Forces of change: condensed from This Isn't the Company I Joined—How to Lead in a Business Turned Upside Down

Information Outlook, May, 2004 by Carol Kinsey Goman

What if your job changed significantly--or was eliminated? What if you had to reinvent yourself to stay relevant in your profession? What if you had to change careers? Would you survive?

Some people actually do survive, and even thrive, in these circumstances. They flourish in chaotic times by (first of all) understanding the forces of change in a world where nothing is guaranteed.

Changes in job structure and availability have been caused by complicated events in the far-flung markets of the world as well as by those in your local community. Companies trying to keep pace have been forced to deal with economic fluctuations, industrial transitions, and new ways of relating to their employees.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Let's take a look at the elements of "changing times." This is the challenging environment in which you are asked to continually modify your attitude and convert your abilities to new kinds of jobs and new ways of working.

These five fundamental events have created the new business dynamic:

1. The shift from domestic to global economy.

2. The shift from manpower to techno-power.

3. The shift from company-led to consumer-driven market forces.

4. The shift from the Industrial Economy to the Knowledge Economy.

5. The transformation of employer/employee relationships.

1. Globalization

In the United States, Europe, and Asia, there have been major increases in foreign investment over the past two decades. In the late 1980s, multinationals greatly stepped up their efforts to buy or build manufacturing and sales facilities in foreign target markets. By 2000, foreign firms, excluding banks, employed 6.4 million U.S. workers, with a payroll of some $330 billion, according to the Commerce Department.

The easy movement of money and people across borders, the creation of multinational alliances and strategies, the revolution in information technology, and the convergence of foreign cultures and markets have combined to turn the world into one huge shopping mall. But globalization isn't a one-way street. Overseas goods, services, ideas, and personnel are pouring into America just as quickly as they are being shipped out. Even small businesses now compete with and have access to products, labor, and new marketing techniques from all over the world. The same holds true for workforces. Employee pools, once thought of as geographically static, now migrate across international borders as easily as cars or computer chips. Companies can locate--or relocate--to where the tax laws are most advantageous and where skilled, cost-effective labor is most readily available. Workloads can be spread over several time zones to cut production costs and facilitate delivery schedules. According to Forbes.com, analysts predict that by 2015, more than 3 million white-collar jobs in the United States will be outsourced to other countries.

2. The Technological Revolution

Advances in technology drive change throughout organizations, enabling them to improve their business processes by replacing routine activities with information systems and robotics. Instant electronic transmission makes it possible to move data entry jobs to any location on the globe.

Technology is also opening up a world of true employee participation in business decisionmaking. Intranet systems allow organizations to capture and share knowledge throughout the organization, to exchange best practices and good ideas company-wide, and to reinforce the corporate culture. That is the good news. The downside, of course, is the loss of jobs. Automated teller machines, robots, and electronic voice mail replace human bank tellers, assembly-line workers, and telephone operators who all used to collect paychecks and are now collecting unemployment.

3. Customer Power

Consumers around the globe are becoming relentless in their demands for quality, service, customization, convenience, speed, and competitive pricing. And with global competition and the new technologies providing customers greater choice about when, how, and where they will receive goods and services, they have, in effect, become the determining factor in the success or failure of most organizations.

4. The Knowledge Economy

The shift from industrial to knowledge-based organizations has occurred with extraordinary swiftness in this country, and its impact on our thinking about work and the workplace has been as profound as that experienced in the 19th century when America shifted from being an agricultural nation to an industrial one. In fact, the challenges of the knowledge economy are affecting every aspect of the workplace. Only a generation ago, trained technical workers were a relative rarity in this country. Now they constitute nearly a quarter of the total American workforce.

The most highly skilled, the so-called gold collar workers, are engaged in steadily more specialized activities, while the tasks demanding less rigorous training (technical and legal research, lab analysis, computer programming, and the like) are being handed over to a growing body of "paraprofessional" support workers whose roles in today's service/information world equate roughly to those carried out by skilled mechanics and quality control engineers in the Industrial Age. Specialized subcontractors in a variety of technical fields are also proliferating as large professional organizations like hospitals, consulting companies, law firms, multinational publishers, and media conglomerates find that detailed work once done in-house can be done faster, more cost-effectively, and often better by independent specialists.