2.3 Modern People and Dated Skills

According to Davidow and Malone, the definition of a worker as someone ‘without education’ has permeated American history.^[68] In the United States, the concept of manual labourers (blue-collar workers), or, more broadly, those not engaged in managerial roles or special professional careers such as lawyers, doctors and scientists (white-collar workers), was refined and reinforced by the education system during the latter half of the twentieth century. The reaffirmation of white-collar workers was inherent in the duality of an education system that pigeon-holed students destined for blue-collar jobs into less academically rigorous subjects, whilst providing students displaying potential for white-collar jobs with a curriculum that would prepare them for entrance into an institution of higher learning. In the post-Vietnam War era, a third option developed for students who were not considered ‘college material’: a career in the new voluntary armed forces.

Unfortunately, this educational dualism created the modern labour pool from which business must recruit workers, talented as well as educated. At the heart of a company’s competitive advantage, especially those specialized in information technology or where technology labour constitutes an important part of their business, is the concept of ‘human capital’. ‘Human capital’ is that knowledge, experience and know-how which individuals bring to the organization. It is a commodity owned by the individual; it can be accumulated by adding to it (for example by taking a course, reading a book, gaining experience). Likewise, it can be sold (by becoming an employee or contractor). Leveraging human capital is about maximizing the returns the company receives from its employees. As Concei o and Heitor put it:

without skills, ideas may be irrelevant, and without ideas, there may be no need for new and better skills. The invention of writing (one important idea) required the development of writing skills. Similarly, the widespread diffusion of another important idea, the computer, requires increasing computer skills. New ideas spur the development of the skills required to use these new ideas. The bridge from production of ideas to the usage of ideas is established by producing new skills. Increased use of an idea, which requires its diffusion, will lead to a constellation of other ideas, aimed at improving and extending the initial idea, which will lead to the need for further skills and so on, in a self-reinforcing cycle that leads to the accumulation of knowledge.^[69]

The accumulation of knowledge and, more importantly, its application to work activities, is the hallmark of the medieval craftsmen. Now, as then, the accumulation of knowledge can be attributed to higher levels of quality and business fidelity. Learning one’s craft and its associated technologies, techniques, styles and innovation was a product of continuous learning within the guild. Accumulated knowledge was the prime reason that a master builder could participate in a project as both an administrator and a craftsman, as described by Andrews:

Hence there was no architect to make a design – no superior or aloof person above and apart from the workers, save only where the magnitude of the work or the multiplicity of his undertakings made it impossible for the master-mason or master-carpenter to take actual tools in hand and labour with the rest of the workers. In the best periods he was always one of them – they were called his socii – his fellows, and he a fellow worker, but wiser – with a larger hope and a fuller vision.’^[70]

The ability to achieve more complex designs – not simply the length of time in service – generated a professional respect for senior guild members.

As Naisbitt and Aburdene claimed, in the new information society there is no one education or skill that will last forever; the process of continual learning has to be developed in order to ensure that one’s knowledge does not become obsolete.^[71] For this reason, the 1990s were the age of adult education and re-education. This ‘educational renaissance’ is reshaping universities’ curricula and increasing the number of courses in further education centres. The idea that a professional should go to college, get a diploma and never seek to be re-educated or recycle knowledge is gone.

Also, in Naisbitt and Aburdene’s view, information alone does not make individuals ‘competent thinkers’. Especially with today’s Internet facilities, data and information are commonplace. To know what to do with that data and information, transforming them into knowledge and wisdom, requires talent and skills from employees. In information technology, ‘thinking is now as basic as reading’,^[72] which means that employees are more and more challenged to be creative, to gather knowledge from different sources and combine it into wise, applicable solutions to business problems. The problem is not only that knowledge needs to be recycled; but also it runs the risk of becoming useless in a matter of years. In the 1990s, we believed that the Internet was about to usher us into an era of creativity, enabling everyone to use tools and be creative. Unfortunately, actual evidence has not supported this flowering of creativity because, like any skill, creativity requires a modicum of discipline and some level of stimulation. Stimulating creativity is the way to ensure that an individual’s productivity is always compatible with changes in the industry and business environment. As David Sutherland of the Business Innovation Consortium^[73] claims, all individuals possess the ability to be creative; creativity is not a gift. It is something that can be learned and developed over time. Corporations need to create an environment that nurtures the creative aspects of their employees in order to achieve true organizational innovation. Of course, not everyone will succeed in being more creative; however, this is no excuse for companies to stop stimulating and encouraging its employees to acquire the one basic skill that will allow them to be more useful and, sometimes, irreplaceable.

Sutherland advocates the use of a corporate innovation assessment to pinpoint those areas within a firm’s business process that are most likely to harbour pools of innovation talent and, more importantly, identify organizational domains that need to develop environments for innovation and creativity to flourish. In this sense, the best way to treat one’s employees and allow them to produce in a creative manner is to institute the practice of ‘self-management’. According to this practice, management today cannot be conducted as it was in the industrial era. With regard to information technology, the use of computers, the increasing level of specialization of employees, the shift from hierarchies to networks and the new corporate structures (cross-disciplinary teams, partnerships, among others) lead to a working environment in which the position of ‘manager’ no longer adds value, being in some cases detrimental to the organization.^[74] The shift from an authoritarian, hierarchical management style to a networking style of management is part of the 1980s trend of ‘cooperative ethics’ and ‘healthy competition’, by which individuals should get help from fellow workers in all divisions, instead of going to a manager who is supposed to represent one or another division.

Karl Erik Sveiby of Celemi’s Tango Program claims that the shift from hierarchical management into a networked style coupled with the process of continuous learning gives business entities the opportunity to have recognizable ‘organizational and individual talent’ as ‘intangible assets’ on corporate balance sheets.^[75] If indeed corporations profess that people are their greatest asset, it is baffling that these assets are often difficult to value. It could be argued that the non-disclosure of the quality and significance of these assets is misleading to investors. This is especially true when organizations are engaged in work that is directly dependent on intellectual output, such as research firms, consulting companies and universities.

Companies need to rethink how they hire staff. They should not be hired for specific jobs because this is too narrow and rigid in an ever-changing workplace. Instead, organizations must rethink the way they organize and accomplish work. The best method is to use behavioural interviews which identify their cognitive and associative skills, that is, their ability to think and apply knowledge gathered from experience. It is said that when Thomas Edison was recruiting new engineers, he presented them with an empty light bulb and asked them to compute the volume enclosed by the glass.

Engineers who laboriously grappled with mathematical solutions based on 3-dimensional geometric formulas were rejected in favour of those who simply filled the light bulb with water and then poured it into a graduated cylinder. P. Israel’s words:

Edison was always willing to hire ambitious young men who had practical experience, including several who had worked for the Lamp Company and Machine Works, and he often favoured those with practical experience when choosing someone to take charge of an important experimental campaign.^[76]

Nevertheless, in this rapidly globalizing world, various countries face different labour and skill challenges as a by-product of technology’s influence. Disturbing trends in early twenty-first-century nationalism and regressive immigration policies threaten to restrict the ability of businesses to attract and retain global workers who can cross-pollinate ideas, skills, experiences and, most of all, cross cultural barriers. Zachary notes that:

Nations have long relied on mixing local and imported talent to stimulate activity. Movements of people are crucial to the diffusion of knowledge. People are the most effective culture-carriers, more effective than media or artefacts.^[77]

The mixture of talent allows corporations to excel and remain viable during times of adversity and economic downturn. Equally, the same mixture of talent provides the catalyst for innovation and product development. The twenty-first century will see the rise of new cosmopolitan workers, or ‘cosmocrats’. The new globally aware worker introduces new challenges to business and government, as identified by Zachary:

The multinational corporations that promote a new cosmopolitanism may be the very force to undermine the social and cultural structures that are essential to holding together pluralistic nations. When merit is the master, performance obliterates distinctions between people based on colour, family background, religion, gender, place of birth and myriad other inherited or elected characteristics.^[78]

Zachary rightly points out that how a company assesses merit and performance will have to be significantly different from the metrics of today. It is conceivable that in many digitally connected organizations in which work can be performed at any location, a worker will select an employer based on the firm’s ability to provide a robust technological infrastructure in a location that best meets the employee’s lifestyle.

The technologies promoting the business and social transformations of the workforce shift the focus of organizational productivity from that of utilization and output to that of applied knowledge and organizational dexterity. Organizational dexterity is measured by how a firm adapts to changes in business conditions, adjusts its production to new product preferences driven by changing consumer attitudes, exhibits mastery in aligning global resources to address new levels of production, and its proficiency in utilizing its resources within profitable operating parameters which translate into a return on investment. Manuel Castells cites the distinguishing characteristics of operating in the post-industrial world as a shift in perspective: societies will be informational, not because they fit into a particular model or social structure, but because they organize their production system around the principles of maximizing knowledge-based productivity through the development and diffusion of information technologies, and by fulfilling the prerequisites for their utilization (primarily human resources and communications infrastructure).^[79]

In order to achieve this new global operating state, businesses will be required to streamline operations and reduce the amount of organizational resistance to change. The combination of a network structure, highly skilled self-organizing pools of talent, and a robust technological infrastructure presents a case for business entities to re-examine their structure and how they embrace organizational change. Corporations are learning that the human capital of the firm is a dynamically changing process that can be optimized by introducing a feedback loop, often enabled by technology. An individual’s value proposition is not in the simple execution of predetermined business rules, but in their total contribution to the organization, manifested by the individual’s leadership, interpersonal and technology skills. The value of people must be tracked on a leadership dimension and their contribution to the organization as well as their information technology expertise. Organizations today no longer comprise members of a single firm, but resources from a variety of organizations. In the construction of global pools of talent, information, knowledge and business wisdom are often lost as people transition between job functions, locations and organizations. In developing a globally connected organization, knowledge must be retained in such a way that it is useful to other knowledge workers. This retention is often difficult because many corporate cultures encourage knowledge hoarding under the old ‘knowledge is power’ model. In organizations exhibiting this symptom, the most effective method to curb undesirable organizational behaviour is by motivating individuals, not always in the form of salaries. The structure and behaviour of an organization reflect not only the attitudes, actions and attributes of the individuals within the firm; these collectively coalesce into what can be called ‘business resistance to change’. Let us analyse how businesses are structured now and what they should do to change the way they work and the nature of their behaviour in order to stay competitive.

^[68]W. H. Davidow and M. S. Malone, The Virtual Corporation. Structuring and Revitalizing the Corporation for the 21st Century (London: Harper Business, 1993) p. 187.

^[69]P. Concei o and M. Heitor, ‘Universities in the Learning Economy: Balancing Institutional Integrity with Organizational Diversity’. In D. Archibugi and B. Lundvall (eds) The Globalizing Learning Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) p. 87.

^[70]F. Andrews, The Medieval Builder and His Methods (New York: Dover, 1999) p. 9.

^[71]J. Naisbitt and P. Aburdene, Re-inventing the Corporation. Transforming your Job and your Company for the New Information Society (London: Macdonald, 1985) pp. 141–3.

^[72]Ibid., pp. 127–8.

^[73]See www.bicnow.com.

^[74]J. Naisbitt and P. Aburdene, Re-inventing the Corporation. Transforming your Job and your Company for the New Information Society (London: Macdonald, 1985) pp. 83–4.

^[75]See Celemi, available at http://www.celemi.com.

^[76]P. Israel, Edison: A Life of Invention (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1998) p. 272.

^[77]G. Pascal Zachary, The Global Me (London: Nicholas Brealey, 2002) p. 70.

^[78]Ibid., pp. 214–15.

^[79]M. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997) p. 204.