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What will our workplaces and organizations be like in the future? I awoke with that thought rattling around this morning and it’s been occupying me off and on ever since. What triggered it I can’t say for certain, but several items of interest that have intersected over the last few days are likely what has powered this train of thought. Then too, this morning, while going through my RSS feeds in Google Reader, I came across John Battelle’s piece on Jeffrey Immelt and that got me thinking about this even more.
This is likely a piece that could run to many pages once it’s fleshed out. I’m not going to make any attempt to order my thoughts as yet. I just want to start getting them down here and if you’d care to add anything to them, discuss them or help me to clarify them in any way, I’d love to hear from you in the comments, via email, Twitter, whatever works best for you. So, with apologies to the Led Zepplin, I’ll just start to “Ramble On.”
Here are some of the other things that have been intersecting. Over on Dan Schwabel’s Personal Branding blog there has been talk lately about how resumes as we know them will die and some new way of documenting our experience will rise and take its place. Alongside this have been the many articles I have been reading about the workforce as it begins to assimilate Gen Y.
There is also the book I am currently working my way through, Connected. It may very well turn out to be a Cluetrain Manifesto kind of book. Where Cluetrain kind of started to blow the doors down around what was then the Marketing and PR standards of the world with the “markets are conversations” meme, the harbinger of what was to come over the next 10 years, Connected may very well do a similar thing for our concepts of networks and connectivity and how we function as individuals and as groups within them. I’ve also been reading Mitch Joels’ Six Pixels of Separation and it too is a very thought provoking book especially when looked at in light of what Connected talks about.
I have long held that the invention of the printing press was the greatest invention of the last 500+ years. Most likely, the invention of the microprocessor, and its function in turning all of us into content or information producers, will go down as the greatest one since then. Our institutions, organizations, corporations, businesses, and companies have always controlled the flow of information to us since the invention of the printing press. That information was expensive to produce and they were the ones in the best position to do so. I suspect that the argument could be advanced that they came into being and matured as they did as a direct consequence of that first printing press. Now that each of us has the power to produce content and information, and to consume it and talk about it as we see fit, we no longer have to rely on institutions for our informational needs, and as such, we are beginning to see the end of that Gutenberg era. Our institutions are either crumbling around us or scrambling to remake and reinvent themselves. Surely, this will have an enormous effect on the workplaces of the future?
Will we ever see another GE? Has there been a more successful organization? Look at some of these numbers. Since Immelt joined the company in 1982, GE has earned $230 billion, more than any enterprise in the world. They have paid $130 billion in dividends to investors, again, more than any company in any country. Today, they have over 300,000 global employees with about half here in the United States. They are the oldest remaining company in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. You have to ask, is it even possible to build something on that scale anymore?
I grew up as part of what is arguably the biggest organization ever, the Catholic Church. It seems rather curious that back when GE was going through one of its grow spurts, the Catholic Church was starting to crack around the edges. Thinking back on it, I wonder if the de-institutionalization we are experiencing today didn’t start back in the mid to late 60s and early 70s with the Catholic Church. If you think back to the start of the Gutenberg era, it was the very same church that so felt the impact of the printing press and the subsequent release of knowledge from behind the closed walls and language of the church. And here we are today, nearing the end of the Gutenberg era, and could it be that they were the first to feel the rumbling? Maybe so. Maybe that de-institutionalization has roots that predate the microprocessor and the ability it has given us to publish and interact. Could it be too, that the printing press was a culmination of something that was already fermenting beneath the surface?
So, if we don’t rely on the large institutions or structures for our informational needs anymore, and if we have lost faith in those institutions as well, and if we are all interconnected in ways we are only beginning to understand, what will the workplace and its structure look like in the future? If our work places of the last two hundred years or so defined us and our networks and relationships, are the social networks that are beginning to appear in today’s world going to shape the corporations of the future? Maybe that’s what we are witnessing with the advent of these networks? The core structures of tomorrows companies? And maybe new media is the liberation of knowledge that is mirrored by what happened with the invention of the printing press?
What will become of the concept of story in the organization of the future? Will it play as big a part as it does now? What effect will our bite sized 140 character world have on how we tell and listen to stories?
As you see, lots of questions. If you can shed any light on any of them I’d welcome the conversation.
