Review
“…[W]e need visionaries like Malone to help push us past the limitations of our conventional thinking.” — Fortune, April 14th 2004″[T]he argument offered here is uniquely grand.” — Financial Times, April 15th, 2004″briskly written…insightful” — USA Today, April 12, 2004
A Pathbreaking Model for Building a New-and Far Better-World of Work For more than a decade, business thinkers have theorized about how technology will change the shape of organi…
Buy The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style and Your Life at Amazon
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.