One of my old friends visited me last month. We talked about numerous things. One topic that we spent a lot of time discussing was how our previous generation (our fathers that is) spent a substantial part of their work life in one company, one profession, one city and so on and why the current economic forces do not allow this ‘sameness’ any more.
I have been part of strategy discussions where we tried to prepare ourselves for the major changes anticipated in the coming decade. There is no right or wrong in such futurology discussions. The best you can do as a company or as an individual is whole-heartedly bet on certain perspectives and closely monitor whether the scenarios you laid out are playing out as expected.
One thing I strongly believe is traditional employment – that is how companies employ individuals and how individuals work for companies - will fundamentally change in the new world. Especially in the Internet economy, digital economy, knowledge economy whatever you call it.
I believe this is inevitable because of the lack of platforms in companies where skills and opportunities/projects can be matched without friction. Large companies by design have to break their end to end operations into silos to achieve efficiency. And such divisions lead to unavoidable waste. At a macro level, within the four walls of a company, skills go unused due to lack of opportunities and opportunities go unexploited due to lack of skills.
It is in this backdrop I feel certain that there will be a rise in mercenary workforces in the coming years. Mercenaries are constructs of extremely talented and deeply skilled set of individuals (maybe with their small teams) in specific areas who offer their services for a specific project in a company at a premium. They are not generalists but specialists in their chosen areas – be it programming, media strategy, data mining, big data architecture, hardware design and so on and so forth.
There are already some industries which exhibit this trend. In such industries superstars or A-listers are independent and are able to create their ‘brands’. They charge a premium for specific projects and also take a cut from the gross earnings in the backend (films and sports are prime examples). They sell their talent for competing entities thus bringing down competitive barriers. What works for these industries where superstars can pull apart from the rest is the presence of a platform (television, internet, films, etc) where their skills are watched by millions and their performance is measured and evaluated objectively.
In the coming years I feel the digital economy will provide the right set of tools and platforms for individuals to showcase their professional talent. Performance measures of individuals / teams will be publicly available for their different projects. Already a few platforms like Linkedin try to do that but there will be more such that will come up. 'Matching' platforms will grow. Companies undertaking complex initiatives will look for such teams who will be employed only for the duration of the project and then disbanded. And such teams will also work for competitor companies thus constantly levelling the playing field. Current legal hurdles will be taken down.
We are living through an era of profound advancements to humanity and a decade ahead looks too far away. One can hardly draw a reasonable picture of the world only a few years into the future, the best we can do is stay prepared and keep our peripheral vision on....
I have been part of strategy discussions where we tried to prepare ourselves for the major changes anticipated in the coming decade. There is no right or wrong in such futurology discussions. The best you can do as a company or as an individual is whole-heartedly bet on certain perspectives and closely monitor whether the scenarios you laid out are playing out as expected.
One thing I strongly believe is traditional employment – that is how companies employ individuals and how individuals work for companies - will fundamentally change in the new world. Especially in the Internet economy, digital economy, knowledge economy whatever you call it.
I believe this is inevitable because of the lack of platforms in companies where skills and opportunities/projects can be matched without friction. Large companies by design have to break their end to end operations into silos to achieve efficiency. And such divisions lead to unavoidable waste. At a macro level, within the four walls of a company, skills go unused due to lack of opportunities and opportunities go unexploited due to lack of skills.
It is in this backdrop I feel certain that there will be a rise in mercenary workforces in the coming years. Mercenaries are constructs of extremely talented and deeply skilled set of individuals (maybe with their small teams) in specific areas who offer their services for a specific project in a company at a premium. They are not generalists but specialists in their chosen areas – be it programming, media strategy, data mining, big data architecture, hardware design and so on and so forth.
There are already some industries which exhibit this trend. In such industries superstars or A-listers are independent and are able to create their ‘brands’. They charge a premium for specific projects and also take a cut from the gross earnings in the backend (films and sports are prime examples). They sell their talent for competing entities thus bringing down competitive barriers. What works for these industries where superstars can pull apart from the rest is the presence of a platform (television, internet, films, etc) where their skills are watched by millions and their performance is measured and evaluated objectively.
In the coming years I feel the digital economy will provide the right set of tools and platforms for individuals to showcase their professional talent. Performance measures of individuals / teams will be publicly available for their different projects. Already a few platforms like Linkedin try to do that but there will be more such that will come up. 'Matching' platforms will grow. Companies undertaking complex initiatives will look for such teams who will be employed only for the duration of the project and then disbanded. And such teams will also work for competitor companies thus constantly levelling the playing field. Current legal hurdles will be taken down.
We are living through an era of profound advancements to humanity and a decade ahead looks too far away. One can hardly draw a reasonable picture of the world only a few years into the future, the best we can do is stay prepared and keep our peripheral vision on....
I agree with you. This is a good thing as it leads to an efficient meritocracy.
ReplyDeleteThis has also encouraged me to sort my github out and start planning for a blog :P