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fHE END OF THE JOB As a way oforganizing work, it is a social artifact that has outli_. Page 3 of 5 062 to be done rather than on doing their jobs would wreck most traditional organizations. Just as individuals need to rethink their assumptions and strategies, organizations too will have to rethink O almost everything they do, look at the characlensfics of the post-job organization. The first is that it hires the right people. That sounds obvious, but it means something quite different in an organization that is no longer job-based than it does where one is hiring to fill slots. To begin with, you must find people who can work well without the cue system of job descriptions. At died, America's largest industrial design firm, in Palo Alto, no one has a title or a boss. The head of marketing there, Tom Kelly, leaves no doubt about the importance of hiring:' if you hire the right people if you've got the right fit then everything will take care of itself." Even the right people will produce poor results if organized in the old way. Yes, complex hierarchies are out and the flattened organization is in, but not because that is fashionable. Rather, the postjob employee's necessary vendor- mindedness - thinking of himself or herself as an independent business just doesn't mix with hierarchy. The post- job employee is going to need a much more flexible organization than most can easily find today. How to create this flexibility? Organizations using such workers most successfully are finding a number of approaches effective. Common to many is a reliance on project teams. The project-based organization is not a new idea, 25 years ago Melvin Anshen wrote in the Harvard Business Review that traditionally structured organizations were inherently designed to maintain the status quo rather than to respond to the changing demands of the market. But, he noted, the single organization pattern that is free from this built-in bias ((toward maintaining the status quo)) is the project cluster" Since those words were written, companies like EDS. Intel, and Microsoft have used the project as their essential building block - though "block' is far too fixed and rigid a term to describe the way projects are actually used. STUDY a fast-moving organization like Intel and you'll see a More from Fortune person hired and likely assigned to a project. It changes over The rem- o Ile hco.eoueders time, and the person's responsibilities and tasks change with Toyota has a'.any;,i. c, casr it. Then the person is assigned to another project (well before the first project is finished), and then maybe to still another. GE aim= !o: a rea-my omf„ These additional projects, which also evolve, require working FORTUNE SnC, under several team leaders, keeping different schedules, cr,:,: Issue being in various places, and performing a number of different SuDK`CHC ron,:ne tasks. Hierarchy implodes, not because someone theorizes that it should but because under these conditions it cannot be maintained. Several workers on such teams that Tom Peters interviewed used the same phrase. "We report to each other." In such a ® situation people no longer take their cues from a job description or a supervisor's Instructions. Signals come from the changing demands of the project. Workers learn to focus their individual efforts and collective resources on the work that needs doing, changing as that changes. Managers lose their jobs," too, for their value can be defined only by how they facilitate the work of the project teams or how they contribute to it as a member. No good word exists for the place that an Individual fills in this kind of organization: It isn't a "job', "position' sounds too fixed; "role" sounds too unitary . Whatever it is, it is changing and multiple. It is a package of capabilities, drawn upon variously in different project- based situations. Anything that stands in the way of rapid regrouping has to go. Some of what it takes to run the organization moving beyond jobs is part of the environment: the databases and the networking technology, for example, that make it possible for a delocalized operation to function effectively. Such technology, one of the forces transforming organizations and de jobbing the workplace, is part of the emerging organizational infrastructure. It was out there waiting to be utilized. Not so with the social and cultural infrastructure for this kind of work world. Far less developed, not yet widely embraced. and lagging behind the technical, these nascent infrastructures threaten to undermine the new work world. You cannot run a post-job organization the same way you ran the organization when it was job-based. Policies on work hours, for example, won't be the same. Compensation plans will have to change. New training programs will be needed. A different kind of communication is essential. Careers have to be reconceptualized, and career-development has to be reinvented. New redeployment mechanisms become necessary . And the whole idea and practice of "management" need to be re-created from scratch. Many organizations have experimented with flex- time, job sharing, and telecommuting. but the disappearance of jobs puts all these into a new context. Standardized work hours and places, and the equation of one person and one job, were products of mass production and the government bureaucracies occasioned by it. They were wholly irrelevant to the prejob world and would have been burdensome checks on productivity. Take lob sharing. Work was usually shared in arrangements that varied with the demands of the situation. Only when work was divided up into activity packages and distributed one to a person in the form of jobs did anyone imagine that anything but talent, proximity , strength, and availability would determine who did what and when. Of course once you have divided up the common task into jobs, then anyone whose other responsibilities, physical capabilities, or financial needs make a "whole job" unappealing or unworkable will suggest job sharing. But if jobs disappear, there is no longer any reason to treat ® these eight- hour chunks of effort as the building blocks from which the organizational structure is assembled. Not that job sharing will be permitted in the post job organization much more than that, The issue disappears. Naturally work will be shared People working on more than one project are http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortnne_arciiive/l994/09/1 9/7975 1 /index-htm 5/8/2009