Organizations that fight against this trend are going to be at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to hiring the best and brightest of the next generation.  You have been warned!

Question: Since 1995, two million American manufacturing jobs vanished. How many manufacturing jobs did China add during the same period?

Answer: None. China lost sixteen million manufacturing jobs since 1995, a higher percentage of their manufacturing workforce than the US.

Sounds interesting. We should all flexible, adaptable, forward thinking, skill-building, constant-learning individuals who are always looking to the horizon. Not only should we be pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, we should be doing it on a regular basis.

Now, compare this to the dour assessment from the New Statesman:

Personnel managers, he finds, look not for people who are committed to and proficient at specific skills but for those who have the “potential” to cope with change. The upward career mobility so familiar to previous generations has been replaced by downward mobility.

By their late forties, people often work at lower skill levels than employees who joined more recently. And because such a high premium is put on flexibility and seizing the new, “you are constantly . . . walking away from your own commitments”.

This surely explains why everything is done so badly. You don’t try to improve your performance and do your present job well; you get ready for the next big change. It may also explain why the government seems always to be struggling to improve the population’s skill levels.

Souns a bit grim, doesn’t it? There are two sides to every coin, and it seems that our ruthlessly efficient focus on productivity improvement and global reach might have some downside.

My Take

Flexibility is important, and we need it in a rapidly changing environment. Make no doubt about it, things are moving faster and faster.  However, taking on the motto of semper gumby isn’t necessarily going to make things work.

1. The need for flexibility is often brought on by indecisiveness, negligence or incompetence, and not opportunity.  When used for the right reasons, flexibility is key.  When used for the wrong reasons it is just an excuse for additional stress.
2. Experience has a tangible value in the workplace, and the savings brought by every hour of work not done. To paraphrase a French philosopher, “A project plan is not done when every hour of work is added together, it is done when every unecessary hour of work is removed.”
3. Age matters!  It is much easier to be flexible when you are young and relatively unencumbered.  At the same time, it is easy to feel a sense of entitlement as you get older and have more to deal with.

Overall, the most useful people will be those with the right combination of drive, wisdom, experience, and flexibility to fit the situation.  A solid organization will recognize this and in itself be flexible to the needs of their employees and ultimately to the bottom line.

1. Recently, a kidnapped teen outsmarted her captor by using his cell phone to send a text message for help.
2. Most 10-year-olds have mobile phones, according to The Register.
3. An 18-year old recently graduated college in one year (with a double major in Math and Physics).
4. A professor at North Carolina State University was asked to remove podcasts of his lectures from a for-profit download service.

First and foremost, I am very glad that this poor girl was so clever and was able to free herself, and that most 10 year olds (at least in the UK) have a safety valve in the case of an emergency. Second, this college professor has NOTHING to do with kidnapping, so please don’t infer that from their inclusion on the same list.

When combined, these stories point me towards the ownership issues that are springing up around intellectual property, organizations, and infrastructure. Each of these begs the question, “Who really owns your infrastructure?” In a disconnected, paper-based world, it is easy to resolve these types of issues. Clearly, if you paid for it then it is yours. However, this is becoming more and more of an issue in our highly networked universe. The prevalence of appliances, mashups, and web services make it incredibly easy for people to connect the right people and things. It is (and will continue to be) easy to create things that hadn’t even been considered in the initial design of your infrastructure. So, if your best and brightest users are building things on top of your information architecture and using it to create new and useful things, are they the owners?

The addition of millenials makes this question a lot more interesting. Digital natives don’t have the same kind of ownership issues that are prevalent in today’s IT world. A progressive workplace is going to have to deal with these type of issues if they want to hire the best and brightest in order to be successful.

a) online as an unfinished mix that was leaked in late 2004; (b) as the official 2005 Interscope CD release, which contained most of the tracks on the leaked version plus a few new songs; (c) as the deluxe CD/DVD edition, complete with seven bonus tracks, a surround sound mix, and interactive video art to accompany every song; (d) in one of the many unauthorized fan mashups floating around the Net; (e) not as Guero at all, but as Guerolito, a commercially released companion piece featuring remixes by Diplo, Adrock, and Boards of Canada.

While I am a fan, you might be wondering why I am writing about Beck here. The thing that captivated me about the article was the way that the artist described his relationship with “the suits” at his label:

Does your label, Interscope, ever balk at your ideas?

Actually they’ve been great about everything. The labels are trying to figure all this stuff out just like everyone else, and I feel fortunate that I’ve been able to do so much experimenting to see what works. I’ve also been lucky because I signed a unique record deal back when I started that allowed me to try out a lot of weird things and even record different types of albums for different labels. I think that set me up nicely for where things are currently headed.

Isn’t all that repackaging just about making ways to sell more product?

I guess that’s part of it, but for me it’s more about giving the music legs, giving people new ways to experience it. There are so many ways to integrate technology into music; I can’t wait to see how the opportunities end up being put to use.

Why This Is Interesting

Recently, I talked about the culture wars that I see over the horizon as demographics begin to take over the workplace. In this context, think about the relationship between Beck and Interscope that I mentioned above. It is a creative partnership between an artist, his audience, and a business that is mutually beneficial. This is the face of innovation, smiling at us from just a bit down the road.