In the interview, there were three main themes that Dr. Malone predicted will happen with respect to changes to work and they are: 1) Freelancers/Volunteers 2) Decentralization from traditional hierarchies and 3) Transition from productivity based organizations to intelligence based organization. With changing environment, we see all the three predictions of Dr. Malone actually happening around us.
In the first theme Dr. Malone gives examples of companies like Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube and Linux, which have utilized the freelancers/volunteers and created a unique business model. Dr. Malone says that there are three primary motivating factors for people to do things, i.e., money, love and glory. I think people work for a combination of the above three factors. But companies like Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube and Linux have been successful because they let people do what they love and enjoy doing for fun. The fact that people do work while having fun has led to lots of volunteers contributing to the success of these companies. The big opportunity for management here is that they can get the work done at low cost by enticing people to volunteer and the big challenge is finding the right motivation for people to volunteer. To overcome these challenges Dr. Malone says that the employees must be viewed as customers and the same principles of marketing must be applied to them to entice them to volunteer.
The second theme Dr. Malone talks about is about decentralization from traditional hierarchies. He says that in future there will be new design patterns like collection, contest and collaborate for people to organize and work together. I have already seen these three things mentioned by Dr. Malone happening in my previous organization which moved from traditional hierarchy model to open door policy and individual managed projects. I have personally experienced the three design patterns mentioned by Dr. Malone leading to decentralization and in turn leading to faster completion of work. It’s like getting rid of bureaucracy. The key here is that there should a strong link between the collection, contest and collaboration for an organization to be successful and it requires out of the box thinking about various possibilities from a broader pallet of design patterns.
The third theme Dr. Malone talks about is transitioning from productivity based organization to intelligence based organization. I believe this change will take time to happen, but will happen eventually and the process has already started as Dr. Malone gives the example of a company in India that is doing amazing innovative things with social media. An organization which is intelligence based will be better prepared to adapt to a changing environment and will have a better sense of things happening around it and respond accordingly. Collective intelligence is the key to organizational intelligence and it can be made possible when people and computer connect together to make some smart, intelligent and innovative decisions.
The article on hyperspecialization is on the same lines of the three themes Dr. Malone talks about in the interview. Hyperspecialization means breaking down the work into more specialized pieces, with many workers doing those pieces of work. The idea is derived from the Adams Smith wealth of nations which describes the central drivers of the economic progress is the division of labor. Dr. Malone example of Linux open source operating system best suites hyperspecialization where a bunch of people got together to work interdependently on different aspects of the operating system.
Hyperspecialization offers many benefits like quality, speed, time and the cost advantages to employers. Hyperspecialization will force managers to divide the work into much smaller tasks, attract the specialized workers to perform those tasks and integrating the tasks to the whole solution. Hyperspecialization can help to bring the global marketplace together because people will be better equipped to do their jobs from anywhere in the world. Thus, we see that hyperspecialization complements the three themes of changes to work Dr. Malone talks about.
As a future leader, I will try to implement the three themes Dr. Malone discusses to reduce cost, engage employees by allowing them to do what they love to do, to get work done faster and bring innovation to the way work is done so as to be better prepared to adapt to the changing environment. These three themes are very critical for the success of an organization and will define the way the work is done in the future.