History of Work: Part 1

Let’s do the time-warp again

65 million years ago

• Dinosaurs become extinct: insufficient collaboration, knowledge sharing

100,000 years ago

• Homo sapien Gork discovers fire: Hierarchies and power struggles begin

30,000 years ago

• Cave paintings: Creativity meets capitalism (admission: two shells)

999–500 B.C.

• First executive suite: Tower of Babel
• Human wisdom reaches a zenith: Confucius, Buddha, Zoroaster, Lao-tse, Jewish prophets, Greek poets, artists, philosophers, scientists
• Babylon launches first banks to capitalize on all the innovation

499–0 B.C.

• Julian calendar of 365.25 days adopted, workweek finalized: 24/7/52.18

A.D. 0 –500

• Bound books replace scrolls: Librarians resist. Change management consultants brought in

501–1000

• Chinese invent paper. Longest-kept competitive secret; Europe remains in the dark for about a millennium. Also invent book printing: Lawyers eventually sue some guy in Germany
• Workday speed is reengineered: Horse-changing posts established for French royal messengers
• Castles become first corporate campuses

1001–1500

• First mechanical (water-powered) clock appears in Peking
• Global brand management begins: Denmark adopts first national flag
• Performance management begins: Inquisition uses tools of torture
• Robin Hood begins first workplace benefits program, instant hit with rank and file
• First pure-play dot-commers, called Alchemists
• Gutenberg heard to exclaim, “This will be the biggest thing since the Internet”
• Leonardo da Vinci invents parachute, instant hit with senior execs
• The symbols + (plus) and – (minus) first come into use
• First infotech standards war: Book publishing splits into separate industries — foundry, printing, and bookselling

1501–1983

• Niccolo Machiavelli, world’s first HR director
• Shakespeare launches leadership development series: Henry’s, Richard’s, Titus, John, Julius, Macbeth, Hamlet
• First water closets appear
• Galileo Galilei faces Inquisition for heresy: Business success actually revolves around employees, and employees revolve around top-notch leaders
• Peter Minuit buys Wall Street and Times Square for $24, eventual home of global trading. (Colonials’ use of Spanish pieces of eight are why, prior to 2001, stock quotes were in eighths, not tenths)
• Business drug-of-choice on streets: first coffee house opens in Oxford
• Joseph Guillotin invents better way to cut under-performing employees
• James Watt perfects steam engine, which eventually leads to entire Industrial Revolution
• Samuel Morse, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell have pet projects
• 10-hour workday established in France (What happened to that?)
• Night-shift work for women banned internationally (Ditto?)
• Idea of a “week-end” first takes hold in America
• Execs hire Frederick Taylor to get things back on track
• The first “war to end all wars,” like the next one, radically alters production methods, standards for innovation and efficiency
• Wall Street spinmiesters call October 29, 1929 a “correction”
• ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) computes WWII firing and bombing ranges: Info Age is born at University of Pennsylvania
• The same year that we read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, the U.S. forms ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), which begets ARPANET, which begets the Internet
• One year before Woodstock music fest: Office of Charles and Ray Eames shatters the myth that, boo hoo, it’s too hard to connect the individual to a complicated business landscape. Their mind-blowing film about the universe, The Power of Ten, creates the model for making the connection — frame of reference must always begin with the individual.
• Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock foretells the dark side of knowledge work.
• Predictions of information and choice overload eventually come true, causing far more root-cause problems than execs care to admit
• All in the Family does more than change TV. It forces deep social issues out of buses, farms, and lunch counters, into the workplace; Archie’s chair is modern-day birthplace of diversity effort
• MTV does more than plant its flag on the moon. It exemplifies the best and worst of how people and ideas come together during the next few decades. At the same time it emphasizes packaging over substance, eye candy over true illumination, and adds to society’s attention deficit problem; it also grabs our human soul by exciting, entertaining, and shocking us. Managing the tension between those extremes will be a constant challenge in Work 2.0 workplaces
• A meter is officially defined as the distance light travels in 1/299,792,458 of a second. Senior execs wowed. Take corporate speed and measurement systems to anal-compulsive levels

Adapted from my book, Work 2.0, published 2001, which correctly predicted three crucial trends now in place as 21st century workplace requirements:

• Embrace the Asset Revolution: Employees are seeking daily/weekly/monthly returns on the assets they invest in your company — namely, their time, attention, ideas, passion, energy, and social networks. The new war for talent will be fought over who provides the best returns on these investments.
• Build My Work My Way: Business must focus on personal, not just organizational, productivity. The future of work is customized, personalized, and tailored to each individual.
• Deliver Peer-to-Peer Value: Your employees are setting new standards for collaboration without you. Leaders must do more than get out of the way of those exchanges; you must add increasingly greater value. That means bottom-up criteria will drive more and more of your collaboration budgets and strategies.

> > > > > > > > 

Bill Jensen Site, Twitter, FB. Bill’s latest book, Future Strong, is about the five deeply personal choices each of us must make to be ready for all the disruptive tomorrows heading our way.