From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.
In the fall of 1994, Fortune magazine published a cover story entitled “The End Of The Job.” More than a dozen years later, that premonition is coming true.
New communications and collaboration technologies are enabling businesses to completely rethink the way they are structured. Increasingly, they will decentralize and outsource that which is not strategic. This will be a difficult transition, but in the end will yield a much more efficient and competitive business model.
Consider eBay. More than 150,000 people now make their living primarily from selling products and services using the eBay commerce engine and more than $60 billion will change hands over eBay this year. If all the people who depend on eBay for their livelihood worked for the company, eBay would be the second largest retailer in the world. Yet the company employees less than 13,000 people .
In San Francisco, Craigslist.com is striking fear into the hearts of newspaper executives everywhere because it has conceived of a classified advertising business that is vastly more efficient than anything we’ve ever seen. Founded just seven years ago, Craigslist today operates 300 web sites around the globe and is the seventh most popular English language website in the world. It has a bigger web presence than the 133,000-employee Walt Disney Company and has been estimated to be worth more than $1 billion. It has a total operating staff of 23 people.
Companies like these are creating a new generation of internet-driven business in which the company is a facilitator of commerce rather than a storekeeper. These innovators have figured out how to use the global network to connect people who would have otherwise never found each other. In doing so, they are upending the proprietary and vertically integrated businesses that came before them.
These models will increasingly be applied to other industries. Already, many companies have relocated or outsourced their customer support operations offshore. The service rep you reach on the phone may be physically located 10,000 miles away, but it makes no difference because the network doesn’t care.
Customer service is just the first step. As the trends forecast in the 1994 Fortune article continue to play out, American businesses will increasingly be constructed on a base of partnerships, contracts and loose affiliations. We will move toward an army of sole proprietors.
In some ways, this is a back-to-the-future scenario. Before the Industrial Revolution, very few people had jobs. Most worked for themselves, plying their trade to anyone who needed them.
With factories came assembly lines and the need to keep the machines running. The job was born. But America has very few factories anymore and machines do much of what humans used to do. People work at all hours in all time zones. There’s no need to keep people busy 40 hours a week any more unless there’s work for them to do. In general, people are more productive when they’re looking out for their own interests then when they are looking out for their employer.
A full-time work force has its benefits and there will always be the need for payrolls. I expect, though, that businesses will involve in the future toward an increasingly decentralized model enabled by technology. Many people will serve multiple masters, bound to their clients by sophisticated communications networks. Businesses will learn to become more efficient by planning their resource needs around networks of contractors and partners in all parts of the globe. It will be a painful transition, but it will also lead to a better style of doing business.
The job as we know it may not end, but it will evolve into something very different from what we now know.
How do you see business evolving? Post your comments here.