Customer Reviews

The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style and Your Life

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The title of this book is misleading. A more apt title would have been: The Future of Organizational Structure. If you really want to read about the future of work, I suggest you look for a different book.

As an expert on communications costs and benefits, Professor Malone explores how the pros and cons of centralized hierarchies, loose hierarchies, democracies and free markets compare in producing better organizational results. The book abounds with examples, most of which were not new to me.

The book's overall theme is that with the costs of communications plummeting and the value of the information communication increasing it is inevitable that organizations will decentralize more than ever . . . by employing hybrid forms of loose hierarchies, democracies and free markets for the same organization.

The book ends up with a call to live your dreams that draws on decidedly nonmanagement sources of inspiration. The key idea is that organizations can live values that uplift everyone in them.

If you would like a solid introduction into the forces that are influencing shifts towards decentralization, The Future of Work is a good theoretical overview. Professor Malone also points you to online resources for finding out about best practices in some of these areas.

As a book for a practitioner, The Future of Work leaves a lot to be desired. Most will find it too abstract and theoretical to help them decide what changes to make in an organization. The book would have been vastly more valuable if it had focused on a few key areas of management performance (such as developing new business models, creating breakthrough new products, or bypassing competitor's established cost advantages) and described how best to apply the concepts in those contexts. I hope that Professor Malone will choose to do this in future books and articles.

The writing leaves something to be desired. Although the book is brief, it has a startling number of repetitions of examples and references. I sometimes felt like I was being talked down to (as though I could not make the links for myself or remember the example that had been mentioned two chapters before).

Much of the book also suffers from an over focus on the "economic human" rather than the "total human." For instance, there is little reference to psychology until quite late in the book. Any success with organizational structure has to take into account both the rational and emotional sides of those involved in the organization.

But I am unaware of any better book on the theory behind this subject, so for the time being we should view this book as the gold standard . . . and thus worthy of five stars.

I suspect that many people will find that rereading books about chaos theory as applied to organizations will have new meaning when viewed through Professor Malone's perspective. I encourage you to do some of that rereading after you tackle this book.

"The Future of Work" began changing my thinking and attitudes about work from its very first pages. It clarified and extended my understanding of myself as a worker, as well as of friends and colleagues, many of whom are either, like me, self-employed, or have entrepreneurial-type positions within organizations. I've already begun using Malone's ideas in consulting with individual clients and organizations, and found them relevant, productive and fun.

Malone's central tenet is that the nature of organizations has been substantially influenced throughout history by the cost of communication. Thus, face-to-face communication characterized hunting and gathering bands, but the advent of writing--with its reduced cost of communication compared to face-to-face talking-- made larger, more powerful and more centralized societies possible. Kingdoms and empires were richer and more powerful than hunting and gathering bands, but at the cost of some of the freedom of most of their members. The advent of the printing press, by further reducing the costs of communication, made possible the reversal of the ancient trend toward greater centralization, facilitating the democratic revolution.

Business organizations show a similar developmental path. Up until the 1800s, most businesses were small and local. By the 1900s, the telephone, telegraph, typewriter, and carbon paper allowed centralization on a large scale, and business "kingdoms" emerged. Today, e-mail, instant messaging, and the internet make it economically feasible for huge numbers of workers to access the information they need to make, for themselves, more of the choices that matter to them.

This change, Malone asserts, is driving a revolution in our attitudes about organizational leadership. "We need to shift our thinking from command-and-control to coordinate-and- cultivate...Good cultivation involves finding the right balance between centralized and decentralized management, between controlling and letting go...Coordinating and cultivating... include the whole range of possibillities for management...To be an effective manager in the world we're entering, you can't be stuck in a centralized mind-set."

Reading "The Future of Work" made me think about the political implications of Malone's vision of the future. Malone grew up on a farm, and his vision of self-employed, or loosely employed, freelancers (or "e-lancers") evokes the same values of independence, and a combination of self-sufficiency and interdependence when necessary, that characterize people who live by working the land. Thomas Jefferson saw the educated independent farmer as the backbone of the American experiment in democracy. But the Jeffersonian polity has been fundamentally altered by the evolution of large, hierarchically organized, centrally managed organizations, in which only those at or near the top have the same sense of personal stake in their work that characterizes the independent farmer. This has contributed to the development of an electorate which sems to me to be largely apathetic or dependent. Malone's vision of a nation of independent or semi-autonomous freelancers might presage a return to Jefferson's vision and values among a substantially larger proportion of the electorate than currently.

Another direction of thinking provoked by "The Future of Work" is to wonder how many people are really capable of the measure of independence which Malone envisions. As a well-established leading international management thinker, and professor at MIT, Malone has been rubbing shoulders with people at the top of the planetary organizational learning curve. His stories about how they've grown their companies, both in the U.S.A. and internationally, delight and inspire throughout this book. But as somone who's been closer to the bottom of things, I see a lot of stupidity, as well as success, when people actually get more control over their work-lives. I discussed this with a client who is the CEO of his own successful company, and who sits on the boards of several others. He agreed that Malone's vision was optimal and appealing, but felt that only about 1/4 of the people he knew could actually thrive with that level of independence. Most people, he felt, needed to have their hands held and be told more or less what to do.

In any case, Malone's is a refreshing, insightful and inspiring vision of humanity's nature, history, and future, and of the power of organizations and markets to maximize human efficiency and ingenuity, for whatever proportion of humanity who are, or may become, ready, willing and able to take their economic fates into their own hands and make their future work.

It turns out that Thomas Malone of MIT is the person who (along with a colleague) coined the term "e-lancer" (i.e. electronic freelancer) back in 1998. This book takes that concept and expands it to outline Malone's view about how business is in the process of a metamorphosis from dense, centralized hierarchies to loose, decentralized networks of workers, specialists, and consultants. Like the transition from kingdoms to democracies, he feels that the rise in accessible communication technology will give employees a greater degree of control in how their companies are run.

He spends the first half of the book explaining how such a system is possible and providing these examples. Malone touches on a great many modern examples of this in action, from websites like Elance, Ebay, and Amazon to the freeform open-source creation of the Linux operating system to more traditional companies that have a decentralized, employee-centered viewpoint.

The last half of the book focuses on how to go about implementing these sort of decentralized systems, like internal and external marketplaces where employees can bid on jobs and use reputation systems to track their success and efficiency. In addition, Malone touches on the need to incorporate human values into the very corporate structure, to motivate people to take part in them.

While the book provides a lot of great starting points, it's clearly an academic approach and only an introductory one at that. It's not a how-to manual. There are many aspects of this revolution that are unclear. For example, how will such a revolution affect health insurance, which many people get through their companies? Would companies or workers be able to band together to create massive co-op-like organizations that can successfully take advantage available to large-scale groups? Malone acknowledges that steps would have to be made to deal with these and many other issues. In most cases, he addresses some possibilities, but they are by no means all-encompassing.

To return to Malone's analogy of the transition from kingdoms to democracies, history has shown us that merely stating the need for a transition isn't enough ... it takes people working hard to figure out how the day to day operations of such a system can work. Malone makes it sound possible and, more importantly, appealing.

It is so seldom to see a book focused not on what to do right now but on identifying the long term trends that need to be looked for in years to come that this book is very refreshing. If you agree with Dr. Malones conclusions or not, you need to at least understand them. And with some of them I agree and some I don't.

A major part of his thesis is that the dramatically lowering cost of communications will change the nature of business organizations dramatically, as dramatically say as the changes brought about by the printing press. Yes, that you are reading this on a computer means that you are part of this revolution, although the people at the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, Germany have a different opinion. For instance, you don't know where I'm writing this, what time of day it is here, or if I'm by myself or in a large office. That's an organizational change from the way the big magazines and newspaper write book reviews.

There is another point that he doesn't mention strongly enough. That is, the every rising cost of oil will force more decentralization. Commuting the distances we do simply won't make sense. (Commuting hasn't slowed much with oil at $50 a barrel, but what would happen at $200, $500 or $1,000 a barrel). Countering this is the desire of a number of managers I've had over the years who want to see all of their employees sitting at their desks so they can see what they are doing.

Don't look at this book as a how to reorganize your company, it's more longer term, more bigger picture than that. But forewarned is forearmed, there is every indication that this is the way of the future.

This is a great book written by Thomas W. Malone.. The book Discusses how a decentraled work environment will change the way we all work and the many benefits of a decentralized corporation. The book starts by going into the different types of decentralized corporations, like Loose Hierarchies where you still have a boss or someone who controls the final product, but you are empowered to make real decisions that effect you, your team and your organization. The second type is a Democracy which allows employees to vote and make decisions like who they will work with and who they will work for. The third type of decentralization is Market. This is where you utilize a market and asign projects or tasks based on pools of willing employees. Also employees can choose what to work on like they are shopping for the right project that they will enjoy and will fit with their talents. The last part of the book focuses on Management and how their role is changing from the command and control style that we use today to coordinate and cultivate. This means that managers should focus on coordinating projects and employees by ensuring that decentralized systems are used properly and that rules are followed. Managers should also cultivate their employees meaning they should discover and encourge positive potential and limit the harm caused by negative tendencies. Management should also focus on putting human values at the center of the organization. The key to how decentralization will work in organizations is through communication. Even blogs like this should be used to provide all employees with information and a way for employees to provide feedback. The better you communication the better decentralization will work for you. This is a great book and I recommend it to any one looking to improve employee satisfaction and have a successful organization

The book poses a very good question, one that most people are thinking about - "What will the future of work be in an outsourced global environment? " But sadly Malone never risks making any futuristic predictions. This book captures the history of functional organizations and a some recent radical organizational models.
Internal trading concept for sharing scarce resources within an organization was rather interesting. In the final chapters Malone goes in-depth about the consulting industry's model of resource deployment, but he seemed to have missed out the key role that Resource Deployment Managers play in serving customers. As an earlier reviewer mentioned the concepts are over simplified and repetitive. It was an interesting read for me until I finished 2/3rd of the book, when I started to slowly discover that the book was repeating concepts and the author is reluctant to be making bold predictions as the title suggested. If you just want an interesting presentation on different organization models currently in practice then this book may be for you but if you are looking beyond the present then you will be disappointed.

I know I have enjoyed reading a book when I have a number of pages dog eared for future reference and/or I take notes. I have done both in this book. Yet, I fell disappointed. Why?

My theory is that Dr. Malone has attempted to write a book for the masses, but has oversimplified his thinking in an attempt to reach the broadest audience. I finished the book yearning for more theory and more case studies. I know that the Internet can be used to decentralize work. I know that large companies such as Intel have internal "auctions" for products and resources. But how is this applicable to a 3-person company? I see the consulting firm example in multiple places. How many times can eLance be metioned as an example without being repetitive?

I recognize the challenge in taking a sophisticated body of research and distilling it down to a book for the masses. Trust me, I've flipped through a few of Dr. Malone's research papers. I would like to see a second edition, expanded to include a bit more theory and more thinking along the lines of how these concepts are applicable to both large and small companies.

Interesting theoretical stab, but lacking in substantiation. Will be of interest to governance theorists, as a thought-provoker or dialog-starter.

We heard similar things twenty years ago. This lacks a true big-picture perspective and is too rooted in organizational design and leadership thinking to be of true utility in terms of enterprise-level or industry-level business architecture. While it presents some intersting concepts, few of these are new ideas The author either does not grasp, or assumes the reader cannot grasp, the true complexity of the situation in large, complex organizations -- issues of centralization and decentralization must be examined across a number of interrelated parameters (strategy, business/performance model, policy, information frameworks for interoperability, business process framework ownership/standardization, actual business processes and busieness rules, organizational model, actual organizational structure, information technology governance, corporate infrastructure -- and, of course, time. This is highly dynamic n-dimensional network of interacting forces, flush with uncertainties.

Academia routinely spouts prophesy based on a sophomoric grasp of business reality. This is interesting and worth reading, but of limited practical value.

This book is quite interesting and talks about how the way we work will change. It is thoughtful and useful for thinking about your career and how business is changing and will continue to change.

This is the Return to Common Sense for our generation. Professor Malone clearly lays out the inevitability of the democratization of capital. However, it is unclear if he recognizes that he has laid out the foundation for a mass movement for collective action towards a fair and just economy -- this was written before the arrogance of Wall Street brought our society to its knees. But, one suspects that he might, because he so clearly states that the democratization of business will be as significant in our time as the democratization of government was to past generations.

To the barricades fellow citizens, the Kings have returned.