The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life

by Thomas W. Malone

Book Overview

For more than a decade, business thinkers have theorized about how technology will change the shape of organizations. In this landmark book, renowned organizational theorist Thomas Malone, codirector of MIT's Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century initiative, provides the first credible model for actually designing the company of the future. Based on 20 years of groundbreaking research, The Future of Work foresees a workplace revolution...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1591391253
• ISBN13: 9781591391258
• Release Date: April 2004
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.1" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Great Book on the Future

I loved it get it and get Gary Hamel The future of management, these 2 books are the best I have read on this topic and by far explain the future of our world!

A Glimpse of the Future

It is so seldom to see a book focused not on what to do right now but on identifying the long term trends that need to be looked for in years to come that this book is very refreshing. If you agree with Dr. Malones conclusions or not, you need to at least understand them. And with some of them I agree and some I don't. A major part of his thesis is that the dramatically lowering cost of communications will change the nature of business organizations dramatically, as dramatically say as the changes brought about by the printing press. Yes, that you are reading this on a computer means that you are part of this revolution, although the people at the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, Germany have a different opinion. For instance, you don't know where I'm writing this, what time of day it is here, or if I'm by myself or in a large office. That's an organizational change from the way the big magazines and newspaper write book reviews. There is another point that he doesn't mention strongly enough. That is, the every rising cost of oil will force more decentralization. Commuting the distances we do simply won't make sense. (Commuting hasn't slowed much with oil at $50 a barrel, but what would happen at $200, $500 or $1,000 a barrel). Countering this is the desire of a number of managers I've had over the years who want to see all of their employees sitting at their desks so they can see what they are doing. Don't look at this book as a how to reorganize your company, it's more longer term, more bigger picture than that. But forewarned is forearmed, there is every indication that this is the way of the future.

The Future of work is Decentralized

This is a great book written by Thomas W. Malone.. The book Discusses how a decentraled work environment will change the way we all work and the many benefits of a decentralized corporation. The book starts by going into the different types of decentralized corporations, like Loose Hierarchies where you still have a boss or someone who controls the final product, but you are empowered to make real decisions that effect you, your team and your organization. The second type is a Democracy which allows employees to vote and make decisions like who they will work with and who they will work for. The third type of decentralization is Market. This is where you utilize a market and asign projects or tasks based on pools of willing employees. Also employees can choose what to work on like they are shopping for the right project that they will enjoy and will fit with their talents. The last part of the book focuses on Management and how their role is changing from the command and control style that we use today to coordinate and cultivate. This means that managers should focus on coordinating projects and employees by ensuring that decentralized systems are used properly and that rules are followed. Managers should also cultivate their employees meaning they should discover and encourge positive potential and limit the harm caused by negative tendencies. Management should also focus on putting human values at the center of the organization. The key to how decentralization will work in organizations is through communication. Even blogs like this should be used to provide all employees with information and a way for employees to provide feedback. The better you communication the better decentralization will work for you. This is a great book and I recommend it to any one looking to improve employee satisfaction and have a successful organization

The Future of Work, by Thomas W. Malone

"The Future of Work" began changing my thinking and attitudes about work from its very first pages. It clarified and extended my understanding of myself as a worker, as well as of friends and colleagues, many of whom are either, like me, self-employed, or have entrepreneurial-type positions within organizations. I've already begun using Malone's ideas in consulting with individual clients and organizations, and found them relevant, productive and fun. Malone's central tenet is that the nature of organizations has been substantially influenced throughout history by the cost of communication. Thus, face-to-face communication characterized hunting and gathering bands, but the advent of writing--with its reduced cost of communication compared to face-to-face talking-- made larger, more powerful and more centralized societies possible. Kingdoms and empires were richer and more powerful than hunting and gathering bands, but at the cost of some of the freedom of most of their members. The advent of the printing press, by further reducing the costs of communication, made possible the reversal of the ancient trend toward greater centralization, facilitating the democratic revolution.Business organizations show a similar developmental path. Up until the 1800s, most businesses were small and local. By the 1900s, the telephone, telegraph, typewriter, and carbon paper allowed centralization on a large scale, and business "kingdoms" emerged. Today, e-mail, instant messaging, and the internet make it economically feasible for huge numbers of workers to access the information they need to make, for themselves, more of the choices that matter to them.This change, Malone asserts, is driving a revolution in our attitudes about organizational leadership. "We need to shift our thinking from command-and-control to coordinate-and- cultivate...Good cultivation involves finding the right balance between centralized and decentralized management, between controlling and letting go...Coordinating and cultivating... include the whole range of possibillities for management...To be an effective manager in the world we're entering, you can't be stuck in a centralized mind-set."Reading "The Future of Work" made me think about the political implications of Malone's vision of the future. Malone grew up on a farm, and his vision of self-employed, or loosely employed, freelancers (or "e-lancers") evokes the same values of independence, and a combination of self-sufficiency and interdependence when necessary, that characterize people who live by working the land. Thomas Jefferson saw the educated independent farmer as the backbone of the American experiment in democracy. But the Jeffersonian polity has been fundamentally altered by the evolution of large, hierarchically organized, centrally managed organizations, in which only those at or near the top have the same sense of personal stake in their work that characterizes the independent farmer. This has contributed to

A Communications Cost/Benefit Analysis of Organizations

The title of this book is misleading. A more apt title would have been: The Future of Organizational Structure. If you really want to read about the future of work, I suggest you look for a different book.As an expert on communications costs and benefits, Professor Malone explores how the pros and cons of centralized hierarchies, loose hierarchies, democracies and free markets compare in producing better organizational results. The book abounds with examples, most of which were not new to me. The book's overall theme is that with the costs of communications plummeting and the value of the information communication increasing it is inevitable that organizations will decentralize more than ever . . . by employing hybrid forms of loose hierarchies, democracies and free markets for the same organization.The book ends up with a call to live your dreams that draws on decidedly nonmanagement sources of inspiration. The key idea is that organizations can live values that uplift everyone in them.If you would like a solid introduction into the forces that are influencing shifts towards decentralization, The Future of Work is a good theoretical overview. Professor Malone also points you to online resources for finding out about best practices in some of these areas.As a book for a practitioner, The Future of Work leaves a lot to be desired. Most will find it too abstract and theoretical to help them decide what changes to make in an organization. The book would have been vastly more valuable if it had focused on a few key areas of management performance (such as developing new business models, creating breakthrough new products, or bypassing competitor's established cost advantages) and described how best to apply the concepts in those contexts. I hope that Professor Malone will choose to do this in future books and articles.The writing leaves something to be desired. Although the book is brief, it has a startling number of repetitions of examples and references. I sometimes felt like I was being talked down to (as though I could not make the links for myself or remember the example that had been mentioned two chapters before). Much of the book also suffers from an over focus on the "economic human" rather than the "total human." For instance, there is little reference to psychology until quite late in the book. Any success with organizational structure has to take into account both the rational and emotional sides of those involved in the organization. But I am unaware of any better book on the theory behind this subject, so for the time being we should view this book as the gold standard . . . and thus worthy of five stars.I suspect that many people will find that rereading books about chaos theory as applied to organizations will have new meaning when viewed through Professor Malone's perspective. I encourage you to do some of that rereading after you tackle this book.