About the Book
Early in 2002, as part of our continuing efforts at the Work Design Collaborative, we began a modest research project we called the "Future of Work." As business consultants with backgrounds in academia - Jim at the Harvard Business School, and Charlie at the University of San Francisco - we saw the need for a new set of analytical tools that businesses could use to rationalize their real estate needs, their information technology deployment, and their human resources planning.
As a result, we gathered a small group of corporate thought leaders - among them Agilent Technologies, Cisco Systems, Intel, PeopleSoft, Capital One, and Herman Miller - and we began to survey both individual workers and senior executives in an attempt to discover how new technologies, the changing workforce, and economic globalization were changing both how and where people worked, and what those changes meant to the future of work in the so-called "Information Economy."
We began with a presumption that, as population growth slowed and the baby boomers moved towards retirement, the workplace would become an increasingly important means of attracting and retaining talented workers. We knew from personal experience and our own previous research that talented people wanted - no, demanded - a great deal of personal control over their work, and that traditional, top-down, one-size-fits-all management and cube farms don't exactly produce any meaningful sense of self-control.
In essence we set out to understand the current state of individual-organizational relationships and what employees were looking for in a job - with a particular focus on the workplace, or as we have always preferred to call it, the "work environment," mindful of the fact that the physical place is only one dimension of the context in which work gets done. And as important as place is in defining work, we were convinced that the tools companies provide to their staff and the human resource management practices they put in place are equally important factors in workforce productivity, to say nothing of how people feel about their work and their employers.
Our initial findings confirmed what our experiences as academics, consultants, and corporate managers had long led us to suspect: although the global economy had undergone a series of rapid, model-shattering changes, most businesses had been unable, or unwilling, to adapt their traditional management styles to the new conditions.
Prisoners of their outdated business practices and their assumptions about how work gets done, most organizations found themselves losing ground to competitors who had not even been on the map a decade before. They became victims, rather than beneficiaries, of advances in information technology. And at a time when the attraction and retention of qualified, engaged employees had become an even more critical factor in a business's success or failure, they found themselves out of touch with a workforce that had undergone a dizzying transformation in attitudes, abilities, and ambitions.
Together, these factors resulted in a crippling loss of corporate agility. In an economy characterized by rapid, unpredictable change, traditionally managed companies felt as though they were standing still while the new global order spun past them. The weights on those corporate ankles were easy to identify: high fixed operational costs, or in other words, long-term commitments to buildings, people, and technologies that robbed them of the flexibility and the agility required to compete and succeed in a period of unprecedented and very short-term change in the business world.
Companies that want to be sustainable over time need a new, revolutionary strategy to compete effectively. We believe the answer is a collaborative, strategic approach to management that acknowledges and leverages the growing interdependence of Human Resources (HR), Corporate Real Estate (CRE), and Information Technology (IT), a process we call Collaborative Strategic Management. People, place, and technology, after all, are what come together to define the workplace, and it is there that businesses thrive or fail.
However, each of these three functional areas has its own disciplines, its own values, and its own challenges. Yet no business can operate effectively unless HR, CRE, and IT are "in sync," aligned both with one another, and with the organization's broader strategic goals. Three years ago, recognizing this need, all of us at the Future of Work redefined our community, reshaping it into a collaborative network of thought leaders, research specialists, and business consultants committed to learning how to define, develop, and implement Collaborative Strategic Management, and thus achieve that all-too-elusive corporate agility.
This book is filled with the stories of leading practitioners who are creating agile corporations. Some of them have been successful, many of them are just beginning the journey, and some, unfortunately, have struggled. Corporate Agility chronicles their efforts, draws "lessons learned" from their experiences, and points the way to a truly revolutionary new model for competing in a flat world.