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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Future of Work, by Thomas W. Malone, May 22, 2004
"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.
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