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They call him “the Boss,” and, not so long ago, rock and roll legend Bruce Springsteen contemplated his career and reminisced that:
“We have the only job in the world where the people you went to high school [with] … you’re still with those people…..You live your life with them. You see them grow up. ….. You see them get older. You see their hair go gray. And you’re in the room when they die, you know?”[1]
No more lifelong employment
Most of us reading these words, do “know,” or at least remember when such lifelong employment was the norm, but that likely won’t be true for those who come after us. Work will continue, but without the permanence of relationships and identity that we all took for granted. The long-dependable immutability of where we work, and who we work with, will be lost, in deference to new organizational forms and the technologies that demand such change, and make it possible. How will the loss of those certainties affect work in the future?
The future is everywhere
Much about our recent past is already temporary; gig workers, once so different, are now everywhere, delivering our meals, writing the articles we read, staffing a multitude of positions, including some quite sophisticated. Remote working is now so familiar that many workers, white and blue collar, resisted returning to offices, post-pandemic. Value-chains are already morphing into ecosystems, where reliance and dependability are being traded-off for spontaneity and opportunity. There is nothing wrong with this, except that when organizational relationships displace assets, a lot of the durable work relationships built around those assets will disappear as well.
AI rethinks management
We are witnessing the first early steps in the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI), destined to replace colleagues and competitors in work and at rest; and, the Internet of Things (IoT), which will create ubiquitous connectivity to accelerate this. As a result, everything about our organizations will be up for rethinking; and the leadership of these organizations must be rethought, as well. Hence, the call for a New Management.
Emerging changes in the environment in which our contemporary organizations have grown will be have to be addressed. This will result in new stresses that will test the mettle of our organizations, and our leadership.
- Customer Experience expectations are growing ever more sophisticated, largely as a result of an increased role of both AI and IoT, customers are expecting more out of their customer experiences. We will increasingly need to be “outside-in” in our strategic orientations, even when we have no familiarity with many of the “outsides” which will arise. Along the way to building ecosystems, we will have to rearrange our view of suppliers and customers, from consumers or originators of goods and services to co-creators. Zero-distance with such value-chain partners will require considerably different relationships than today’s, increasing the speed of interaction and blurring the boundaries between the participating organizations.
- The need to deal with existential threats
Today, start-ups are being explicitly created to disrupt vulnerable industries by students who have never actually worked in industries. Business model innovation makes it easier than ever to bypass long-held technical barriers to entry to an industry, and the digitalization of mature industries have led to the appearance of radically new entrants and behaviors in many industries. This makes it possible for new firms, playing by new rules, and without legacy assets, to enter and disrupt mature industries. Zero-distance with the user will be non-negotiable, but so will zero-distance with the future. As a result, firms will need to employ more foresight and be able to access once unknown and inaccessible expertise domains.
- The organizations of which we are a part will become ever more temporary
Networked organizations, perhaps a shade less daring than ecosystems, also raise the stakes associated with rethinking how we organize, and with who. Henry Oliver, author of Second Act [2], suggests that “rather than looking to get lots of connections and move to the center of a network, we might be better off networking with people at the edge of different networks, and thinking more about influence than connections.” Keep in mind the edge-dwellers are different. They are part in, and part out, of the network. They are not likely to advance your status within a network, but they might take you to places and networks that you never knew existed. Here, learning such things can be more important than knowing them.
Learning not knowing
In fact, the value of learning rather than knowing is a great advantage in all temporary environments, if only because what you know may quickly lose its relevance as your context changes. Nearly sixty years ago, Warren Bennis (writing with Philip Slater), cast aside terms such as adaptive, organic and learning, as unsuitable adjectives for the title of his path-breaking The Temporary Society [3], andbemoaned his inability to find a better term than “temporary” to capture “the ability of temporary systems to stay viable by continually transforming themselves to meet the demands of changing climates.” Instead, he ultimately admitted that “the key word will be temporary.”
We will organize more frequently into self-organizing/self-disintegrating, autonomous units. We will work with short-lived, highly perishable knowledge and have a difficult time establishing reputations in a constantly transient environment.We will have to rely instead, upon quick-forming/quick-dissolving work relationships. While entrepreneurial juices will undoubtedly be flowing, we will, at the same time, face a constant pressure for everything to be easily-measured, short-term, and transactional. However, an undue emphasis on contractual metrics in entrepreneurial organizations with high levels of internal autonomy can be toxic for any efforts at relationship building.
Learning fast, and bonding quickly, will be keys to professional success. Most of us will leave little impression on the organizations we visit; how will being a “hard worker,” even be recognized, much less appreciated? Temporary work mocks linear career progression. Work life will be very different, with conventional certainties sacrificed for better customer experiences. Leadership will be momentary, and always in flux. And, what of the “loneliness of leadership;” how will that be assuaged without long-term bonds of friendship to fall back on? Michael Stanford’s recent study of Leadership Transition [4], emphasizes post-traumatic psychology’s recognition of “the quality of [leadership] relationships… as key to the process of growing through transition;” can we afford to lose these to short-term, transitory, marriages of convenience? Bennis tells us “we must eternally confront and test our humanness and strive to become more fully human,” but is this even possible if “temporary” trumps “cherished” when it comes to relationships?
A big thank you to the indomitable Nick Hixson, for his assistance and goodwill on this writing project.
About the author:
Bill Fischer is Professor Emeritus of Innovation Management, at IMD; and Senior Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
[1] Bruce Springsteen quoted by Sonia Rao, in “Bruce Springsteen documentary reveals wife Patti Scialfa’s illness,” Washington Post, September 9, 2024.
[2] https://www.commonreader.co.uk/p/how-networks-really-work
[3] Warren Bennis and Philip E. Slater, The Temporary Society, (30th anniversary edition), San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998.
[4] Michael Stanford, Leadership Transition: How leaders turn chaos into growth, London, UK: LID Publishing, 2024.