Читать книгу The Shift: The Future of Work is Already Here - Lynda Gratton, Линда Граттон - Страница 5

Preface

Tomorrow’s Work Begins Today

It all began with one of those simple questions that teenagers have a habit of asking. Seated at the morning breakfast table, I found my train of thought interrupted by my eldest son Christian who, 17 years old and fresh out of school, was clearly pondering his future.

‘I’m really keen to be a journalist,’ he remarked to his brother and me.

His brother Dominic, two years his junior, perhaps inspired by his lead, followed on with ‘And I’m thinking about medicine.’

Both sentences were spoken with sufficient query that I took them as questions rather than statements of fact.

Having been a professor in a business school, and an advisor to companies for nigh on three decades, I consider myself something of an expert in the why and how of work. Of course, I am also the first to acknowledge that my sons, being teenagers, are unlikely to have much interest in my opinion. But it struck me on that busy morning that I did need at least a point of view about the future of work. The challenge was this: what was my point of view? I began to realise that, despite my years of advising companies and researching work, all I could muster that morning was a rather half-baked, old-fashioned set of assumptions, combined with ‘tidbits’ of data that seemed both hopelessly out of date and extraordinarily incomplete.

Over the following few months, as I pondered on their question, I found that more and more people asked me about their working future. I recall how one of my smartest MBA students wanted to know how he could create a future working life that allowed him to be more of a father to his own family. He explained to me that he believed it was crucial that he spent more time with his yet-to-be-born child than his own father had spent with him as a child. Others wanted to know where to live to gain the most value, the competencies they should focus on and the career paths they should develop. At the same time, the executives I taught wanted to know when to retire, what to do when they reached 65, how to take a gap year, what to say to their companies. Then my research team ran, with colleagues at Unilever, a session with kids under the age of 10. We asked them to talk about their ideas about work. They talked robots and transhumans, computers and global warming. Even at 10, they had begun to play out these future scenarios. And to cap it all, the human resource executives I teach at London Business School seemed to be deeply concerned that their companies were too hierarchical and bureaucratic, and too slow moving to catch up with the trends they saw emerging.

I put these anxieties and questions down in part to the 2009/10 global recessions that rattled everyone. I was feeling the impact myself in my own teaching. Back in 2000 my colleague Sumantra Ghoshal and I had chosen four companies to write extensive case studies on, which would then be taught both at London Business School and also around the world. We chose companies that at that time were in the top five in their sectors and generally admired. From banking we chose the Royal Bank of Scotland; from industry, BP; from investment banking, Goldman Sachs; and Nokia from the technology sector. By mid-2010 RBS had made one of the largest losses in banking history; BP was haemorrhaging oil into the Gulf of Mexico and being castigated by the US Senate for its leadership competence; and Goldman Sachs was in the process of a significant fine from the trading commission. Only Nokia was unscathed, although its share price and value seemed paltry against the mighty Apple. And of course, until 2009, I had directed the Lehman Centre at London Business School. Even ivory tower academics began to feel the winds of change.

When I talked to executives in Nokia and Reuters about the technological developments that are around the corner, and to colleagues at Shell about the coming energy challenges, and indeed to other academics about the growing employee distrust and anxiety they were observing, I began to realise that what I was witnessing was more than simply the backlash from the recession. Added to that, in my twice-yearly visits to India and Africa it was clear these continents were transforming in a way I had never previously witnessed. It began to dawn on me that this was not going to be business as usual. Instead I began to realise that we were entering a time of real flux and possible transformation, and that I was ill equipped to answer the questions I was being faced with.

What I needed was a point of view about the future of work that was more thoughtful and expert than the rather vague and ill-formed views I held. I knew that these questions I was being asked about the future of work were crucial. Work is, and always has been, one of the most defining aspects of our lives. It is where we meet our friends, excite ourselves and feel at our most creative and innovative. It can also be where we can feel our most frustrated, exasperated and taken for granted. Work matters – to us as individuals, to our family and friends and also to the communities and societies in which we live.

I also knew that many of the ways of working we have taken for granted in the last 20 years – working from nine to five, aligning with one company, spending time with family, taking the weekends off, working with people we know well – are all beginning to disappear. And what’s coming in its place is much less knowable and less understandable – almost too fragile to grasp.

However, despite this fragility and the difficulty of grasping the future, I needed answers – and so do the people who asked all these questions. So, of course, do you. Perhaps you don’t need absolute answers. But what you do need, like me, is a point of view, a basic idea of what the hard facts of the future are, and a way of thinking about the future which has some kind of internal cohesion, which resonates with who you are and what you believe. You and I, and my children, and others who are important to us, need to grasp the future of work because we have to prepare ourselves, and we have to prepare others.

To understand better these profound changes, I began my journey with the goal of discovering, with as much fine-grained detail as possible, how the future of work was likely to evolve. I was interested in day-to-day details like: What will friends, my children and I be doing in 2025? How will I be living my working life at 10.00 in the morning? Who will I be meeting for lunch? What tasks will I be performing? Which skills will be in the ascendant and most valued? Where will I be living? How will my family and friends fit with my work? Who will be paying me? When am I going to retire?

I also wanted to discover more about whether in the future our thoughts and aspirations could change. Questions like: What will be going on in my working conscious in 2025? What sort of work will I be aspiring to? What will be my hopes? What will keep me awake at night? What do I want for myself, and those who come after me?

These are the day-to-day events and fleeting moments of thoughts and aspirations that will influence the working lives of you and your colleagues, and those of your children and friends. These are important questions since it is from this fine-grained detail that our daily working lives are constructed.

I soon discovered that while, on the face of it, these are relatively simple questions, in reality the answers are not straightforward. At an early stage of this journey it began to dawn on me that you couldn’t describe your working future simply as a straight line from the past into the present, and then on to the future. Instead, I began to see the future as a set of possibilities, a number of ways forward, and the opportunity to travel on different paths. But the question remained of how best to draw these possibilities and different paths.

My mother is a great maker of patchwork quilts. As a child, I remember her assembling fragments of material over many years – material she had used earlier, or which had been donated by friends, or which she had bought. Over the years the height of the material scraps in the patchwork box increased, and every couple of months my mother would take them out and look at them closely.

What she was looking for was a pattern that she could discern from the pieces. She was looking for the pieces that would naturally fit together to create a pattern that made sense. Once she had decided which to keep and which to discard, she set about arranging those pieces she kept. She moved the pieces this way and that, until she decided how best to assemble them into the quilt. At this stage she made a rough layout on the floor of the bedroom, and then began the long task of making the first rough stitches to hold the pieces together. Once this had been done, and she had made any final changes to the location of the pieces, she set about the laborious task of hand-stitching them together.

I am reminded of my mother, and her construction of the quilt from the many pieces of material, as I craft this book about the future of work. It is a book that I hope will be uplifting without being ridiculously positive and Pollyanna-ish, and illustrative without being constraining. In the crafting of this book I have followed the same path my mother took as she fashioned the patchwork quilt. I have, over the years, kept many scraps of ideas and borrowed some from friends. More recently, I have assembled a wise crowd of people from across the globe to bring their insights and ideas. Then, having gone about the process of looking for patterns, I decided what to discard and what merited keeping. I have, like my mother before me, embarked on the long period of hand-stitching the pieces together to form a patchwork of the future of work. This book is the result of that long process.

I believe passionately that the scale of change we are going through in this decade puts into stark relief many of the assumptions we have held dear about what it takes for us to be successful. It is perilous and foolhardy to ignore these changes. It is also naive to imagine that what worked for the past will work for the future. To do so puts in jeopardy our own future and the future of those we care about. Predicting the future of work, and crafting a working life that brings happiness and value, are two of the most precious gifts you can give yourself and those you care about. Don’t leave it too late to make the decision to think and to act.