I was asked the other day why I invest and put my time and money where I do? I told this person that I subscribe to the theory that you can be the person who makes big changes to big things or make little changes to big things that add up to a big change, but it's kind of silly to fool around with anything that only addresses small things.
This is why I am fascinated with the size of the "Work Market". Nearly everyone works, will work, or has worked and while we go up and down economically, this premise won't change. And up until now, the "Work Market" has been approached only on the "enterprise level" bringing tools, processes and programs to the employer, the ones who create the work and hire the worker. And until now, the only outside of the office support or help a worker could get to make them better was what they could find at the local bookstore.
But the world has changed. Today, the "Work Market" is open for those who are doing the work. I first felt the shift when the guys in Austin at 37 Signals created a collaborative project management software called "Basecamp". Companies were slow to offer project management tools and when they did they were heavyweight, clunky and one-size fit all, like Microsoft Project. Workers who couldn't and wouldn't wait started sourcing their own tools and were using Basecamp, inside the firewall, on either their own credit card, or expensing it monthly as a nominal fee. Box and DropBox have grown in the same way. We now have "BYOD", bring your own devices to work. This week I will talk to a group of top HR Leaders that we are now in the "BYOW" era..."Bring Your Own Way" to get these things done.
Every company and their employees are now an open "Work Market" platform that we can build work, productivity, data, prediction, reporting, trending, and whatever else we can think of applications.
Mark Newman, the Founder and CEO of HireVue (one of the HCM companies where I sit on the Board) estimates that there are a billion interviews done a year in the United States. He's probably wrong in that is a low number. Consider just that number as the number of (as Mark likes to call them) "interactions" that are available to capture, improve and provide tools and support. Interviews are a perfect example of BYOW as everyone does an interview in a way that is easy and best for them. But, that haphazard approach is also a part of the problem in why that part of the "Work Market" always feels so broken.
BYOW is not going to stop. The "Work Market" is not shrinking. Who will be the ones to capture the needs and the wants of those who work and those who create and fund the work?
If you are looking for a big market fraught with lots of problems to solve, then look no further than right here.
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From where I sit, the work market is splitting in two. Things that happen with and for global brands (say the Fortune 3500 or so) don't inherently make sense for everyone else. There are maybe 15% of workers in those big, recognizable brands. The rest of us work in a less rarified setting.
What's happened is that those large enterprises have fallen way, way behind in their approaches to work. They may never catch up to newer ideas. That's because those big companies are/were built on industrial models of work.
21st Century work is smaller and more artisan. That means that it will have a haphazard feel to it. The answer isn't to correct those imperfections but to celebrate them, to make them even better at their haphazard-ness.
A bigger question is something like "What will we make up as work when the robots are doing all of the drudgery (and most work is drudgery for most people)?"
Don't get me wrong, the big cos will be around for a long time. And, their employees will have the rarest of commodities, a job. The rest of us will be designing our lives in other ways.
Today, barely 50% of the working age population of the US is working in any traditional sense. In other words, the change is well under way. The move to non-job lifestyles began with Microsoft Office.
So, I bet the next frontier is tools that help to create work
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