"The future of work is fluid, dynamic and goal-oriented; project leaders will be in high demand." Cindy W. Anderson
Few appreciated the far-ranging impact the first Industrial Revolution would have, as it was happening. The moving assembly line brought a radical transformation that extended well beyond Ford’s Model T. With the Industrial Age came a whole new set of business practices, shifting cultures, restructured organizations and transportable skills. The future of work would never be the same.
A century later, the future of work has once again become a central topic. Technological advancements and automation are provoking a business transformation every bit as radical as the one set in motion a hundred years ago. Uncertainty related to the climate crisis, food and water scarcity, demand for housing to address population growth, and global political instability are disrupting business as usual -- and creating tremendous pressure on organizations to evolve or die.
Optimism and enthusiasm are matched by uncertainty and confusion. Yet, amidst all this chaos, one thing is clear: the 4th Industrial Revolution has unleashed The Project Economy. The fusion of physical and digital in a desire to blend speed and precision as organizations integrate strategy design and delivery, is taking hold in broader and more sophisticated ways, demonstrated by organizations as diverse as music streaming giant Spotify in Stockholm, Sweden, to global electronics giant Haier in Qingdao, China. The projects in these organizations, an others, are being led by people with a variety of titles, solving a variety of problems in industries big and small, and across all regions around the globe. The Project Economy has room for all of them.
Several years ago, the term “gig economy” began to make its way into the business vernacular. Epitomized by the rise of outfits like Uber, it described the prevalence of a new sort of freelance and contract work, in which companies were supported by task-based, goal-focused workers whose careers were increasingly defined by the variety of their activities. Even full-time employees might be pursuing “side hustles,” whether it be a nascent start-up or the periodic renting out of their apartment via Airbnb. There was more freedom for employers and employees on both sides of this equation, with advantages—and disadvantages—for both.
What hasn’t yet been fully recognized, and will increasingly become apparent, is that the gig economy is just a small part of The Project Economy, which includes gig work at Unicorns like Lyft and Uber, TaskRabbit and Airbnb. But it also encompasses project-based structures being embraced by large, global organizations—even traditional ones. Professor and author Roger Martin, one of the world’s top-ranked management thinkers, has called this “projectization.” Executive Antonio-Nieto Rodriguez, whose resume spans GlaxoSmithKline, BNP Paribas Fortis, and PricewaterhouseCoopers, describes this as The Project Revolution in an incisive book published earlier this year.
We’re coming to realize that the disruptive impact of new technologies has rendered formerly best-in-class practices too slow and static; that the downside of traditional hierarchies, once tolerable, can now be fatal to an operation; that next-generation knowledge workers, increasingly, are less interested in lifetime employment than in fulfilling, engaging assignments that allow them to build skills and experiences they can take anywhere. More and more, workers will be hired, grouped and regrouped according to the knowledge, experience, and capabilities they bring to the specific projects that deliver the most value to an organization’s stakeholders. Once executives start structuring their entire organization around the portfolio of projects that deliver the most value to their stakeholders, they have much more flexibility in terms of how they hire, train, assign, engage, and retain a capable, high-performing workforce.
The Project Economy at Work
Reid Hoffman is among the most successful and thoughtful entrepreneurs in history. The chief operating officer of PayPal in its early days and then co-founder of LinkedIn, Hoffman went on to become a partner at Greylock Partners, where he helped nurture world-changing companies like Facebook and Airbnb. Hoffman encourages both employers and employees to look at work through the lens of a task, not a title. He believes workers will increasingly sign on at an organization for what he calls a “tour of duty.”
Spotify founder Daniel Ek has put this concept at the heart of his company, which has gone from a startup to a global enterprise that redefined an industry. While familiar with (and inspired by) Hoffman’s tour-of-duty nomenclature, Ek uses the term “mission.” Among his senior leadership team, Ek told Fast Company last year, he hires people not to fill a title nor for an undefined tenure but to address a specific “mission.” What’s more, these missions are of limited duration – generally two years. At the end of that time, Ek will discuss what the next mission is—and whether the leader in place is the ideal one to address it; the leader, similarly, is encouraged to consider how motivated they are by the new mission. Ek says that his top leaders may stay on for two or three of these “mission” cycles, but rarely more than that. In the process, Ek has instituted a culture of high performance as well as one of high transparency.
In a fascinating Harvard Business Review article last December, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini shared the story of Haier’s remarkable reorientation of its management model under CEO Zhang Ruimin. The company now operates as more than 4,000 microenterprises averaging 10 to 15 employees each. These units operate autonomously, yet within a unified framework of “leading targets”; they are encouraged to use each others’ services, but are not required to—which puts pressure on each group to maintain quality and deliver value. Haier’s system has many other compelling components, which together have enabled the company to maintain and accelerate its competitiveness, even as China’s tech scene and the global marketplace have crimped the effectiveness of other older-line firms.
Spotify and Haier represent just two manifestations of how The Project Economy is coming alive—and how it will continue to evolve. Their examples demonstrate the power and potential that dynamic, goal-oriented processes can achieve. Too often we get caught up in semantics (what is the different between a product and a project?) or get pinned into unnecessarily binary debates (is agile development better than scrum?). What matters most is recognizing the big picture and remembering that while the day-to-day is in flux, there is a larger context that is inexorably unfolding.
The Project Economy is one in which people have all the skills and capabilities they need to turn ideas into reality – no matter what kind of project they’re working on. It is where organizations deliver value to stakeholders through successful completion of projects, delivery of products, and alignment to value streams. And all of these initiatives deliver financial and societal value.
Enabling organizations. Empowering people. Strengthening society. These are promises that Project Management Institute is making to its three million global stakeholders and the rapidly growing ranks of project professionals everywhere.
The Project Economy offers so much rich potential as society optimizes and extends the amazing achievements that technological advance now puts at our fingertips. It is no surprise that disruption accompanies change, and that there can be resistance to that which is different. But if we can view the world through this new, future-focused lens, we can prepare ourselves, our organizations, and our society to make the most of the opportunity. The Project Economy is here. Let’s get to it.
(Free) - Via LinkedIn
Comentarios