It's So Darn Different.

If I were to walk up to any manager and say the nature of work has changed dramatically, I'd get a look of pity or irritation and hear, "Well, der."

We all understand that, right? I claim we don't.

Even though we hear a lot of talk about the future of organizing, decentralized organizations, and empowered employees, many conversations over the past few years convince me that the implications are much more profound and far-reaching than most people have realized.

Let's start with the end in mind. When you dig down through all the technological and economic complexity, what you'll see at bedrock is a provocative feature: the fundamental unit of value today is not the corporation but each of us.

Years from now, when future historians write about this period of time, the most important event they'll see is not technology, not robotics, not artificial intelligence. It is the momentous change in the human condition. For the first time, substantial and rapidly growing numbers of persons are empowered to make choices about things that affect the whole. And society is totally unprepared for it.

Few leaders and fewer organizations are awake to the new realities. A significant segment are not preparing, not understanding how different the future will be. (Check out MITSloan's global executive study.) The result? Work life in America is caught in a crisis of meaning.

"Companies have felt that workers needed them more than they needed workers,” Peter Drucker observed. “This is changing in ways that most companies still do not seem to grasp.” Why is this so? And how is this phenomenon transforming the demands on the individual worker?

Three Forces Dissolving Boundaries

To understand what's occurring, we need to think about three major forces that are transforming our world. The confluence of technological advances, demographic changes, and economic shifts is changing how we all live and work. I emphasize the notion of "confluence" because each is influencing, and being influenced by, the others. It's their simultaneous occurrence and vast choices that ramify from it that's creating a shift of historic proportions.

Technology gives choices. To some extent we've grown accustomed to this, so it's easy to underestimate its impact. One fascinating, though little remarked upon, consequence of the spread of mobile devices is that they mark the first time in history that men and women have shared the same primary tool of production. Sharing a primary tool now gives virtually everyone a common language of work. The Economist magazine recognized the significance. Its editors concluded that the most significant event of the last 100 years, in terms of its potential to affect the 21st century, was the inclusion of women in every arena of public life.

At the same time this demographic revolution is taking place, we're undergoing a profound economic shift. The emerging economic order has three distinguishing characteristics. It is boundaryless. It favors intangibles—relationships, ideas, and information. And it is radically contingent. The most revolutionary aspect of the value our economy places on ideas, imagination, and empathy is that it begins to reverse the balance of power between organizations and individuals.

The balance of power will continue to shift as organizations progress in their digital transformation efforts. The architecture of digital—flexible, organic, interactive—pushes information and therefore power to persons on the front line. It facilitates and even demands direct communication so that customers, stakeholders, and companies understand their commitment to one another. Frontline workers who have been marginalized in the past are now carriers of the brand for the company. As more value is vested in creating new knowledge, organizations and leaders will be confronted with the need to work with individuals who no longer want generic career paths but paths customized to meet their aspirations and values.

The confluence of these major changes is creating a new frontier for all of us. We're moving into an era different from anything we have known. The emphasis on variety, diversity, options, and choices will increasingly become a workforce issue. It makes no sense for employees simply to fill slots or create customized products and services in jobs that are not themselves customized. There is no such thing as a "typical" employee with "generic" needs: we all have different needs. These needs change throughout the course of our lives. Our lives increasingly resist easy categorization.

Abundance of Choices

As I realized in researching my latest manuscript, technology creates choices about how to organize work. The way people self-organize networks and connect to do what once only large corporations could, implies that the choices aren't simply a matter of selecting from a few well understood alternatives. The factors that are transforming the world of work make it possible to organize human endeavor in ways that have never been possible before in history. I suspect that some of the most important choices involve possibilities that we haven't even imagined yet.

Making choices that are wise, not just economically efficient, means making choices that are consistent with what what we really want—for ourselves, our organizations, and our societies. The choices we're making today will lay the foundations for a new organizational era tomorrow.

What seems crucial to me is that we think consciously about what kind of legacy we want to leave our organizations, our communities, our families. My wife and I have two charming grandchildren. And I now understand, as never before, that the choices all of us make in the coming years affect not only ourselves but those who follow us. Are we ready for that moment when our convictions will be tested? Have we thought what our actions and decisions now will mean to our organizations years from now?

Once we begin to think in terms of our legacy, what a different light suffuses everything about our lives and our work!

Know Yourself

To succeed in this new world, you will have to learn, first, who you are. You must be very clear about how your unique gifts influence the whole system. The gravity of this changes the meaning of “role” for each person.

Few people, even highly successful people, can answer the questions: Do you know what your gifts are? Do you know what you need to learn so that you get the full benefit of your strengths? Few have even asked themselves these questions.

On the contrary, most are proud of their ignorance. There are HR people who are proud of the fact that they can't read a balance sheet. If you want to be effective today, you have to be able to read one. On the other hand, there are accountants who are equally proud of the fact they cannot get along with people! That's nothing to be proud of, because anyone can learn to work smoothly with others. It's not hard to learn manners, and manners are what allow people to get along.

Place Yourself

Throughout human history, it was the super achievers—and only the super achievers—who knew when to say "No." They always knew what to reach for. They knew where to place themselves.

Now all of us will have to learn that. It's not very difficult. The key to it is to record the results of your decisions. Every time you do something important, write down what you expect will happen. Mozart and Leonardo da Vinci were brilliant at this.

The most important decisions in organizations are people decisions, and yet only the military (and only recently) has begun to ask, "If we assign this person to lead this base, what do we expect to accomplish?" They have now reached a point where almost 60 percent of their decisions work out.

Building on Strengths

It's easy to understand your strengths by tracking your results. However, most of us underestimate our own strengths. We take them for granted. What we're good at comes easy, and we believe that unless it comes hard it can't be very good. As a result, we don't know our strengths and we don't know how to build on them.

Try this. Ask five to seven people who know you well what you do better than anyone else. Press them for specifics. You'll be surprised what you discover. The answers will all be consistent. And they'll be something you missed because you thought it was easy. Because for you it is. It's you using your God-given gifts.

Improving Productivity

Understanding our strengths, articulating our values, knowing where we belong — these are also essential to addressing one of the great challenges of organizations: improving the abysmally low productivity of capable people. The productivity of teachers, for instance, hasn't improved, and may have shrunk, in the past 70 years. Nurses and sales workers are only two-thirds as productive as their counterparts 70 years ago.

Yet we know that hospitals can improve productivity by asking their nurses two simple questions: What are you being paid for? How much time do you spend doing that? Typically, nurses say they're paid to provide patient care, or to keep the doctors happy. Both are good answers. The problem is that they have no time to do either job. One hospital, though, more than doubled its nurses' productivity simply by asking them these two questions, and then hiring PT clerical workers to do paperwork that prevented nurses from doing their real job.

Effective organizations place people—or allow people to place themselves—according to their strengths, in roles in which they can do the most good.

The greatest competitive advantage of the United States is that it attracts very talented workers from around the world—not just because they earn more money but because they're treated as colleagues, not as subordinates. Talented workers don't believe they are paid to work 9 to 5. They believe they're paid to be effective.

Organizations that understand this, and strip away everything that gets in workers' way, will be able to attract, hold, and motivate the best performers. That will be the single biggest factor for competitive advantage for the next 25 years.

Role of Social Nonprofit

I take a dim view of most of the programs companies create to develop people. The real development I've witnessed of people in organizations, especially in big ones, comes from their being volunteers in a nonprofit organization — where (1) you have responsibility, (2) you see results quickly, and (3) you learn what your values are. There's no better way to understand your strengths and discover where you belong than to volunteer in a nonprofit. That is probably the greatest opportunity for the social sector, and especially in its relationship to business.

We talk today of social responsibilities of business. I hope we will soon begin to talk about the nonprofit organization as the great opportunity for business. It is the opportunity for business to develop managers far more effectively than any company or university can. It is one of the unique benefits that the social sector can offer—to provide a place where every person can actually discover who she or he is and can actually learn to self-manage.