Welcome to the Working Week

WorkingFuture is a site devoted to thoughts on the Future of Work.

All around us a new world is being created in front of our very eyes by the collision of four macro, long term trends;

• The ongoing, unstoppable growth of globalization
• The "platform" provided by the Internet and the new generation of "net-native" technology 
• The rise of the millennial generation
• The "virtualization" of organizations 

Work is the foundation of modern society; everything else that we value, treasure, dream of, take for granted, worry about is based on work. Without work things fall apart. 

Look around you and you can see that work is changing radically and increasingly rapidly in many, if not all, corners of the globe. Many mature industries are undergoing, at best, existential shocks, at worst, complete tail spins. Old skills have declining value. Old business models based on those skill sets are being crushed under the weight of economics that no longer make sense. Approaches and conventional wisdoms based on limitless growth of business as usual are imploding as unforeseeable worst case scenarios come true. Unsustainable imbalances between supply (30k new media studies graduates a year in the UK) and demand (a fast contracting commercial media industry) put huge additional strains on governments struggling to adjust as public sector finances become stressed beyond tolerance. 

(Relatively) free trade and (relatively) friction-less movement of capital and labor has had the unintended consequence of amplifying global volatility and instability as capital has sought Alpha wherever it can and labor has sought its premium wherever it can. Bubbles have gotten bigger and crashes have gotten more sever.  

But of course at the same time many new industries are emerging and exploding in the red hot furnace of digitization. $1bn buy outs of 18 month old companies may be an outlier of the current zeitgeist but in the less visible median huge new money is being created from work that represents the future. Work requiring  completely different skill sets and attitudes and expectations. Work leveraging new faces from new parts of the world. 

Work that we don't fully understand yet. Work that is weird and strange and unsettling and trivial and extremely stretching. That is not fit for our parents and will seem ridiculous to our kids. 

WorkingFuture is a place to examine and discuss The Future of Work. The future of everything involved in work; business strategies, markets, competition, enabling technologies, work practices, management models, socio-economics, socio-politics, location, and individual’s views of work.

We invite you to join the conversation, come for the ride, and help us all figure what a working future will look like.