyping on transatlantic flights, Blackberries, smartphones and laptops wherever we go – why not let (server based) systems do the delivery of work-orders, run the events, do the transactions and capture the data? Why not have the flows defined with loops and warts and all ready to be refined daily as the organisations learns and grows?
“Anataxonomy” and “Flow”, combine those two principles and use the wonders of technology accordingly.
So what does this mean? Sure, we’re already getting used to the idea of big commercial Open-Source software companies like Spikesource. But what about non-software? Open-Source Exxon’s? Open-Source General Motors’s?
This is when “Flow” starts getting REALLY important.
.
Smart knowledgeable people who have studied deeply the issue of why hierarchy seems such a durable concept tell us to get used to it … they say that there are good reasons why hierarchies thrive, even in the face of increasing flows of information and spreading forms of networked semi-transparency.
But hierarchies don’t have to remain static … and this is one of the big deficiencies in current models and with the existing tools of organizational design. Think about it. How often are there reorganizations, changes to departmental structures, downsizing, mergers or acquisitions – and the org chart gets tossed up in the air like a set of pick-up sticks. In the case of larger organizations, the “pick-up sticks” always come down in highly-organized, very neat looking boxes with straight lines that essentially state … “this is the right design .. this time we’ve got it” !
Until the next change.
Really, organizational structures are basically a rolling flow of change. Why the assumption of stability, of more-or-less static structure ? In my opinion, it’s just that many executive and management types don’t really like the feelings of messiness and control based only on engagement and willingness that accompany the conditions of continuous change.
So … what if work meant that at different times and for different projects, you could get *tagged* with different tags for different skills, and *linked* with other relevant of pertinent skill and personality *tags*, and so on ? Then, these new-style indicators (of capability) could be combined with availability / scheduling optimization software, and you’d have the basic format for a new form of organization chart.
Hierarchies could be developed at a specific time, for as long as may be necessary, and may involve different people or peoples depending upon the situation, the problems and the desired or hoped-for outcomes. So too for teams and purpose-focused networks of skills, abilities, competencies, willingness and availability.
If you stop and think about it for a moment, you can almost *feel* that this would probably seem more natural and more probably effective. But, we have a large legacy system in place.
Hmmm …
Back in the mid-1980’s there was a brief eruption of self-managing teams and what was called socio-technical work systems, where some of these types of issues were addressed – except that then the concepts of *knowledge work*, and mechanisms for manipulating information flows, like tags and hyperlinks, were only really fringe ideas.
Not anymore … but the org charts and the performance management and compensation practices are still (generally) what were used 30 and 20 and 10 years ago.
How much longer will yesteryear’s tools continue to suffice ?
This is basically the question Gary Hamel addresses in his recent book The Future of Management.
.
The Web is a near-ideal mechanism in which to culture new strains of social organization. From Craigslist to MySpace to FaceBook to Second Life to eHarmony, from instant messaging to podcasting, blogging, video chat and virtual worlds, the Internet is radically changing the ways in which people find romance, manage friendships, share insights, learn, build communities, and more.
For the moment, though, most of this joyous and frenzied experimentation is taking place outside the plush-carpeted hallways of the corporate old guard.
I find this ironic.
While no company would put up with a 1940’s-era phone system, or forgo the efficiency-enhancing benefits of modern IT, that’s exactly what companies are doing when they fail to exploit the Web’s potential to transform the way work of management is accomplished. Most managers still see the Internet as a productivity tool, or as a way of delivering 24/7 customer service. Some understand its power to upend old business models. but few have faced up to fact that sooner or later, the web is going to turn our smoke-stack management model on its head.
We recently released a new report in our Future of Small business forecast series called “The New Artisan Economy.” In the report we talk about the re-emergence of artisans as an economic force.
Next-gen knowledge artisans are amplified versions of their pre-industrial counterparts. Equipped with and augmented by technology, they rely on their human capital and skill to solve complex problems and develop new ideas, products and services. Highly productive, knowledge artisans are capable individually and in small groups of producing goods and services that used to take substantially larger teams and resources. In addition to redefining how work is done, knowledge artisans are creating new organizational structures and business models.
As our economy continues its shift towards ideas and innovation, the new knowledge artisans will be crucial to competitive success. Corporations will need to better understand knowledge artisans and how they work. They will also need to design work policies, organizational models and IT infrastructures that attract, retain and support knowledge artisans.
The new knowledge artisans share several important characteristics. First, they tend to have excellent end-user IT skills and expect to have access to the latest tools. Most knowledge artisans are power Internet users and comfortable with a wide range of IT and internet applications and software.
Knowledge artisans are highly collaborative. Because they often work in distributed, cross functional and cross organizational teams, they understand the importance of information sharing.
Knowledge artisans use a broad mix of collaboration tools to communicate with and share information across their teams.
Knowledge artisans tend to be analytical. The rise of the Internet has created vast new pools of data and information. Knowledge artisans understand the need to convert these complex data streams into useful and actionable information. Using analytical business tools and data visualization, knowledge artisans are shifting decision making from gut-instincts towards objective analysis.
Knowledge artisans are mobile and connected, but not “always on.” They tend to work from a variety of locations and are always connected. But being connected does not mean always-on. Instead knowledge artisans work when and where it best suits their needs. They schedule their own hours, choose their work location and even pick projects and teams that interest them. While knowledge artisans work very hard and put in long hours, they want to work “on their time” and “on their terms.”
Knowledge artisans are looking for values-based work. Knowledge artisans want to work in a manner that reflects their life values. The values knowledge artisans mention most are work/life balance, sustainable business practices, social responsibility and giving back to the broader community. We also hear knowledge artisans talking about “meaningful work”, “working independently”, and the pride of using their knowledge and skills to accomplish something.
The competition for skilled knowledge artisans will be intense. These highly valuable workers have many career options and job choices. Corporations that fail to develop business policies and IT infrastructures that support knowledge artisans will lose them – and come under increasing competitive pressure from firms that are able to attract, retain and support knowledge artisans.
Be sure to catch Bill Ives' ongoing review series in which he looks at online, sharable database apps. The focus of Bill's reviews: web-based business software that enables companies and individuals to better organize, track, and share information, as well as better manage projects, processes and workflows.
Looking for apps that help you and your team get work done?
Check out the AppGap's Appopedia, an ever-expanding section with reviews of more than 150 of today's best tools to help you better manage projects and collaborate. Reviews are presented in a useful directory that breaks down tools by category and function, e.g., online crm, project management, human resources, security, etc. Check it out here.
The AppGap Webinar Series
The AppGap has hosted a series of discussions with leading thinkers and doers intended to illuminate how new apps and approaches are changing the way we work and help companies and individuals implement better collaboration, project management, and productivity practices and solutions. Access, via the links below, the recordings, each about an hour long, of the discussions.
The AppGap is a blog and resource on the future of work and how new tools are addressing age-old challenges of organization, collaboration, and innovation. But it is also an idea: that there remains a gap between the toolset that exists and what's needed...
Can today's project management software be done better? What can online CRM help companies companies accomplish? Which development platform can help individuals and organizations build better online databases, Web based applications, and HR solutions? And what are the processes and best practices that help organizations large and small achieve success. Find out more.
Thought...
