Help Wanted
“What are you looking for in an employee today?”
We put that question to five employers: one who employs low-skilled white-collar workers in India; one who employs high-skilled white-collar lawyers in Washington, D.C.; one who employs green-collar workers all over Afghanistan (the U.S. Army); one who employs blue-collar workers all over the world (DuPont); and one who employs freelancers everywhere and anywhere to do anything. No matter what color the collar, all five employers gave nearly identical answers. They are looking for workers who can think critically, who can tackle nonroutine complex tasks, and who can work collaboratively with teams located in their office or globally.
And that’s just to get a job interview.
That’s right. The employers we interviewed consider all those skills “table stakes” today—merely the conditions of entry for a new job. Now they also expect all the workers they hire to think of themselves along the lines of what we’ve called “creative creators” or “creative servers”—people who not only can do their assigned complex tasks but can enhance them, refine them, and even reinvent them by bringing something extra. By listening to what these employers say, and what they are seeking in employees, we can understand the urgency of the need to adapt our education system to compete and thrive in the hyper-connected world.
“We have never asked so much from people as we are going to now—leaders and led,” argues Dov Seidman, whose company, LRN, advises executives on leadership. “Today, we are asking every American to climb
his own Mount Everest and make that cell-phone call from the peak: ‘Mom, guess where I am.’ In today’s hyper-connected marketplace, to be a leading company, now a company has to be a company of leaders—every individual has to contribute significant value and impact.”
Herewith, the new help-wanted section.
In February 2004 Tom went to Bangalore, India, to make a documentary program on outsourcing for the New York Times–Discovery Channel. Part of the documentary was filmed at the outsourcing company 24/7 Customer and its call center, manned by hundreds of Indians doing what were then relatively low-wage white-collar service jobs via long-distance phone lines. Late at night—daytime in America—the room was a cacophony of voices, with young Indian men and women trying to fix someone’s Dell computer or straighten out a credit card account or sell a new phone contract. It was a cross between a coed college dormitory and a phone bank raising money for the local public TV station. There were 2,500 twentysomethings, some with college degrees, some just out of high school, working either as “outbound” operators, selling credit cards or phone minutes, or “inbound” operators, tracing someone’s lost luggage or dealing with computer glitches.
Seven years later, the company’s founder, PV Kannan, told us that we would not recognize his office today. “To begin with, it’s a lot less noisy,” he explained. That is because much of the voice work once done over long-distance fiber-optic phone lines or via satellite has now shifted to text messaging over the Internet. Moreover, 24/7 Customer no longer just waits to receive calls about problems. “It’s all proactive now,” explained Kannan. “Now, when a customer goes online and, say, opens his phone bill or cable bill from the company we are working for, we know about it. Today most of the customer questions revolve around bills that they are looking at online. We know from our software that it is the first bill you have been sent by this cable or phone company. You thought you signed up for a $99.99-a-month cable package and the bill is for $278.00. We can track when you opened your bill online, and if you keep it open for more than two minutes a little dialogue box will pop up
and say, ‘Would you like to discuss your bill?’ One of our operators will then interact with you online. This requires a very different kind of operator. So now when we recruit people they have to have the savvy to link things together, and they have to be able to multitask—to know what you are looking at, be sensitive to the context of the dialogue, and then pull up all the relevant information quickly and resolve the problem. So the way we recruit now is that we invite candidates to take an online test where all of this is simulated.”
Seven years ago, when Tom visited the 24/7 Customer office in India, most of the employees there “were entry level,” said Kannan, whose company is actually headquartered in Campbell, California. “They had to stick to a written script, and they were afraid the minute someone got them off of it. A supervisor would randomly listen to the calls of agents and then give them feedback or help them with a customer … Now the software we have is predicting what the consumer is doing, so we don’t need so many supervisors, because technology is now following what our operators are texting, while they are texting! Today what I am most interested in knowing is what else did the customer have issues with, what services did they seem to be looking for. So we ended up transitioning many of our supervisors into new jobs that we created that revolved around analyzing data. These are better-paying jobs, but they require more skill. So we picked out the supervisors who had the science and math degrees to make the transition, and the others we kept as supervisors.
“A call center never employed Ph.D.’s—now I have an army of them, trying to analyze all this data,” said Kannan. “We started doing this about four years ago, but 2010 was the big crossover year.” Now, instead of looking just for people whose jobs will involve answering the phone or making phone calls—of which Kannan still employs many—he’s also looking for statisticians, psychologists, and Ph.D.’s.
“What we ultimately are hoping to do is combine in the same person the technical talent to understand what the data is telling them and the service skills to deliver the new services that the data says people want,” Kannan explained. “If we learn from the data that 80 percent of consumers who receive their first bill from a mobile company or cable are going to pick up the phone and call, we also now know exactly how to service them. It means the agent who deals with them is much better prepared.”
Kannan said, “Everyone in the chain makes more money now because we are able to charge more money, because we are delivering more value to our clients. And people are also much more satisfied with their work. You’re not just calling people hour after hour, trying to sell them a credit card. Now we look for employees who have their own Facebook profiles, who are adept at writing little blogs and have real comfort living and interacting in that online world. The old workers who showed up and just read off a script—a lot of them are gone.
“We want people who have a completely open mind,” he added, “and then the ability to learn constantly and challenge the status quo—no matter what the level of the company where they are employed. Challenging the status quo is the most critical thing, because if your employees don’t challenge your status quo, someone else’s employees will and they will disrupt the status quo before you do.
“There is really no such thing as a low-end job anymore,” said Kannan. “If it were really routine, it would have been automated. Every two or three years the skilled thing you are doing is going to get scrapped. The question is whether you are going to scrap it and own the next job, or let someone else do that.”
Although he is describing a service business, Kannan’s observation points to one of the most important reasons that America needs to keep high-skilled manufacturing at home. So many innovations come from engineers and workers who are actually handling the product, seeing what goes wrong, and anticipating the next breakthrough improvement. “If none of the work is being done in America any longer, that is dangerous,” explained Kannan. “Sometimes my clients say to me, ‘PV, I don’t understand why you are still in the call-center business, a bunch of entry-level jobs. The value we get from you is all these data and analytics. Why don’t you carve that out as a separate business and list it on the stock exchange?’ My answer is that if I don’t do the customer-facing part of the business, I lose touch with reality, and then I am really in the cloud.”
Kannan explained that though many of his workers are in India, his whole technology platform is run out of the United States on servers based in America; some of the data analytics are done in America, and his experts who help clients interpret that data and what it means for their businesses actually sit in the offices with those clients, side by side.
“So, in many ways, the best jobs are here in California, but they also demand the most skill,” said Kannan.
Obviously we cannot keep every factory in America. But we need to understand that, particularly for the high end of manufacturing, when a factory moves offshore now it takes with it not just the jobs of today but also, perhaps, the jobs of tomorrow. “If all the manufacturing and then more and more of the engineering moves to India and China,” Kannan warned, “it is only a matter of time before the next Google or Facebook comes out there.”
At the worst point of the subprime crisis, Tom asked his friend Jeff Lesk, the managing partner of the Washington office of the international law firm Nixon Peabody, how the legal business was being affected by it. “Heavily,” Lesk said. Everyone was laying off lawyers. Out of curiosity, Tom asked him who was laid off first. The answer was surprising. Lesk explained that it was not necessarily last in, first out anymore. Rather, the lawyers who were getting laid off by most big law firms were those who, when work was booming during the credit and real estate bubbles, took the work, did it, and then handed it back when finished. Some of them were now gone. These were people who were doing nonroutine work but doing it in a routine way—uncreative creators. Those keeping their jobs were the ones who were finding new, more efficient ways to do the old work, with new technologies and processes, or were coming up with entirely new work to do in new ways.
This is indicative of the new labor trends in the hyper-connected world. While the jobs of lawyers—and others like them—may in theory fall into the category of nonroutine creators, that does not make them immune from the pressures of globalization and the IT revolution. Sure, at the height of the credit bubble, firms signed up whoever came out of the best law schools and were generous with bonuses. But today globalization, IT, and the tight economy are prompting more and more big companies to put their legal work out to bid whenever they can—treating it as a commodity. So law firms that want to continue to pay high bonuses need to offer something extra to justify high fees.
That is why, in the winter of 2011, Nixon Peabody created a new position: chief innovation officer.
Say what? A chief innovation officer? Why would a law firm need a chief innovation officer?
“We are in business to help other businesses,” explained Lesk, an expert in putting together real estate transactions involving tax credits to generate financing for community-oriented developments, such as low-income housing. “And what we are finding is that the core of American business is changing—the repeat deals, involving similar structures, are fewer and farther between. There is more competition, barriers to entry are lower, our clients are reaching out to us for new ideas now much more frequently.” His law firm therefore has to be more creative and nimble in every way.
For instance, says Lesk, his firm was a pioneer in putting together low-income housing credits with solar-energy credits in order to finance affordable housing for low-income people that would also come with solar-powered energy.
“A few experienced practitioners in the industry were looking at the base product that we had used for years—the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit—and at the same time we were learning about renewable-energy tax credits,” explained Lesk. “We wondered what would happen if we combined the two. So together with some clients and colleagues we put these financing tools side by side, looking at the rules and requirements and conflicts between these two complex government programs, and then we thought about how to overcome those conflicts.” Then they did some financial modeling, made some assumptions on pricing, and came up with a model that showed “we could build an affordable housing project with solar panels that would utilize tax credits for both of these important programs—and at a minimal or negligible cost,” said Lesk. “So you end up with people having affordable housing with lower energy bills, financed by private investors who can use those tax credits. We were among the first to work through all the issues and come up with a product that could meet governmental requirements, attract private capital, and, most important, scale.”
But no sooner did Nixon Peabody help to open that path than competing law firms and accounting firms followed suit, turning it into a commodity. As a result, said Lesk, “we constantly have to find ways to
improve and adapt our products. Now we’re putting together affordable housing with geothermal energy and drafting projects utilizing fuel cells. How about a community wind project? You have to look for original combinations and approaches to stay one step ahead of the competition.”
Lesk continued: “Necessity is the mother of invention and we are in the age of great necessity because little that was given in the past is given today—whether it is fees, types of projects, the structure of deals, or availability of financing. I have worked with tax credits and affordable housing for twenty-five years. It was a specialized field and for a long time it had a reasonably limited number of players. Today it changes frequently and the barriers to entry are so low that we have all kinds of new competitors, and not only law firms.”
His firm’s new chief innovation officer will lead a program to recruit, coach, and inspire lawyers so that they will not only do today’s standard legal work but also invent tomorrow’s. Those qualifications are already being taken into consideration when the firm determines annual pay and bonuses for its lawyers.
“For this year’s partner reviews,” said Lesk, who also heads the firm’s tax-credit finance practice group, “I asked each partner in my group specifically what was his or her best innovative idea for the past year and what does he or she have on the drawing board to invent this year … We are a partnership and we have to share the profits in a way that recognizes past contributions and predicts future performance, and in a way that fairly compensates each partner.” The best predictor of the future is not necessarily just how someone has performed in the past, he said. It’s also how much the person has adapted, created, and innovated. “If I have to make tough compensation choices between lawyers, a significant factor now for me is their ability to invent,” said Lesk. “And my challenge, for the lawyers who don’t come by those skills naturally, is to find ways to teach them.”
Critical thinking alone just doesn’t buy what it used to buy, Lesk concluded. “Critical thinking has become the basic price of admission. If I had to choose who else I would elect to help assure the continued success of this law firm, one of the most important qualities I would be looking for is proven ability to innovate, because with change coming this fast, that is the only thing that will save us.”
General Martin Dempsey is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—America’s top military officer—but earlier in his career he commanded the First Armored Division in the Iraq war that took Baghdad from Saddam Hussein in 2003; served as acting CENTCOM commander, in charge of all American forces throughout the Middle East; and from 2008 to 2011 was commanding general of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, where he oversaw boot camp—the training and education of American soldiers for twenty-first-century warfare. He remembers the exact moment when the light started flashing in his head, saying, “We need to train and educate our soldiers and leaders differently.”
“When I was acting commander at CENTCOM,” said Dempsey, “I went to visit a young U.S. Army captain stationed on the border with Pakistan, inside Afghanistan. It was the summer of 2008. Out at his base he described to me his task and purpose there and the recent engagements he had had with Taliban trying to infiltrate. I think he was twenty-five kilometers from any other base. Yet from his little forward base he had access to intelligence and information from the lowest tactical level right up to the national level and he had the authority to order joint fire from air and artillery. I am guessing he was probably twenty-six years old. At one point I said to him, ‘You have more capability at your fingertips than I had as division commander in Baghdad in 2003.’ The technology had improved that much … The type of threats we face today are decentralized, networked, and syndicated. They are not massed threats but threats at the edge. To confront a network you have to be a network, and to confront a decentralized foe your power needs to be decentralized.”
Dempsey returned from Afghanistan to Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida, saying to himself, “We have empowered our soldiers to be effective in this new kind of battle. We have given them the capability and authority and responsibility to function in distributed operations, semiautonomously. But we have not changed the way we trained them to accept this responsibility.”
As soon as he took over the army’s training and education systems, that became his primary focus. “We say that a leader’s responsibility is to
visualize, understand, decide, and direct,” said Dempsey. “And yet we used to spend the vast majority of our time providing the knowledge skills and attributes to allow a commander to decide and direct and almost no time on how to visualize and understand.”
The changes the U.S. military is undertaking now start with recruitment. Thirty years ago, said Dempsey, “we would have said we want men who are physically fit, educated, and disciplined. Now, what we say is that we want someone who wants to belong to a values-based group, who can communicate, who is inquisitive, and who has an instinct to collaborate—and we will take care of the rest.”
Dempsey began reforming army training by asking that all-important question: What world are we living in? The military, he concluded, was living in what he called “a competitive learning environment.” By that he meant a world in which military capability is diffusing into the hands of non-state actors, terrorists, and criminals. Nation-states no longer have a monopoly on competitive military capabilities.
“It is a fool’s errand,” Dempsey said, to chase every new capability emerging from your adversary—whether it is new roadside bombs or devices that confuse GPS signals. “We cannot be oblivious to these things, but we cannot be consumed by them in isolation. What we should be consumed by is developing leaders in our own military who can adapt to whatever future they will find and innovate to create a future that is more favorable to us.” You need people who can constantly adapt and innovate because the technology and how the enemy is using it are constantly changing.
Thirty years ago, noted Dempsey, the experiences a person had in the local high school, the experience in basic training, the experience in the army unit to which the new recruit was assigned, and the experience a soldier had on the battlefield “were not so different.” That made training easy, but it simply isn’t true anymore. Now, even traditional armies will confront America on the battlefield in a “hybrid” decentralized manner. So the army has to train its soldiers to reflect that prospect. It has to empower them to respond to the unpredictable experiences they will have in a village in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Fighting decentralized enemies, said Dempsey, is like “dropping a bowling ball into mercury.” So sometimes you need to inject chaos deliberately into the classroom. “When I say we want to inject chaos, foster
creativity, and leverage technology to create a different learning model,” explained Dempsey, he means that drill instructors have to change, too. “What we have right now in many cases are instructors who want to be the sage on the stage: ‘I have the knowledge and you know nothing, so pay attention to my PowerPoint presentation and take notes. And then on the last day maybe we will get around to problem-solving exercises.’ The new model is for the classroom to provide a kind of warehouse of tools and applications that the students can download and deliver themselves.”
Army manuals are changing accordingly. “We have roughly four to five hundred doctrinal manuals that we are migrating to a Wiki format,” said Dempsey. “We have done about fifty already—how do you operate a forward base, a manual for bridge crossings, how to manage IEDs [improvised explosive devices], how to conduct a key-leader engagement in Iraq or Afghanistan, how to make best use of an unmanned aerial system. Let’s say you had a manual on how to organize a forward operating base in Afghanistan. In the past, the community responsible for doctrine would publish it. That would take three or four years to do, with a steering committee or review boards, and then it would take five to seven years to permeate the army schoolhouse. Now we are putting that all up in a Wiki that allows the community of practice to edit it constantly and contribute to it from their battlefield experiences. So it is always up-to-date, self-correcting, and adaptable in real time by the soldiers in the field. It is a living doctrinal textbook, with officers assigned to watch over and manage each doctrinal Wiki site.” (Don’t worry, they are protected so al-Qaeda cannot read them as well!)
The new recruits coming into the military today, said Dempsey, have an almost insatiable appetite for information, access, and connectivity. “They want to be by themselves sitting in the middle of the football field but connected to the rest of the world,” Dempsey said, adding: “They come in much less physically fit than previous generations because of lack of exercise. They come in with a mixed bag of values.” That is, he explained, they come with a genuine sense of purpose and patriotism and general desire to belong to something, but it is often not much more developed than that. “So we have made major changes to the physical-fitness training and we have made major changes in how we inculcate values,” he said. “I am not suggesting they have bad values,
but among all the values that define our profession, first and most important is trust. If we could only do one thing with new soldiers, it would be to instill in them trust for one another, for the chain of command, and for the nation.”
A decade ago, the army was still trying to instill knowledge through rote memorization, especially in basic training. “We still have that, but now we balance it with outcomes-based training,” said Dempsey. “So the task might be to evacuate a casualty. In the past we might do that with a PowerPoint in a classroom and then take the kids out and demonstrate it in the field. Now we start in the field because we not only want to develop the proficiency [in handling] of the task but we want to develop trust, we want trust to be one of the outcomes. We also have peer-to-peer instruction. Before, the drill sergeant was God. If he said it, it was to be believed. And if he didn’t, it wasn’t important. Now the sergeants are alive to the idea that there are young men and women in the ranks who have leadership skills. Now they nurture them. They will tell some of the basic trainees, ‘You are responsible for this task: Here is an iPhone with an app on it. You learn about it and collaborate on it, and on Friday you teach the class.’ We find that the students are more attentive to their peers than to us. It requires a soldier not only to master the skill he is teaching but to be able to add value by teaching it to his peers.”
The bottom line: “Collaboration is important on the battlefield and trust is the cement of collaboration,” said Dempsey. “And trust is the prerequisite for creativity. You will never be creative if you think that what you have to say will be discounted. So creativity cannot happen without trust, communication cannot happen without trust, and collaboration cannot happen without trust. It is the essential driver. And that is why you build authority now from the bottom up and not the top down.”
Not so long ago, Dempsey explained, a junior officer would get the intelligence and information from above and then execute on the basis of that information. No one held that officer accountable for understanding or contributing significantly to higher headquarters’ understanding. “Now, in the kind of environments in which we find ourselves, the more important information comes from the bottom up, not the top down,” he said. That means lower-ranking personnel are as responsible
for creating and understanding the context in which they are operating as the most senior leader on the field. “We are issuing iPhones to basic trainees so that they can pull down applications and collaborate on coursework,” said Dempsey. “I like to think of us as getting more and more adaptable—learning from what we experience as fast as possible and reacting to it. We have to do that fast and smart … I want this [U.S. Army] to be an adaptable learning organization.”
Dempsey’s former colleague in Iraq, General Stanley McChrystal, witnessed this evolution in the battlefield at the very cutting edge when he commanded the Special Forces operations in Iraq that fought an underground war with al-Qaeda and Baathist elements and helped the surge succeed. They fought that war with a combination of unorthodox, innovative methods and modern technologies. Here is how McChrystal described his evolution to us:
“My grandfather was a soldier. My father was a soldier. From the time my grandfather, at the end of World War I, went from lieutenant to colonel, there was a change in technology. But it was not so fast or so great that his experience did not provide him with a body of expertise that made him legitimate and credible with his men. The reality today is that when a general officer speaks to a captain, that general officer has almost never used any of the communications systems, intelligence assets, or weapons systems that the captain has. So when the general or colonel goes down there and tries to be the leader and the captain looks at him, [that captain knows] that this guy has never done the job he is doing, nothing close. So the reality is: How does the leader retain his legitimacy in his big organization? What is the basis for his credibility? Is it his good looks? This is a really big deal. Things go so fast now it is very difficult for people to be experts and still be leading.”
One way to do both is to be more of an orchestrator and inspirer than a traditional hard-charging, follow-me-up-the-hill commander. As an example of this, McChrystal described special operations commanders in Iraq who adapted their units, turning them from just “shooters”—the people who go out on missions and kill or capture the enemy—into intelligence analysts who are always looking for targets and thinking about targets when they are not in the field. “In the past, when they were not going on the target, the shooters would just have been working out or sleeping,” McChrystal said. Instead, the commanders put them behind
desks to analyze and sift through and argue over all the raw intelligence about potential targets. “As a consequence, [those commanders] probably increased their field capacity tenfold. They created guys who were entrepreneurial and always fighting for more information. They owned the mission much more—because they were actually assembling and analyzing the information and selecting priorities … They were careful not to waste intelligence assets, because it affected their productivity, [and] they did not send the assault force on a stupid mission, because they were the assault force that was going on that mission. When we captured people, they would sit in on the interrogations. It made them so much more effective.”
DuPont makes a lot of things. To survive for 208 years a company has to be good at making a lot of things. In fact, DuPont makes so many things that if you go to its website and click on “Products & Services,” it shows you the alphabet. If you click on any letter—except J, Q, or X—there is something DuPont makes that starts with that letter. Hit “H” and you get directed to “Harmony® Extra XP herbicide.” Hit “Z” and you get directed to “Zenite® LCP liquid crystal polymer resin.” Given how many products DuPont makes, and the number of blue-collar workers it employs all over the world, there are few executives who can better describe the kind of blue-collar workers needed for the twenty-first century than Ellen Kullman, who became DuPont’s nineteenth CEO in 2009.
In an interview at company headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, Kullman summarized in a single word what she looks for in every employee today, from senior vice presidents to production line employees: “presence.” “We want every employee to be present in the room. What I mean by that is that all the rote jobs today are gone—they are done by machines. Now you have to have people who can think and interact and collaborate. But to do that they have to be engaged and paying attention—they have to be present—so that they are additive, and not just taking up space. Whatever job you have in the company, you need to understand how your job adds value wherever you are [in the chain]. Because if you know that, then you can add value. But you will not be
successful here if you just come to work and say, ‘When do I arrive and when do I get to leave?’”
Production-line workers at today’s DuPont plants, she added, have to “collaborate and work in teams, they have to be able to communicate with engineers and tell them everything that they are seeing on the line every day. They have to bring their thinking into what they do—they can’t just go into their little zone and punch buttons all day. It is just a much more integrative and collaborative environment.”
A line worker who is engaged can save a company millions of dollars with just one insight, as Kullman explained with an example. DuPont invests a huge amount of money every year in factories and equipment, and one key to making profits is having those machines working twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. “So we are constantly measuring uptime and yields on every piece of equipment,” said Kullman. The company has a big plant in Spruance, Virginia, and on a particular production line of spinning cells that put out Kevlar fibers the machines kept prematurely failing, bringing the whole line down. “So the engineers are sitting there trying to solve the problem in one area of the line,” Kullman recalled, “and one of the line operators broke in and said to them, ‘You know what is strange is that the machines that fail sound different.’ So they started to work with the guy and isolated the problem, which had to do with new units. It immediately increased the utilization of the whole plant. Now, the engineers don’t live there like the line operators do. They are not listening every day … It is why you need every employee to have the mind-set of how they help us make every product better.”
DuPont recently installed a company-wide production-management system that is based on inviting every employee to help improve a product or manufacturing process. “Every worker has to be engaged,” she explained, “so we now spend a lot of time thinking about how we as leaders create a better environment for that—so we can get the best out of our employees, our equipment and plants, and our company.”
Kevlar, a synthetic fabric used to make protective vests, is one of DuPont’s signature products. Only by using the assets of the whole company has DuPont been able to maintain its lead in that product area. According to Kullman, “The Kevlar we make today is vastly different from two decades ago in terms of tenacity and how lightweight it is.
It took researchers working with engineers and with production employees to make the whole system better. We had to. The world doesn’t wait for you. We have competitors who are very aggressive. I was recently down in one of our plants in Texas and you had a cross section of maintenance workers, operators, and engineers all in one room—ten of them—working on a real problem: How did they reduce the turnaround time for the maintenance of one of their machines and get more production time out of every day? To see them all work together, each getting up at the drawing board and talking about it, trying to solve the problem together, is something to watch.”
DuPont does not operate with cheap labor. “Our plants are made up of big equipment,” explained Kullman. “One of the big factors we look at in locating a plant is the availability of an educated workforce. Our plant in Spruance that makes Kevlar has three criteria for hiring a line operator: You need to have more than a high school degree, either a community-college degree or a vocational-college degree; or you have to have had experience at another company; or you have to be a military veteran. You have to have two out of those three. And we partner with community colleges to make sure that we have the right opportunities to get that training. [Also], we interview them differently than we did decades ago. They have to be able to communicate with engineers. They have to be able to bring their thinking into the job.”
Matt Barrie is the founder of Freelancer.com. His business involves matching up anyone seeking a product or service anywhere in the world with anyone else able to produce that product or perform that service anywhere in the world. Whatever it is you want, you just put it out to bid on Freelancer.com and see who is ready to provide it at the lowest price. People would be stunned to know how many things get done this way today, beyond the obvious projects such as software development, website development, logos, graphics, designs, data entry, and freelance writing assignments. Freelancer takes a percentage of every project from employees and employers. To be sure, a few users have complained that Freelancer.com takes its fees before the work is done, and there are cases where different parties end up not delivering their side of the bargain.
But users say that if you insist on some payment for work in advance of completion and check the online reviews of prospective employers and how previous employees say they were treated, the site can be a lucrative source of income and labor. It is, in many ways, the ultimate in the “help wanted” forum and is surely the future. When we spoke to Barrie in March 2010, Freelancer.com was listing 2.8 million freelancers offering every product or service you can imagine.
“The whole world is connecting up now at an incredibly rapid pace,” said Barrie, and many of these newly connected are coming to Freelancer.com to offer their talents. Barrie said his site is primarily used by small and medium-size firms to outsource small projects, typically under $200, to the developing and developed worlds. By the end of 2011 well over one million projects had been assigned to freelancers, earning them more than $100 million. The Australia-based Barrie said he describes this rising global army of freelancers the way he describes his own team: “They all have Ph.D.’s. They are poor, hungry, and driven: P.H.D.”
Barrie offered us a few examples of “help wanted” that was being sought on his site in March 2010: Someone was looking for a designer to design “a fully functioning dune buggy.” Forty people were bidding on the job at an average price of $268. Someone was looking for an architect to design “a car-washing café.” Thirty-seven people were bidding on that job at an average price of $168. Someone was looking to produce “six formulations of chewing gum” suitable for the Australian market. Two people were bidding at an average price of $375. Someone who was looking for “a rap song to help Chinese students learn English” had three bids averaging $157. When Barrie needed a five-word speech to accept a Webby Award, he offered $1,000 for the best idea. He got 2,730 entries and accepted “The Tech Boom Is Back.”
Indeed it is.
If we step back and take all these stories together, some very important trends in today’s workplace become clear: the people on the bottom rung of the workplace are becoming more and more empowered, which means more innovation will come from the bottom up, rather than just from the top down. Therefore it is vital that we retain as much high-end
manufacturing in America as possible, so our workers can take part in this innovation.
“People think innovation is the idea you have in the shower,” said Ernie Moniz, the physicist who heads MIT’s Energy Initiative. “More often it comes from seeing the problem. It comes out of working with the materials.” To be sure, there is some pure innovation—coming up with a product or service no one had thought of before. But a lot more innovation comes from working on the line, seeing a problem, and devising a solution that itself becomes a new product. That is why if we don’t retain at least part of the manufacturing process in America, particularly the high-end manufacturing, we will lose touch with an important source of innovation: the experience of working directly with a product and figuring out how to improve it—or how to replace it with something even better.
“A lot of innovation now happens on the shop floor,” said Hewlett-Packard’s CEO, Léo Apotheker. Indeed, if you open a factory, and are doing things right, “it will be more productive a year later because the workers themselves on the factory floor are critical thinkers and can improve processes along the way,” said Byron Auguste, the McKinsey director. In any factory or call center, he noted, “there is often dramatic variation in productivity in different parts of the system. If you have continuous learners on the shop floor or in the call center, there is a constant opportunity to learn and spread the word, and then everyone improves. If you are doing that in every node of your production, design, and after-sales service, you will have a system that delivers three percent productivity growth every year and is not dependent on new inventions coming out of Carnegie Mellon University or Silicon Valley.”
In the past, companies had “innovation centers” off in the woods, where big-thinking R&D teams devised new things that were then produced on the assembly line. Some companies still have such centers, but others are opting instead for continuous innovation that includes frontline workers as well as top management. Now every employee is part of the process, often using social networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook. The assembly-line worker today not only has more information than ever before, but also the capacity to communicate what he or she is learning instantly to upper management and throughout the company.
Continuous innovation is not a luxury anymore—it is becoming a necessity. In the hyper-connected world, whatever can be done, will be done. The only question for a company is whether it will be done by it
or to it: but it will be done. A breakthrough product, such as the iPhone, instantly generates competition—the Android. Within months, the iPad had multiple competitors. So a company that does not practice constant innovation by taking advantage of every ounce of brainpower at every level will fall behind farther and faster than ever before.
Before the world became hyper-connected, American companies moved jobs around the world—that is, they outsourced parts of their business process—to save money that they then reinvested in new products, services, and people in the United States, because they could. Now companies move jobs around the world to do “crowdsourcing” and distributed innovation, because they must. They find the most creative brainpower, the most productive workforce, the most inviting tax rules, and the best infrastructure in or near the fastest-growing markets, because they must. They must use the whole global “crowd” to invent, design, manufacture, improve, and sell their products. If they don’t, their competition will. We repeat: In the hyper-connected world, whatever can be done, will be done. The only question is, will it be done by you or to you?
Ask Curtis Carlson, the CEO of SRI International, which serves as an innovation factory for governments and companies on topics ranging from education to clean energy to homeland security. Government agencies and private companies come to Carlson and his teams of scientists, engineers, and educators; they describe what they want—often blue-sky wish lists or solutions to seemingly insoluble problems—and ask SRI to invent it for them. When he gets a request, Carlson’s first step is to assemble a team of SRI scientists, engineers, and designers, along with outside experts—fitting the people to the problem as best he can.
“There are few problems left today where one person with one skill can solve them,” he explained. “That means you had better assemble the best team. Not a good team—the best team. You don’t want to be ‘world class.’ That just means there are a lot of others like you. You want your team to be best in the world.”
Given the rising innovative power and knowledge that can so easily move from the bottom up now—the power to invent, design, manufacture, improve, and sell products—and not just from the top down, Carlson sees the following mega-trend barreling down the highway: “More and more, innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly but dumb. Innovation that happens from the bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart.” Therefore, “the sweet spot for innovation today is moving down.”
We call this Carlson’s Law: Innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly but dumb. Innovation that happens from the bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart. This makes it all the more important for every worker to be a creative creator or creative server and for every boss to understand that the boss’s job is to take advantage of Carlson’s Law—to find ways to inspire, enable, and unleash innovation from the bottom up, and then to edit, manage, and merge that innovation from the top down to produce goods, services, and concepts.
“We had a group visiting SRI from Japan the other day,” Carlson told us in March 2011, “and one of them asked me: ‘How many big decisions do you make every day?’ I said, ‘My goal is to make none of them. I am not the one interacting daily with the customer or the technology. My employees are the ones interacting, so if [moving ahead on a project] has to wait for me to decide, that is too slow. That does not mean I don’t have a job. My job is to help create an environment where those decisions can happen where they should happen—and to support them and reward them and inspire them.’”
Carlson said he thinks of himself more as “the mayor” of his company, orchestrating all the departments and listening to his constituencies, rather than as a classic top-down CEO.
So there it is: This is not your grandparents’ labor market anymore. It is not even your parents’. Each and every one of us has to be “present” now, all the time, in whatever we do, so that we can be either creative creators or creative servers. That’s where the jobs will be. This is why our schools need to prepare all students for careers in which they not only do their assigned jobs but offer something extra.
That is because in this hyper-connected world, there is increasingly no “here” and no “there,” there is no “in” and no “out,” there is only “good,” “better,” and “best,” and managers and entrepreneurs everywhere now have greater access than ever to the better and best people, robots, and software everywhere. This makes it more vital than ever that we have schools elevating and inspiring more of our young people into those “better” and “best” categories, because even “good” might not cut it anymore and “average” is definitely over.
For everyone to find his or her “extra” will require both more education and better education. The next two chapters are about how we can deliver both so that every American can adapt to the merger of globalization and the IT revolution.