In the later decades of the 20th century, the gradual increase in the number of knowledge workers coupled with the sudden appearance of an accelerating pace of change began to stretch the limits of the effectiveness of a century-old management discipline. Despite the pressures from these two emerging developments, corporate executives have been reluctant to relinquish the control and the authority that comes with management positions in command-and-control organizations. Until now, they have been able to handle the competitive challenges of an accelerating pace of change by working everyone harder – but not necessarily smarter – through staff reductions and increases to the workloads of the remaining workers.
Managers have been able to finesse the demands for involvement by the increasing number of knowledge workers by adopting participative management practices that require accommodations in style, but that leave the basic substance of hierarchical management unchanged. While these accommodations reflect the bosses’ begrudging realization that, increasingly, it is the workers and not the corporations who truly own the company’s critical knowledge, the managers have also been keenly aware that worker knowledge only has economic value when it is combined with other workers’ knowledge, and until recently, the only place that workers could go to find other knowledge colleagues was in corporations. Thus, the bosses have been able to sustain their ingrained belief that the workers still need the corporation more than the corporation needs the workers.
Whatever comfort managers may feel in their ability thus far to hold onto their century-old management discipline, they will soon learn that they are acting with a false sense of security. With the firm rooting of the Internet, we are fast approaching a tipping point that will radically transform the focus of work from mass production to mass collaboration and will dramatically change the work we do and the way we work. By making mass collaboration possible, the Web becomes the catalyst that shifts the ownership of economic value from the corporations to the workers and, in the process, accelerates the pace of change to the point where continued use of strategies to work harder is ineffectual. The only effective strategy for working in today’s faster-paced world is to work smarter.
The Internet and mass collaboration are providing knowledge workers with attractive – and oftentimes more productive – alternatives for combining their knowledge with others to create economic value. As these alternatives expand, it is becoming clearer that today the corporations need the workers more than the workers need the corporations. This will become even more evident as an increasing number of knowledge workers, especially among the millenials, turn their backs on traditional ways of working to become free agents so they can work for several companies at once. Who says you can only work for one company?
The inevitable shift from mass production to mass collaboration means that companies will need to reach outside their organizations for a significant number of their workers if they are to remain competitive in our new wiki world. They will also need to work far smarter and far faster than they currently do today. A century-old management architecture that assumes that change happens incrementally will not get the job done. Harnessing the power of mass collaboration means that the bosses will have no choice but to accept that the successful enterprises of the Digital Age will be peer-to-peer collaborative communities designed for innovation and rapid change. These organizations will be substantially different from traditional top-down hierarchical bureaucracies. That’s because when the primary task of the corporation is to leverage the power of collaborative networks, managers need to learn that the key to managing at the pace of change is to work smarter not harder.
