June 17, 2015 at 16:22Work of the future
Today, most of the work looks like this: there is a certain business person who owns a business who hires people to delegate certain activities to them.
The goal of the businessman is to earn money on a car / house / yacht / island, etc. depending on ambitiousness.
The hired employees are the cogs in the mechanism, the creator of the mechanism is not very interested in making the cogs think of themselves as businessmen, so he tries not to overload anyone with information about all the intricacies of the business (some kind of “divide and conquer” principle).
These employees were motivated by the money necessary for survival, Marx called it alienated labor.
There are of course exceptions that look like aliens or messengers from the future, about the largest / most famous of them we constantly read on all types of habr. This is, for example, Valve , whose corporate culture is very unusual because it allows you to do anything; Project eMT - people work 4 days a week remotely and without urging; Netflix and Virgin who do not follow the schedule of work and rest of employees ; 37signals - who wrote a whole book about their work style (Rework); Google , Amazon's, Spotify will probably also fall in this list, as well as many other (about the last job you can read here ).
What is the main difference between the approach of such companies? - The fact that they do not consider the employee stupid, lazy and irresponsible, everything else follows from this.
Since the employee is smart, hard-working and responsible, there is no need to monitor whether he works or to indicate how he works, and in many cases you don’t even need to indicate what to do.
Someone will say that there will not be enough for all such workers, that these companies simply incorporate that apparently small percentage of smart, hard-working and responsible people, this is partly true. But the fact is that in my opinion a significant part of people simply adjusts to how the work is organized now - they do not assign responsibility to it, backed up by authority, they lose their responsibility (reasoning: “if they do not trust me, let them worry themselves”). Plus, you need to understand that if a person does not work well, then maybe he is simply out of place.
Companies of the old type do not want to change, but I suspect that life will force either change or die out.
I believe that in the not so distant future, non-initiative executors of the will of the great boss will cease to be necessary, primarily in connection with robotics. A huge number of professions will disappear very soon because robots will come to replace humans. Moreover, companies built on old principles simply lose the competition not only for personnel, but also for markets, because a significant portion of their energy goes to “management” and “motivation”.
The new approach is not only more humane, but also logically more effective - for example, Stafford Beer's cybernetics book “The Brain of a Company” says that a system of less complexity (brain, director of a company) cannot manage all the details of systems of greater complexity (body, company), and therefore it is necessary to reduce the flow of information to the control system giving some autonomy to the subsystems, this is done by advanced employers.
What to do with those who cannot work independently? Probably for humane reasons they will not be processed into biogas, but most likely they will replenish the army of the unemployed or just the army (although there are robots).
The goal of the businessman is to earn money on a car / house / yacht / island, etc. depending on ambitiousness.
The hired employees are the cogs in the mechanism, the creator of the mechanism is not very interested in making the cogs think of themselves as businessmen, so he tries not to overload anyone with information about all the intricacies of the business (some kind of “divide and conquer” principle).
The golden rule of management: In each company there is always one person
who understands what is really happening, and this is what he needs
to be fired first.
These employees were motivated by the money necessary for survival, Marx called it alienated labor.
There are of course exceptions that look like aliens or messengers from the future, about the largest / most famous of them we constantly read on all types of habr. This is, for example, Valve , whose corporate culture is very unusual because it allows you to do anything; Project eMT - people work 4 days a week remotely and without urging; Netflix and Virgin who do not follow the schedule of work and rest of employees ; 37signals - who wrote a whole book about their work style (Rework); Google , Amazon's, Spotify will probably also fall in this list, as well as many other (about the last job you can read here ).
What is the main difference between the approach of such companies? - The fact that they do not consider the employee stupid, lazy and irresponsible, everything else follows from this.
Since the employee is smart, hard-working and responsible, there is no need to monitor whether he works or to indicate how he works, and in many cases you don’t even need to indicate what to do.
Someone will say that there will not be enough for all such workers, that these companies simply incorporate that apparently small percentage of smart, hard-working and responsible people, this is partly true. But the fact is that in my opinion a significant part of people simply adjusts to how the work is organized now - they do not assign responsibility to it, backed up by authority, they lose their responsibility (reasoning: “if they do not trust me, let them worry themselves”). Plus, you need to understand that if a person does not work well, then maybe he is simply out of place.
Companies of the old type do not want to change, but I suspect that life will force either change or die out.
I believe that in the not so distant future, non-initiative executors of the will of the great boss will cease to be necessary, primarily in connection with robotics. A huge number of professions will disappear very soon because robots will come to replace humans. Moreover, companies built on old principles simply lose the competition not only for personnel, but also for markets, because a significant portion of their energy goes to “management” and “motivation”.
The new approach is not only more humane, but also logically more effective - for example, Stafford Beer's cybernetics book “The Brain of a Company” says that a system of less complexity (brain, director of a company) cannot manage all the details of systems of greater complexity (body, company), and therefore it is necessary to reduce the flow of information to the control system giving some autonomy to the subsystems, this is done by advanced employers.
What to do with those who cannot work independently? Probably for humane reasons they will not be processed into biogas, but most likely they will replenish the army of the unemployed or just the army (although there are robots).