Work Disrupted. Jeff Schwartz
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technologies to create greater value for workers and to liberate us so we can leverage our uniquely human capabilities—those enduring human skills that smart machines have not yet mastered, such as problem-solving, creative thinking, complex decision-making, empathy, and managing teams. In this scenario, groups of remote and diverse teams work together, people and machines collaborate, and workers continue to be employed because they explore and master new skills and capabilities throughout their lives.
“In medicine, law, finance, retailing, manufacturing, and even scientific discovery, the key to winning the race is not to compete against the machines, but to compete with machines,” observed authors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in 2012.19 MIT's Thomas Malone calls the remarkable power of people and computers working together “superminds.”20 From finding new cures for diseases to designing new tools and systems that will create new products and new lines of business, the promise of AI and humans working together may be the future.
In the midst of these dramatically different depictions of the future of work—a robot apocalypse versus humanity unleashed—many seek to understand what is different from other periods of great technological advances, where do they fit in, and how can they navigate this landscape without signposts so they can continue to work. For all the hype and headlines about the future of work, guidance on how people can find their way is in short supply. My aim is to provide that guidance.
Innovation and experimentation will continue to be lifelines as we transition to a very different world.
We Have Choices
While portions of many jobs will change, and some jobs will likely be eliminated entirely, many more jobs will evolve. When agricultural processes were mechanized in the nineteenth century, some farmworkers lost their jobs, but they ultimately earned more money working in factories. The automation of industrial production displaced factory workers in the twentieth century but they moved into service jobs. What we tend to forget is that rising productivity creates new jobs. Indeed, technological innovation has historically delivered more jobs, not fewer. And the new jobs often required more skills and paid higher wages.
As an economist and business consultant who has spent the past decade immersed in the issues surrounding the future of work, I have explored the topic with innovative thinkers and business leaders wrestling with the opportunities and challenges presented by this changing landscape. I spent half of the past decade based in New York and half in Delhi and Mumbai, working across India and Asia. I have advised companies and government agencies grappling with the mysteries that lie ahead. And I continue to bear witness each day to the dramatic changes taking place at the forefront of some of the largest and most successful businesses in the United States and around the world.
This book offers guidance to individuals, business leaders, and institutions so they can make smart choices. Organizations are poised to shape what ultimately becomes the future of work, as individual workers face broad options regarding how and where they work, as well as the skills and capabilities they want to gain to secure their livelihood. While we appear to welcome consumer technologies in our personal lives—we have managed to master more than 10 versions of smartphones (Apple and Android) since they were introduced in 2007 and 2008, respectively—we are more uncomfortable with tech innovations that will ultimately transform in profound and meaningful ways our work, who does the work, and where work is done.21
Individuals are searching for ways to continue to contribute their skills, procure value, and have an impact in the marketplace. Employers are facing important choices about whether to use advances in technology to drive efficiency and reduce costs or to explore how to harness technology to reshape jobs in ways that yield more value and meaning. Citizens, educators, and policy makers face a call to reconsider how we prepare and train people for the changing workplace and what paths are available to individuals to gain new skills throughout longer lives with multiple chapters of career reinvention.
Perhaps the most important question concerning the future of work is not what might happen in the future, but what do we want to have happen—the future of work to what end? When asked what employment relations would look like in 2030, the answer provided by Louis Hyman, a professor of labor history at Cornell, struck a chord. “It's hard to talk about the future,” he said, “because we actually have choices.”22 The challenge in this century is to understand and take advantage of the opportunities that technology and new ways of working afford us. In research at the Center for the Edge, Deloitte found that most future-of-work efforts are focused on reducing cost, increasing efficiency, and replacing workers with technology.23 Daron Acemoglu, a professor of economics at MIT, refers to this as the “wrong kind of AI.”24 The opportunities, as yet largely unrealized, are to expand our focus beyond cost, which is important but not the end in itself, to include value for customers and to provide meaning for the workforce and society. We return to this topic in the last section of the book.
Source: Chart courtesy of MIT Sloan Management Review, ©MIT; “Reframing the Future of Work,” by Jeff Schwartz et al, February 2019
From Disruption to Innovation to Creation
When we think of a disruption, we generally think of a disturbance that interrupts. In business theory, a disruptive innovation is one that creates a new market, shaking up the existing market, and displacing it.25 Disruptive innovation is a powerful way to think about innovation-driven growth. Disruption shifts profitability from one prevailing business model to another. The new model typically provides customers with the same or better value at a much lower cost.26 The fallout: Companies that relied upon the old business model lose ground or are pushed out of business. Netflix is an example of digital disruption, as are Uber, Amazon, Airbnb, and countless other digital services that changed prior business models.
The word “disruption” was popularized by Clayton Christensen in 1997 in his book The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail.27 However, the economist Joseph Schumpeter had introduced the concept of “creative destruction” and the disruptive power of innovation more than 50 years earlier. Schumpeter's thesis was that innovation is responsible for both the progress and the instabilities of capitalism. He attributed those instabilities to the principle of creative destruction, which recognizes that innovation by entrepreneurs is the disruptive force that drives and sustains economic growth. The earlier products and processes are suddenly obsolete, forcing companies to quickly adapt to a new environment or fail.28
Schumpeter's theories powerfully anticipated the future of work. He often used the example of the railroad as a transforming agent in the economy that opened up new opportunities while clearing out old approaches. He pointed to the ability of entrepreneurs, by advancing new products and services, to provide “a perennial gale of creative destruction.”29 Fascinated by the entrepreneurial spirit, he recognized destruction as a mechanism for progress. Schumpeter realized that economic innovation