I love serendipity. Last week I was rambling on about how difficult it would be to manage in a strengths based environment. At the time, I did not see a clear path to the future. However, I just happened to be in the local public library later that day and just happened to pick up a book on CD that looked interesting. Then Whammo! the whole thing came together.
The book I picked up was Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams. The premise of the book is that we are seeing a shift away from traditional hierarchical business models to more collaborative business models. I cannot say much more than that without diminishing the impressive ideas put forth in this book. I would highly recommend it and, for my purposes here, will leave it off by saying that this book jogged my thinking in this area.
In the future you can expect to see more outsourcing of work to individuals. Instead of retaining talent in a sort of corporate studio system, corporations will increasingly acquire the talent they need, when they need it, from the global pool of talent that is available throught the World Wide Web. Professionals will bid for jobs and be paid for the things that they produce rather than being paid for just showing up. Over time people will gravitate to the things they are best at as that will maximize their productivity and their revenue. And businesses will adjust compensation so as to attract the best person for the job at the best price. This will lead to economic efficiency and maximized productivity. And people will work according to their strengths as that will produce the maximum revenue for the least effort.
I don't want to push this idea too far as the future tends to scare people. However, it is easy to see a day, within out lifetimes, where notions such as "going to work" or "working for a company" are simply antiquated. Will we ever get nostalgic and look fondly back on the days when we used to sit in traffic for a hour in the morning and in the evening so we could hang out all day with people we didn't like just so we could go to pointless meetings and engage in any number of pointless repetitive rituals? Perhaps not. Maybe this is a good thing.
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The linking of collaborative output depends on strictly defined value, that hopefully results from that output/activity. Collaborative activities don't always achieve the expected value. Alternatively, the expected value is often ill defined. As an example I point to the notion of crowdsourcing.
The idea of crowdsourcing is an extension on the well-known practice of “outsourcing.” Specifically, “crowdsourcing” refers to the practice of using the skills and time of a generally large group of people (most often the general public) to generate business-oriented content or solutions. According to Jeff Howe, the individual who coined the term in Wired Magazine, simply defined, crowdsourcing represents the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call. Most experts agree that the real benefit of crowdsourcing is in its intrinsic ability to expose ideas to many people and receive a variety of feedback that is often “out-of-the-box” in its perspective.
A good idea conceptually, but it definitely has its limits. One of the big obstacles is a high degree of noise. As further evidence, I point to a 2008 article about Cambrian House, an early pioneer in crowdsourcing: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/12/when-crowdsourcing-fails-cambrian-house-headed-to-the-deadpool/
I provide this comment not to knock the concept of Wikinomics, rather to highlight some challenges or characterize how far in the future it may really be. No doubt mass collaboration is the future, but this future still has to be managed and that remains a significant challenge.
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