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MAY 22,
2000 VOL. 155 NO. 20 VISIONS 21: OUR WORK, OUR WORLD What Will We
Do for Work
Drastic
change is afoot. You'll have to be flexible and upgradable, but
you may actually enjoy what you're doing By TOM PETERS
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I believe
that 90% of white-collar jobs in the U.S. will be either destroyed
or altered beyond recognition in the next 10 to 15 years. That's a catastrophic
prediction, given that 90% of us are engaged in white-collar work
of one sort or another. Even most manufacturing jobs these days are connected
to such white-collar services as finance, human resources and engineering.
I talked to an old London dockhand some time back. He allowed
as how in 1970 it took 108 guys about five days to unload a timber
ship. Then came containerization. The comparable task today takes
eight folks one day. That is, a 98.5% reduction in man-days, from
540 total to just eight. This time the productivity tool kit
aims, belatedly, to reconstruct--make that deconstruct--the white-collar
world. In fact, I see a five-sided pincer movement that will bring
to fruition my apparently bizarre "90% in 10 years" prognostication.
FIRST The destructive
nature of the current flavor of competition, dotcoms. Sure, most
will fail. But the survivors will exert enormous pressure--fast!--on
the Big Guys. When an Amazon or a Charles Schwab moves into your
neighborhood, you've got moments to react. Or take king entrepreneur
Jim Clark of Netscape fame. His latest venture, Healtheon/WebMD,
intends to squeeze hundreds of billions of dollars of waste out
of the health-care system. These new firms aim to create nothing
less than havoc in the theaters in which they operate.
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S
ECOND Enterprise software.
It's a jargony name for the tools that will hook up every aspect
of a business's innards--personnel, production, sales, accounting--and
then hook up all that hooked-up stuff to the rest of the "family"
of suppliers and the suppliers' suppliers and wholesalers and retailers
and end users. They are your nightmare, these "white-collar
robots." The complex products from German software giant SAP
will do to your company's innards exactly what forklifts and robots
and containerization did to the blue-collar world circa 1960. Installing
these tools is not easy. The technical part is harrowing; the politics
are horrendous. When the blue-collar robots arrived, the unions
raised hell. This time it's management bureaucrats who are turning
Luddite. Why? These tools threaten their cozy baronies, carefully
crafted over several generations. But the robots did come.
And they triumphed. THIRD Outsourcing. M.I.T.'s No. 1 computer guru,
Michael Dertouzos, said India could easily boost its GDP by a trillion
dollars in the next few years performing backroom white-collar tasks
for Western companies. He guessed that 50 million jobs from the
white-collar West could go south to India, whose population hit
1 billion last week. The average annual salary for each of those
50 million new Indian workers: $20,000. FOURTH The Web. Ford, GM and DaimlerChrysler announce
a rare hookup. They will link all their tens of thousands of suppliers
into a single, Internet-based network. This entity will encompass
$250 billion annually of suppliers' products (and perhaps an additional
$500 billion of those suppliers' suppliers' products). In short,
every penny of waste will be wrung from the mammoth procurement
system. The order cycle will speed up dramatically. Medibuy aims
for the same hat trick in medical supplies, DigitalThink in training,
CarStation in the auto-body-shop world. This is the white-hot world
of B2B (business to business) electronic commerce, which will soon
encompass trillions upon trillions of dollars in transactions.
FIFTH Time compression.
It took 37 years for the radio to get to 50 million homes. The Web
got there in four. Hence my belief that while it took about a century
to revolutionize blue-collar job practices, this brave new white-collar
regime will be mostly installed in a tenth of that time--10 years.
Each of these five forces is fact, not supposition. Each influences
the others multiplicatively. Therefore my unwillingness to back
off my predictions about the power of the white-collar tsunami bearing
down on us. Unsettling madness is afoot. Especially if I'm a 48-year-old
white-collar staff member or middle manager entombed in a corporate
tower in Manhattan or Miami or Milan. Yet these forces
are liberating. Blue-collar robots took the grunt work out of factory
and warehouse and dockside. The same will happen to white-collar
work. Just as workin' the line at U.S. Steel was no walk in the
park in 1946, passing papers in the tower is no great joy. My dad
did it for 41 years at the Baltimore Gas & Electric Co. He was,
sad to say, a white-collar indentured servant. The world
is going through more fundamental change than it has in hundreds,
perhaps thousands of years. The head economist at Sandia National
Laboratories, Arnold Baker, said it's the "biggest change since
the cavemen began bartering." Do you want to be a player, a
full-scale participant who embraces change? Here is the opportunity
to participate in the lovely, messy playground called "Let's
reinvent the world." Here's a new role model I call Icon
Woman:
- She is turned on by her work! - The work matters!
- The work is cool! - She is "in your face"!
- She is an adventurer! - She is the CEO of her
life! - She is not God. She is not the Bionic Woman. She
is determined to make a difference! (Dilbert would be appalled,
no doubt.) My Icon Woman, of course, embraces and exploits
the Web.
- She submits her r?um?on the Web and keeps it perpetually
active there. - She is recruited and negotiates and is
hired on the Web. - She is trained on the Web.
- She creates and conducts scintillating projects on the Web via
a far-flung "virtual" stable of teammates (most of whom
she's never met). - She manages her career and reputation-building
efforts on the Web. And she has a fab personal website!
But
what--exactly?--will she actually do? Circa 2010. She will be at home.
Working--for the next several months--for Ford on a fiendishly difficult
engineering problem. She won't be on Ford's payroll, though she
will be drawing full benefits, even as a contractor. (During President
Hillary Rodham's second term, health care, pensions and retraining
will no longer be tied to a company but to the individual.) Her
79-member project team, only one of whom she's met face-to-face
(she considers face-to-face a quaint idea that her mom suffered),
comes from 14 nations. Her fully wired home is her castle. After
half a dozen virtual meetings this morning, she'll take a so-called
RETRB (ReTRaining Break) and attend a virtual class in engineering
(conducted from God knows where) as part of her virtual/online master's
degree program.
She is deeply
committed to her self-designed, do-it-from-anywhere-with-anybody
"career" path. She is relieved, by the white-collar robots,
of 95% of the drudge work ?and is adding value by being on the tippy
top of her intellectual game. Her only security is her personal
commitment to constant growth and her global (virtual) rep for great
work. "Get a grip, Peters," you retort. Is this
"be wild and crazy and Webby and CEO of your own life"
picture anything other than New Age/new economy/Palo Altoconsultant
speak b.s.? I think it is relevant and real rather than
wild and crazy--on at least two important scores. One
is that though my "house" is in Vermont, I've hung my
professional shingle in Palo Alto since 1981. All hell is breaking
loose "out there/here." These folks may sound weird, but
they may also be redefining the world. And speaking as a 57-year-old,
"they" don't look or eat or taste or smell--or work--much
like Frank Peters or George Babbitt or Dilbert. Two is
back to the future! I constantly remind my middle-aged seminar participants
that George Babbitt and Dilbert are not the quintessential Americans.
Who are? Ben Franklin (the father of self-help literature). Ralph
Waldo Emerson (self-reliance was his shtick, recall). Walt Whitman.
And yes, motivational guru Tony Robbins. And yes, Donald Trump.
And ?Bentonville, Arkansas' Sam Walton ?and Bill Gates.
Hero Jim Clark, mentioned above, is no charmer, as revealed by Michael
Lewis in The New New Thing. In fact, to my reading, he comes off
as about as delectable as Donald Trump. But he's pure American bravado,
a bravado that was lost in the Babbitt-DilbertBig BureaucracyCubicle
Slave decades. WHAT IF? Maybe the wild new-economy America
is the old America. Truer to ourselves. We came here to break free,
to make our records in our awkward ways, as did my German grandfather
Jacob Ebert Peters. He arrived in the 1880s and was a wildly successful
Baltimore contractor 30 years later. Then he lost it all in the
Great Depression. How quintessentially American. Like Grandpa,
I am facing extinction, only by this new set of powerful forces.
I make most of my living giving live seminars and training programs
and as a management consultant. It's all gravitating to the Web--gravitating,
heck. It's moving at the speed of light. I am scrambling to reinvent
myself, to not just "cope" but to exploit the new communication
and connection media. Hey, there are young management gurus hot
on my trail. Hot = Web speed. I'm completely fed up with
Dilbert. He's funny. He's unerringly on the money. But he's a hapless
victim too. Damned if I'm going to be. In any event, it's
going to be one hell of an interesting ride. Consultant Tom
Peters recently published a series of books on reinventing work,
including The Brand You 50 and The Project 50 Write to TIME at mail@web.timeasia.com
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