The New Equation
A management guru seeks the answers.
There is a seductive formula driving the corporate world today "1/2x2x3" "half as many poeple as we have now, paid twice as well, producing three times as much." The only questions are:"How long will it take us to get there?" and "Which half will we be in?"
Since most organisations still have an accumulation of slack, and since they are still doing for themselves many things that others could do better, a mixture of redundancy and some dexterous outsourcing soon produces the desired results. Productivity soars, and most of the time, profits do likewise. Economic theory tells us that everyone is, and should be happy.
What the formula doesn't say is what happens to the other half, the half no longer needed. Nor does the formula make clear that as well as being paid twice as much, the favoured half will also have to work twice as hard. Hence the paradox, that half of the people have money but no time, and the other half have time but no money.
A working lifetime used to last for 1,00,000 hours, roughly 50 years of 40-hour weeks. The overworking half still do their 1,00,000 hours, but now more of them cram them into 30 years, giving them 68-hour weeks. From them, the new question becomes,"What do we do afterwards?' when, worn out or too expensive at 55, they still see 25 years of life ahead. WIll those years be an opportunity or a problem, and will they, at the end, judge that the rewards were worth the struggle? These are new questions for a new age.
These are, however, comfortable questions compared with those faced by the other half, the half outside the organisation. An outsider's life is not an easy one. Some the professionals. artisans and craftpeople relish the freedom of a "portfolio life", with their changing mix of clients and projects. For them, the advice I give to my children on leaving college to " look for customers not jobs" is an exciting challenge. These people have sought-after skills abd can sell them to a marketplace eager for contracted-out specialities. Most of those on the outside, however, have nothing to offer or to sell concepts except their time, and these are few buyers of non-specific times these days. Yet they grew up in a world where it was considered sensible and normal to sell all your working time, 1,00,000 hours of it, to someone else to do with it what they willed in return for the promise of a living wage.
The Faustian bargain
Looking back on it, it was a Faustian bargain, selling one's time for money, but it became a vital part of the social contract. That social contract is now breaking down and, notwithstanding the rhetoric of governments, it will not be renewned on the same terms. Some revised version is needed if the capitalism is going to be good for all the people and not just for a favoured few. It would be a sad paradox if capitalism, having seen off the rival appeal of communism, were to fall on its own sword of efficiency. In the end, the lurking question remains: Efficiency fo what, and for whom?
While capitalsim was fighting the ideological war, these questions were left begging. When survival is an issue, all else is
irrelevant. Now, howver, that threat of totalitarian communism and its war have receeded, there is more time and pressure to look at what we are doing to ourselves. The picture is, at best,confusing and, at worst, alarming. The rich in every country are getting richer and the poor, mostly are getting poorer, even in absolute terms. Trickle-down theory does not work too well in economics where wealth increasingly follows intelligence.
The potent asset
Intelligence may be the key to the problem. The secret to wealth is no longer land, or raw materials or even money. It is intelligence, and the ability to use it. Intellectual property, defined not as patent rights but broadly as intelligence in all its forms, is the potent asset in today's world. The smart language of business is about core competencies, knowledge workers and key skills. The New York Times, said that Microsoft's only factory asset was the imagination of its workers.
Singapore, that city-state enterprise, boldly states in its latest 10-year plan that everything necessary for success can now be bought, except for the talent of its citizens. They are wrong, in one sense, because that too can be bought, but correct in that, if they don't own that themselves, they own nothing.
What goes for Singapore goes for the rest of