¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ

Here are four modern business scenarios. See if you can tell which one
is imaginary:

1) A graduate sets up a business offering neck massages to City executives
in their offices. The adverts don’t mention that she doesn’t have an office.
All she needs is a fax machine, some printed letterheads, and – most important
– a pager that can store up to 20 messages at a time.

2) An advert in Nature offers supplies of an enzyme used in DNA analysis,
with a London phone number. Call it early in the day and you get an apologetic
answering machine. Call it later, or in the evening, and your call is routed
to the company head office – in Phoenix, Arizona. The company doesn’t want
to spend the money on hiring a London office, but it can easily afford
a London phone number.

3) A British consumer products company has a research and development
division in Hong Kong, with the division manager based at the head office
in England. Every day the Hong Kong staff work on new developments; before
going home they fax them to the manager’s office, just at the start of the
British day. The manager studies them, makes corrections and suggestions,
and sends the revisions to Hong Kong in time for the next working day.

4) A journalist wants to interview the extremely busy head of a multinational.
He decides that the best first approach would be via e-mail, and sends a
message. A while later the executive e-mails a brief reply. The journalist
poses more questions. The executive replies. The dialogue continues, electronically;
eventually the journalist publishes the ‘correspondence’ as part of his
article.

Did you spot the fake? If you did, then you’re wrong. All four are already
happening – prime examples of the way that work is changing to fit the future.
The British consumer products company is Amstrad, which even in the 1980s
designed many of its products using the 24-hour laboratory described. The
Nature advert ran in recent issues. The electronic executive was Bill Gates,
head of Microsoft, and the journalist was writing for a January issue of
the New Yorker magazine.

The neck massage service was set up a couple of years ago by the daughter
of Charles Handy, a visiting professor at the London Business School who
has written numerous books about the changing shape of work. Yet his familiarity
with the idea didn’t mean he found it easy to adjust to the reality. A
virtual office? ‘But she did it instinctively,’ he recalls. ‘It makes you
realise that it’s not the exotic stuff – the superhighways or whatever
– that really make a huge difference at once. It just gradually takes over.’
In time, he came to see his 24-year-old’s business as just another example
of the wave of the future.

Changes in work patterns are inevitable, as technology means that everything
and everyone becomes more connected on a global scale, and less defined
by location. Where does Amstrad’s research division really exist? Not exclusively
in London, nor in Hong Kong. ‘In ten years’ time people will be less tethered
in their work to place, time, or device,’ says Kate Ehrlich, a research
scientist in ‘workgroup technology’ for Lotus, the software company based
in Boston.

Lotus is desperately interested in knowing just how work will change.
Lotus 1-2-3, its combined spread-sheet, word processor and database package,
became de rigueur for computer users in the 1980s: for many, it produced
everything they could want from a computer. But that is no longer the case.
People now want much more from their computers – including connection with
other computers. Lotus’s commercial survival depends on staying abreast
of those demands. Hence Ehrlich’s six-strong group was set up about 18 months
ago to ‘look over the horizon’. What they see is approaching rapidly.

‘People don’t want to travel to work so much. In fact, the office is
becoming less important. Companies have more temporary staff, with more
mobile workers,’ she says. ‘This means that there will be different ways
of building communities. People will have a different allegiance towards
their employers. It’s already the case in computing that people who have
been with the same company for six years or more are becoming rare. Instead,
people will have other allegiances, with professional societies, for instance.’

The importance of time also changes if people are working to the same
objective in different places. E-mail, for example, is delivered almost
immediately, but can be read at any time. Unlike a telephone call, the sender
has no control at all over this time-shifting. Equally, workers at geographically
remote locations can work on the same subject at different times, as long
as their computers are connected and can swap any updated information. The
effect is to make the phrase ‘geographically remote’ redundant, except
to describe whether you can get together for an evening drink.

And what will the devices we use in the future look like? Right now,
says Ehrlich, we’re still grounded by their physical nature; in the future,
everything – from computers to telephones – will be smaller and ubiquitous.
‘You’ll be able to interact with them by gestures, eye-gaze, movement. It
will all be more seamless. Information that’s out there now in nonelectronic
form will become digital. And you’ll be able to receive information in
the medium that you want – so, for example, voice mail becomes a printed
text note, paper memos can be read out, and so on.’ The technology will
become such a part of your life that you cease to notice it – just as you
don’t wonder about how a light bulb works. A century ago, it would have
been amazing.

But just as individuals are changing their ways of working, so are companies.
They too are less tied to time or place, and less reliant on a large, permanent
workforce. The mantra now is productivity: getting more from fewer people.
Handy describes it as the ‘1/2 x 2 x 3 = P’ equation: companies will try
to employ half as many full-time staff, pay them twice as much, and work
them three times as hard.

In such a system, it becomes easier to be a part-time worker. Don’t
like your employer? Become a consultant, selling your valuable knowledge
a bit at a time to different companies. Got the management expertise that
a company needs for its latest big project? Sell yourself to them for just
as long as it takes. Handy describes it as being more like an actor, or
a member of a film crew: the task has a goal, and you might get paid more
than some of the people who organise you (as a star is ordered around by
a director).

Retirement ceases to be a cutoff date after which you don’t work, and
more a description of how often you work. The old hierarchies and certainties
break down. Most importantly, with global information networks, finding
those projects and those companies becomes easier as you hook up with your
work peer groups from Tokyo to Turin. Being at ease with the technology
becomes imperative in order to join the community of the networks – not
the community of the jobless.

SURFING THE DATA STREAMS

Howard Rheingold, a writer and editor based in Sausalito, near San Francisco,
has written books such as The Virtual Community. He stresses that there
are going to be a lot of advantages in having access to the information
networks. ‘Clearly there are going to be class divisions in that. And we’re
seeing the beginnings of ‘symbolic analysts’ – people like journalists who
manipulate ideas, who need a lot of streams of ideas and sources, and develop
skills for deciding what’s useful. It’s the problem of taking just a mouthful
from a firehose pouring out water. We package and sell that mouthful.’

But is there a wider significance to this change towards part-time work?
Handy is convinced that there is, towards a very different society. As he
points out, we are oddly short-sighted about how the world changes: ‘Every
generation perceives itself as justifiably different from its predecessor,
but plans as if its successor generation will be the same.’ This next generation
will be very different.

The change here is rather like bursts in evolution where the more effective
methods – in business, the more productive ones – triumph over the rest.
And technology speeds the process. If a bank can replace a loan evaluator
with a computer program that does not demand a pension, cheap mortgage or
insurance, it will. If a credit control department can replace ledger clerks
with an electronic payment system, it will. Many people will lose their
outdated jobs almost overnight, and will remain profoundly unemployable
because they lack the variety of skills and mental flexibility to adjust
to an economy of ideas which is constantly remaking itself.

According to Handy, the trouble started when time turned into something
that could be bought and sold. ‘Time turns out to be a confusing commodity,’
he writes in The Empty Raincoat. ‘Some will spend money to save their time,
others will spend their time to save money. Others again, will trade money
for time at certain periods of their life, preferring to work less long
for less money.’

Yet this contradictory commodity could be one of the few engines of
growth in the jobs market. If you’re one of the ideas elite, working those
extra hours to be three times as productive, why not buy in all the help
you can? There will be armies of people out there who, like you, have ‘gone
portfolio’: that is, exchanged full-time employment for the independence
of taking on different pieces of work for different clients. For job, read
‘client’ in the economy of the very near-future.

The traditional ‘fixers’ (plumbers, electricians, and builders) will
be joined by Handy’s ‘new fixers’ (estate agents, brokers, conference organisers,
and tour arrangers). Further down the pecking order in this superservice
sector, the old-style servant businesses (cleaning, gardening, child-minding
and chauffeurs) will flourish alongside more esoteric, services like that
offered by Handy’s daughter.

Those who are less busy, on the other hand, will spend their time doing
what they used to pay others to do. In the do-it-yourself economy, they
will buy equipment and materials and spend time to save money. They may
also turn their hands to pottery or weaving, or some of the more technological
crafts such as bespoke software design, and in turn furnish the affluent
ideas elite with whatever they desire.

But such change doesn’t always happen in the way or at the speed we
expect. Take the earthquake that hit Los Angeles in January. It devastated
key sections of many freeways, at least doubling the journey time to work
for many of the city’s commuters. What could be more logical than to let
the phone take the strain instead, and telecommute? Pacific Bell and GTE,
the two big phone companies in the region, set up hotlines to advise companies
that wanted to exploit telecommuting while the freeways are repaired.

The corollary, that longer journey times means more telecommuting, seems
so obvious that Rheingold, unusually, was tempted to make a forecast. ‘I
predict that the quake is going to cause an immediate, sudden rise in telecommuting
in LA,’ he told ¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ a week after the event.

Early in March, a call to Pacific Bell revealed that the hotline had
taken 4600 calls since the quake at the end of January. That may sound a
lot, but it’s tiny for a city of 5.9 million commuters, of whom about four
million travel to work by car. Those calls translated into just 4000 installations
for new lines – 0.1 per cent of the working population. Meanwhile the roads
are still blocked in the mornings and nights. Some habits die hard.

‘Of course, you should check in a year’s time,’ says Rheingold. ‘There’s
a competitive advantage for the companies who put some of their workers
into telecommuting. Even without the quake, if you can take a tenth of
your workforce and keep them at home by tele-commuting, you save resources.’
As he points out, it doesn’t take many barrels of oil to move a megabit
of data.

The principal change happening now in Los Angeles in the wake of that
earthquake and its many aftershocks is that those with sufficient money
are selling up and leaving the city for other places, such as Las Vegas
or Florida. They might become prime candidates for teleworking – if they
cannot find the right work at their new location and decide to get in touch
with their former employer. It’s still too early to tell; as Rheingold says,
the time to ask is next January. What’s important, though, is that the technology
only makes it possible. The people decide.

The future, Rheingold thinks, is often best viewed from the past. Think
of the last big social change in work – the Industrial Revolution. ‘It crushed
some pleasant ways of life; but it also made it possible for many people
to live far better than ever before.’ Agricultural labourers found their
jobs disappearing while new, differently skilled jobs sprang up in factories
– just as people in manufacturing industry today are finding their skills
becoming redundant, displaced by the manipulation of ideas. In the 18th
century, some disliked the change intensely – violently, even. ‘The Luddites
were protesting against the wholesale social change which was taking away
cottage industries,’ comments Rheingold. ‘Byron spoke in defence of the
Luddites – because the people who really didn’t want to see their lifestyle
changed and sullied were the aristocrats. They were happy with things as
they were.’

The aristocrats of today are the managers who think it will be easier
to run their companies if they resist the changes in technology and society
around them. Their problem, says Handy, is that too few ask themselves
the question: ‘If we were going to reinvent this company from scratch today,
would we do it like we are now?’ The future, he says, is too valuable to
be left to those busy with the present. Ehrlich agrees: ‘I can’t predict
the direction of change because I’m rooted in today’s technology.’

Which brings us to the fifth modern business scenario:

5) A ¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ reader decides that all the talk of new technologies,
digital superhighways, video-on-demand and so on will never really impinge
upon life at home or in the office, and resolves to carry on using what’s
already available – computers, telephones, TVs. Is it the right decision?

Further reading: The Work of Nations: Preparing Our selves for 21st
Century Capitalism by Robert B. Reich, published in the US by Alfred Knopf,
1991; in Britain by Simon & Schuster.

The Empty Raincoat: Making Sense of the Future by Charles Handy, published
in Britain 1994 by Hutchinson, £12.99. Available in the US as The
Age of Paradox, published by Harvard Business School, $22.50.

* * *

Trading places: is your job safe?

Changes in the way we work will make some trades more valuable – and
others redundant. The following trades were prominent among those listed
in the London Post Office directory of 1900: ash collectors, starchers,
blood driers, mourning hatband makers, lamp black makers, lamplighters,
ice merchants, soot merchants, spermaceti (whale oil) refiners, saddlers
and harness makers, livery stable keepers, soap makers.

None survives in today’s (telephone) equivalent, the London Yellow Pages.
Instead there are computer dealers, adver-tising agencies, audio-visual
services, aircraft component makers . . .

But what about a future (electronic) Yellow Pages in, say, 20 years’
time? What trades will grow, shrink, change – or even be created? Here,
¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ makes its predictions – with a brief explanation.

Shrinking or disappearing trades:

Air couriers (replaced by high-speed data networks); Answering machines
(computers); Insurance claims assessors (neural networks); Bailiffs (electronic
credit freezes); Checkout staff (image recognition software); Cash register
suppliers (computers); Coal & solid fuel merchants (electricity); Company
registration agents (networks); Dictation & secretarial services (voice
recognition software); Layout artists (computer templates); Duplicating
equipment (computers); Factory cleaning (intelligent robots); Film processors
(digital, chemical-free film); Hotel booking agents (software); Industrial
relations arbitrators (employment deregulation); Notaries and commissioners
of oaths (video recordings); Draughting equipment makers (computer-aided
design); Typewriter manufacturers (computers); Window cleaners (intelligent
robots); Airlines (rising fuel prices); Middle managers (networks)

Growth areas:

Advertising (fuelled by opportunities in new media); Alarms & security
equipment (rising crime due to unemployment); Corporate entertainment (to
keep staff and customers happy); Sports equipment (more leisure time); Hi-fi
& computer dealers (convergence of technologies); Cellular radio dealers
(more networks); Cable manufac-turers (more networks); Environmental systems
(tighter laws); Recycling (tighter laws, higher material costs); Computer
programmers (need for better interfaces); Designers (producing and choosing
computer templates); Telemarketing (chance for wider access to public);
Career consultants (increased redundancies); Trauma consultants (rise in
random criminal acts); Personal matchmakers (less time for workers to socialise);
Escort services (importance of appearing sociable in public); Cruise companies
(for leisurely business trips)

Change from physical to electronic:

Market research Novelty goods Lawyers Doctors Surveyors Cinema Detective
agencies Estate agents Journalists Writers

New trades:

Internet plumbers (PC won’t talk to your fridge? Call one out – they’ll
solve it.); Workgroup synthesisers (bringing together ideas from staff on
different projects in remote locations); System hosts (the DJs and talk-show
hosts of the Internet, who will be famous for the discussions they provoke
each day. The true megastars of the future)