What’s Next for Work?

Over the past five years, incredible new technologies have emerged that are rapidly changing how business is done. Since the rise of cloud computing, blockchains, large language models, and e-conferencing platforms like Zoom, we have seen a shift from office-based to home-based work, increased use of artificial intelligence in business contexts, and even entirely new kinds of organizations being formed.

One word I would use to describe the trends we are experiencing is “decentralization”. Technology gives us the ability to store and share information so quickly and easily that teams are now able to collaborate from different geographical areas, and often in ways that move too quickly for traditional corporate management.

We see expressions of this trend in Seth Godin’s work, and in the development of WordPress technology. As documented by Scott Berkun in his book The Year Without Pants, WordPress employees have the freedom to work on updates, projects, and fixes with limited oversight from management. Email is used much more sparingly than in other companies, and small teams of five people manage most of the work.

In Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations, released just one year after The Year Without Pants, we find similar forms of decentralization in “teal” companies like Buurtzorg Nederland and Patagonia . These organizations also eschew top-down management styles for more employee-driven approaches and use these new technologies to support their way of working.

One decade later, in 2024, we now have the potential to work alongside artificial intelligences, and we also have ways of verifying transactions with blockchain technology. This era has brought us the DAO, or “decentralized autonomous organization”, where users buy or earn stakes in a company running on blockchain and manage the business through voting mechanisms.

As these trends move through human networks, new economies and opportunities are spontaneously forming. The industrial age required centralized top-down structures to organize manufacturing processes. Employees and customers had to make do with what was on offer; personalization and authenticity were not profitable pursuits.

The digital-entrepreneurial age can instantly connect consumers, experts, and entrepreneurs to form SGBs (small global businesses). The smaller scale of these enterprises encourages creativity and adaptability to flourish and allows for organic responses to market needs.

If the 1900s were the century of the corporation, the 2000s will be the century of what I now call the “sovereign individual”. Although many career tracks will involve corporate at some point, even for decades, ultimately more people will be planning to be their own corporation. With today’s technology, we’ll have the resources to do it.

What are your thoughts?