The REAL Economic Tsunami - Part II

Let's review the topics of my current sermon/rant -

1. Root economic change
2. What is a job?
3. The death of US manufacturing
4. The death of traditional media (newspapers, etc.)
5. Monetizing manufacturing/media's replacement (in the US at least) - Web 2.0 and higher. In an earlier blog I wrote this, about the concept of "the job" as an organizing principle of performing "work";

"We (the US) are in the middle of an economic transformation the likes of which we haven't seen since the steam engine. Yes, people will be thrown out of work - for a while. Yes, companies will be in receivership, in order to re-organize - for a while. But the transformation will come, no matter what manner of backward, insane, neo-socialist, buggy-whip making stupidity the guvmint tries to inflict, And if the guvmint doesn't midwife this transformation, it will be stripped down against it's will too. We are moving, albeit slowly, into a new economic paradigm, in which KNOWLEDGE, will supersede information as the controlling factor - this means jobs will be discarded and replaced with new types of jobs, manufacturing will shift from human-based to machine-based labor, hell, even the very definiton of what a damn job IS will change. The end of the "job", if you will, is coming, and nothing can be done to stop it..

The end of the "job" as a way of organizing work, it is a social artifact that has outlived its usefulness. Its demise confronts everyone with unfamiliar risks -- and rich opportunities.

Each day's newspaper and blog carries another story of new job losses. We hear the recession has been in effect for quite a while. The coming Obama Administration is trying convince you that they can create jobs, but critics claim some of its new taxes and regulations will destroy jobs. We are told the only way to protect our jobs is to increase our productivity, but then we discover that business process re-engineering, using self-managed teams, flattening our organizations, and turning routine work over to computers always make many jobs redundant. We used to read predictions that by 2000 everyone would work 30-hour weeks, and the rest would be leisure. But as we approach 2010 it seems more likely that half of us will be working 60-hour weeks and the rest of us will be unemployed. What's wrong? It is not that the President or his critics don't care what happens to us, or that organizations that asked for our loyalty and grew because of our efforts have double-crossed us. The fault does not lie even with that dread monster overseas competition, which has been blamed for everything from unemployment to falling living standards. It's a shame these things are not the culprits, for if they were our task would be simpler.

The reality we face is much more troubling, for what is disappearing is not just a certain number of jobs -- or jobs in certain industries or jobs in some part of the country or even jobs in America as a whole. What is disappearing is the very thing itself: the job. That much sought after, much maligned social entity, a job, is vanishing like a species that has outlived its evolutionary time. A century from now Americans will look back and marvel that we couldn't see more clearly what was happening.

The job is an idea that emerged early in the 19th century to package the work that needed doing in the growing factories and bureaucracies of the industrializing nations. Before people had jobs, they worked just as hard but on shifting clusters of tasks, in a variety of locations, on a schedule set by the sun and the weather and the needs of the day. The modern job was a startling new idea -- and to many, an unpleasant and perhaps socially dangerous one. Critics claimed it was an unnatural and even inhuman way to work. They believed most people wouldn't be able to live with its demands. It is ironic that what started as a controversial concept ended up becoming the ultimate orthodoxy -- and that we're hooked on jobs. Now the world of work is changing again: The conditions that created jobs 200 years ago -- mass production and the large organization -- are disappearing. Technology enables us to automate the production line, where all those job holders used to do their repetitive tasks. Instead of long production runs where the same thing has to be done again and again, we are increasingly customizing production. Big firms, where most of the good jobs used to be, are unbundling activities and farming them out to little firms, which have created or taken over profitable niches. Public services are starting to be privatized, and government bureaucracy, the ultimate bastion of job security, is being thinned. With the disappearance of the conditions that created jobs, we are losing the need to package work in that way. No wonder jobs are disappearing."

Definitions of job on the Web:

• occupation: the principal activity in your life that you do to earn money; "he's not in my line of business"
• a specific piece of work required to be done as a duty or for a specific fee; "estimates of the city's loss on that job ranged as high as a million dollars"; "the job of repairing the engine took several hours"; "the endless task of classifying the samples"; "the farmer's morning chores"
• a workplace; as in the expression "on the job";
• an object worked on; a result produced by working; "he held the job in his left hand and worked on it with his right"
• the responsibility to do something; "it is their job to print the truth"
• the performance of a piece of work; "she did an outstanding job as Ophelia"; "he gave it up as a bad job"
• a damaging piece of work; "dry rot did the job of destroying the barn"; "the barber did a real job on my hair"
• problem: a state of difficulty that needs to be resolved; "she and her husband are having problems"; "it is always a job to contact him"; "urban problems such as traffic congestion and smog"
• a Jewish hero in the Old Testament who maintained his faith in God in spite of afflictions that tested him
• profit privately from public office and official business
• any long-suffering person who withstands affliction without despairing
• subcontract: arranged for contracted work to be done by others
• (computer science) a program application that may consist of several steps but is a single logical unit
• a book in the Old Testament containing Job's pleas to God about his afflictions and God's reply
• work occasionally; "As a student I jobbed during the semester breaks"
• caper: a crime (especially a robbery); "the gang pulled off a bank job in St. Louis"

Whew! That's lot to digest, but you get the idea - there are a lot of definitions for the word job, but for now, let's focus on "occupation: the principal activity in your life that you do to earn money". This is changing, and at an exponential rate - just as in calculus, the rate of the rate of change is increasing. One great example can be found at Toyota (just down the road from me in Georgetown, KY) - no one line worker has just one "job". They perform, as in olden pre-industrial revolution times, shifting clusters of tasks... but still on the assembly line, at the plant, in Georgetown. But this is a quantum change from the UAW, unionized paradigm of singular tasking, a la Frederick Taylor ( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Winslow_Taylor for more). What is the "job" becoming? In a fast moving economy, jobs are rigid solutions to an elastic situation. I think it means: tasking is "permanent"; economies have always changed, so that it is necessary to have flexible solutions to solve problems in the tasks to be performed. For coming generations, the traditional job will never exist. Even the idea of the 9-5 job is becoming obsolete, simply because it's not good time management, and it's expensive. Productivity doesn't need a stop watch, or people poring over time sheets. All it needs is actual production and viable costs. The job monoculture no longer exists. You won't get vast crops of new accountants, herds of clerks, and fields of paper pushers anymore to be JUST accountants, etc. Bureaucracy is dying, and so is its infrastructure. They're inefficient. You don't need them any more. A spreadsheet, a document or so, and an email address will do. That's got rid of a lot of dead end jobs, and careers based mainly on inertia. Nor are you stuck with a career path which turns you into a clone of your parents. With the removal of the office motif, the workplace and the employment market are now a lot more advanced, and this is only the beginning. The new generations may never need to work under such restrictions, with so few options.

For job hunters, this may involve some good organization, and very good sources of information, but in practice, it works entirely in their favor. This is an extremely fluid workplace, and there are now multiple job opportunities, literally every second. You don't have to commit a whole day to just one job. Nor are you confined to just one career, or just one skill set. In the past, a person with multiple skills across multiple fields was very unusual. People specialized in one field. Their career choices were severely limited by that specialization. Now, you can accumulate multiple degrees, multiple qualifications, and transfer common skills across different professions. All the suffering caused by downsizing workforces and cost cutting in wages has had a very strange result. It's completely changed the entire concept of employment, both for employers and employees. What used to be a so-called good solid job now looks like a bad risk. Cheapskate wages and neurotic downsizing, particularly in the US, have added a lot of incentive to looking for much better ways of earning a living The rise of the contract worker, originally seen as the end of the world by the traditional job market, has worked well. The average contract worker has more choice than anybody in the employment market has ever had before. If you're prepared to do the work, you can make as much money as you can find in the contracts, and have some spare time for your own projects. You can even have a life.

And what about companies, corporations? Who will do the ...er, jobs? Well, you won't have jobs, I think, just task clustering. And corporations will become more like movie studios - project factories, with flexible scheduling, task assignment, even manufacturing (off-shored to some Third-World sh*thole no doubt, at least at first. Labor exploitation is part of the human genome you know). Manufacturing will return to the US, but it will performed by American made robots (!?!?!?) designed and maintained by, yes American workers, as one their clusters of tasks, as part of a project. Specifically, companies that have already begun to employ de-jobbed workers effectively seem to share at least four traits:

1. They encourage rank-and- file employees to make the kind of operating decisions that used to be reserved for managers.
2. They give people the information that they need to make such decisions -- information that used to be given only to managers.
3. They give employees lots of training to create the kind of understanding of business and financial issues that no one but an owner or an executive used to be concerned with.
4. They give people a stake in the fruits of their labor -- a share of company profits. The organization that wants to move down the path toward the post-job future must answer several key questions:

-- Is work being done by the right people? -- Are the core tasks -- requiring and protecting the special competencies of the organization -- being done in-house, and are other tasks being given to vendors or subcontractors, temps or term hires, or to the customers themselves? -- Are the people who do the work in each of those categories chosen in such a way that their desires, abilities, temperaments, and assets are matched with the demands of the task? -- Are such workers compensated in the most appropriate way? -- Is everyone involved -- not just the core employees -- given the business information they need to understand their part in the larger task? Do they have the understanding needed to think like business people? -- Does the way people are organized and managed help them complete their assignments, or does it tie them to outmoded expectations and job-based assumptions? Too often new ways of doing things are viewed as add-ons: "If we ever get a spare moment around here, let's flatten the organization chart!'' That's a big mistake, of course. Part of the reason there is so little time is that most of today's organizations are trying to use outmoded and underpowered organizational forms to do tomorrow's work. They insert an empowerment program here and a new profit-sharing plan there and then announce that those things aren't so great after all because profits are still falling. Such organizations won't have better results until they do two things. First, get rid of jobs. Second, redesign the organization to get the best out of a de- jobbed worker. A big task, sure. But like any evolutionary challenge, it will separate the survivors from the extinct.


More on this later ---> ONWARD!!!