The age of the unknown competitor


I used to ask the question, what do American Express, Federal Express and Manpower have in common? The answer is that around 50 per cent of all their people are interchangeable. IT and its derivative parts drive those businesses and make them successful in their ability to collect money or distribute goods or people fast. In the future we are going to have to look a lot harder to see where the competition lies and see who is sneaking up behind us.

Part of the reason for this is that jobs are redefining themselves and seem to be almost merging into each other. So the clear delineation between marketing, finance, engineering, production and logistics is becoming ever more blurred.

In addition, geographies too are blurring as every organisation has the ability to plunder the globe in search of customers. The worldwide web put paid to any ideas that we were not living in a global economy. I have friends who export English jams to the world, sell Danish furniture to the world and others who have in just two years built a million-dollar-business from Texas, founded entirely on a single barbecue sauce recipe! Interestingly enough, all these people previously had ˜real jobs': another warning signal to consider. However, what this really means is that competitors can spring up anywhere these days, and because so many jobs are transferable (IT, product and project managers, HR etc) we need to take a very close look at what is happening around us.

It gets worse . Open access - due largely to data protection and freedom of information laws - means there is a lot more information available about our employees than ever before. Spend a few hours in the research department of a headhunter and you will be amazed at just how much data there is out there. A lot of that data is on-line, just sitting waiting for you to tap into it. This means that our employees are far more vulnerable than we might think. And, on top of that, smart recruiters can really play up to the ˜be myself at work' mantra of the new-age employee. ˜What a really cool lifestyle/workstyle opportunity, come and work with us.' A lot of us are going to be really up against it in the coming years, unless we change the way our employment offer is presented and fulfilled.




The New Rules of Engagement(c) Life-Work Balance and Employee Commitment
Performance Tuning for Linux(R) Servers
ISBN: N/A
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 131

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net