Touring the Past - The Human Side of Transformation
This is the second in several complementary articles that I am writing on the topic of creative culture for corporations, as part of Share More Stories (SMS) work on “The Human Side of Transformation”
"Factory-Forward"
There are macro changes that make a creative culture an important contemporary topic, and our team at SMS has been studying the rise of the creative worker. It is understood who we are, as workers, is changing; but how do we predict the manner and direction? I believe a look at the history of work will help. Let’s spend a moment to highlight some of the shifts that have changed the topology of contemporary enterprise, and its workforce.
To properly understand today’s worker, we need to start with a British immigrant, Samuel Slater and his mechanical wizardry used to create textile machines. In 1789 Samuel Slater and his business partners brought the British industrial revolution to the United States. Their factories, along with Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, sparked the issuance of industry in America. This wave of innovation had the effect of increasing the need for a new type of work force, the factory worker; and the demand for the ancient and unethical workforce of slavery to produce the needed supply of cotton. Between 1800-1950 there is a wealth of interesting history about the industrial revolution that could be discussed, but for this article let’s only recognize its impact on the type, organization, and demand for work. It could be said that the industrial revolution’s most redeeming characteristic was its efficiency to apply work to product. This productivity led to the advent of contemporary consumerism. Never before had the average person been provided the means to acquire goods in a routine manner. Yet the revolution's efficiency was so consuming that it would also teach us the need to regulate industry to protect the worker. The industrial revolution created the middle class, helped end slavery, forced our government to enact labor laws to protect the worker, and established the 5 day work week. “Working 9 to 5” and much of what comprised the manufacturing plant of 1980, came into form through the first 150 years of the American industrial revolution.
The 1990's were more than Grunge and Seinfeld…
The evolution continues. Starting in the 1980's, and gaining traction in the 1990's, we mainstreamed corporate and consumer computing. Computers would change everything, including the corporate working environment. They not only improved productivity within the office, computers influenced the factory floor, distribution, and resource management. The composition of work was shifting from muscle power to brain matter. People had to think more on the job, and incorporate a greater percentage of time to education, as their tools were also changing. New corporate positions, degree programs, and lifestyles were emerging from this economic, and societal shift. Though this transformation alone was significant, the arrival of the internet in the mid 1990’s became the combined catalyst that ushered us into the era we call the information age, and further altered our working environments.
Thomas Friedman’s book “The World is Flat”, first published in 2005, highlighted the flattening of preexisting barriers that minimized the spread of production, power, and wealth internationally. Mr. Friedman’s read proved right, the world has become one large playing field. The good of this change is that an entrepreneur in Zimbabwe with a cell phone can build a business. However, this expansion was disruptive to established markets, forms of business, and caused damage to the well-being of the blue collar worker in economies like the United States. Rural regions that were once considered economically optimal for lower cost production, became less desirable over night when compared to global alternatives. These new locales had depressed economies, lower standards of living, less tax structure, and minimal labor laws. They were conducive to business, and newly attainable in the form of network computing. This wave of connected computing led to a series of technical optimizations that have allowed companies to both expand international operations, and at the same time reduce the costs and complexities of global business computing.
A New [Entropic] World Order
Technical improvements have been on an ever-increasing innovation cycle that is both compounding and accelerating. Technologies have creative and transformative properties and are redefining industries, companies, work methods, and the people involved. One such trend was the collection, management and dissemination of data used in concert with mathematical algorithms to improve everything from determining user sentiment to cancer diagnosis. Machine learning is also automating everything that can be expressed in algorithmic form. This has the practical effect of reducing tasks of workers, and will remove the actual need for some traditional job roles. The manufacturing automation and globalization described by Thomas Friedman, which weakened the demand for blue collar workers. That wave of change has an analog in algorithmic process automation. Automation is currently, and will continue to affect traditional white collar jobs as it quickly transforms global markets, and the corporate work environment.
A separate but intertwined branch of technical innovation is the advent of virtualization, cloud computing, and micro services. These tools have allowed dynamic systems to generate decentralized, continuously improving compute operations at a massive scale. This trend, influenced a physical change in how we compute, has created “lights out” data centers the size of several football fields, built in locations that deliver the lowest operational costs, and all connected via an optical network of digital bandwidth. These automated facilities reduce the need for IT staff in expensive metro areas. What used to be a “tech job” is now algorithmic, and silently processed through a mesh of compute, one microsecond at a time. With fewer IT staff members in the data center, work and innovative focus are moving to the edge. "Hot edge" computing is the migration of our investments in computing to the last mile, or simply the cell phone in your pocket. Our creativity, coding, and design efforts are moving towards user level computing. The effect is that today technical innovation is drastically more consumer focused, than our traditional B2B models of the past. This evolution of technology is equally impactful to the creative worker.
It can be said what we needed in a worker has changed more in the last 20 years, than we experienced in the shift from agrarian to industrial society. Work is no longer the long repetitive hours spent toiling in a factory, replaced by a diverse web of geographically dispersed programmatic and human worker units. This new model affords businesses and the worker a new level of flexibility, and opportunity to evolve into, but it has to be realized.
Damned if I Don’t
To properly consider where today’s worker stands in this evolving continuum, we need to consider the recent evolution of international business. As companies have internationalized, they have also participated in industry segments that are being reinvented by new business models and new competition from market consolidation. In an effort to remain agile, companies have become more complex.
A corporation who solely listed on the NYSE in the past, now may be on many indexes, or operate across federated companies and/or divisions within a single conglomerate. Add to that, corporations have to internationally balance their understanding of cultural, environmental, and social-political changes across markets. There have been many steps to make corporate operations and investments more adaptable and responsive.
Part of that adaptability, companies are having to consider how they manage the interplay between labor and technology. Labor and technology are two critical and sizable investments that companies juggle to maximize annual production and return. In the past when technology innovation would slow, companies would invest in labor, only returning to technology when new innovation could provide productivity gains. However, in today’s businesses, optimizing the use of technology has no ceiling, and labor is in short supply.
Though there is a demand for labor, its new form may not match existing skill sets, and may not be conducive to a full time position for the worker. The opportunity is increasing for new, sometimes transient work models. Today’s optimal worker is a creative specialist, which means they are often only needed at one place for a short while, then become too specialized and expensive to keep in an ongoing role. This new era is sometimes called the gig economy. The trend is instantiated and growing, and it creates new unique challenges for companies and workers to optimize the use of talent in flexible and mutually equitable ways.
Riding Your Wave
We are experiencing the rise of the creative worker. Given all the change that has happened, it is no surprise that companies are eager to find the mechanisms and habits that take advantage of the creative worker, while further tuning their more fluid operating models. If history is a good measure, then we can only expect the pace and complexity of change to accelerate and diversify more. This means companies need to consider a significant shift in how they invest in culture, workers, and HR departments. Almost everything about how we have run companies is changing. What was a competitive advantage will likely change as quickly. Understanding how to leverage the creative worker will no doubt be a key to success. To be clear, what made a company a powerhouse in the past, may likely and specifically make them unsuccessful at creating creative cultures in this new model. Inertia is likely not your friend in this redesign. This isn’t a new coat of paint, it is a re-conception; but those who reinvent, will reach levels of growth that we have yet to fully appreciate.
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