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

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.

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.

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.