Creating the Future of Work

Whether we wish to acknowledge it or not, the Corporation itself is being disrupted

The pandemic has shown that when people have resources and know a problem to solve, they make the best decisions at the time and get things done. The lesson is that companies should no longer fear the idea of actually giving people the resources to get something new done. The pandemic proved that companies have the resources when they need them.

In the workplace, the biggest change has been the move of technology from a supporting role to a central role. It isn’t just that messaging became more important or that video meetings began to work, but that people quickly realized these can actually be superior. The next step is to take these tactical lessons and apply them more broadly to how a ... See more

We’re emerging from a generation-defining event and there’s every reason to think in the years to come that the reinvention of work and what it means to be a corporation will change as much going forward as those did in the period following the return from the War.

No amount of time in a conference room will make the future clearer than actually making the future.

If these patterns sound familiar it is because they are the patterns of a failed response to a disruptive change. The idea that everything stays the same except for a few changes around the edges caused every incumbent to lose in the face of step-function change. The ideas in this essay might not be the best experiments to run and the suggestions m... See more

Even as the personal computer and then the phone made it onto the desktop and into the hands of most every single employee regardless of job, the structure, organization, and processes of a company continued to mirror those of the 20th century.