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The Top Ten Strategies For Managers O Mobile Workers:
Surviving and Thriving in the Emerging Mobile Workorce
Terrence L. Gargiulo, President, makingstories.net
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The Top Ten Strategies For Managers O Mobile Workers
Where Are We Today?
CIRCA 1980
The hall erupted in a sea o applause. James made his way to the ront o the ballroom.Waiting to shake his hand and give him theesteemed Outstanding Corporate Citizen Award or 37 years o service was the CEO o Typical Enterprises. James Gander was proud to be a third- generation employee. His ather and grandather had worked in the same acility.He would have never guessed that a high school summer job flling bins on a production line would have turned into his current position as an Account Services Manager. Sure, he had seen changes. Assembly had replaced manuacturing, and quality and service had become the cornerstone o the company’scompetitive advantage, but or the most part James had worked with the same group o people. Typical Enterprises was as much a parto James’ amily as his six grandchildren.
CIRCA 2010
Cecilia rubbed her eyes. Getting up at three in the morning or a conerence call halway around the world was never in her job description. It had been days since she had actually seen or talked in person with any o the fty people on her sta. As she typed in theweb address o the virtual meeting she saw an instant message pop up.Tony who had just joined her team six months ago wastexting her his ofcial two-weeks notice. Since he was based in Australia and Cecilia worked in Palo Alto, he had notifed Human Resources on Monday (Sunday or Cecilia) that he would be leaving. Cecilia thought it wasconsiderate o Tony to text her beore the meeting so she would not be blind-sided. She was excited Tony would get a chance to try his hand at a new career. At least she had thirty seconds to collect her thoughts beore announcing the inormation to her team. Days like this made Cecilia wish she could just crawl back into bed. Then she remembered that today she wastelecommuting, so at least she could surround hersel with the comorts o her home as she prepared to tacklewhatever onslaught o fres was sure to come her way.
However disorienting and maddening the pace and rules o our contemporary work lie may be, let’s understanda ew things: there’s no turning back, it doesn’t have to be a bad thing, and there are things you can do to setyoursel up or success even in the ace o all the challenges.Our approach in this white paper will be to tackle the challenges head on. This is not a Pollyanna attempt toconvince you o things you already know. Lie in organizations is dierent.
Background
As the authors Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger pointed out in their classicbook
Clue Train Manifesto
, the boundaries o an organization have become porous. Today’s organizations are parto elaborate interdependent networks o suppliers, partners, vendors, and migrant employees. Forget about thegentle notion o touch points with customers; organizations are bombarded with meteoritic impacts o a socialand economic variety. There are no institutional walls to protect the inner sanctity o organizational practices. According to the authors, this has led to an acceleration o emergent and “smart” markets that in many caseshave outpaced the adaptive capacity o organizations. In other words, the speed o inormation and the numbero interactions between people has made many o our old organizational sense and respond tactics obsolete.By the time we measure or capture the inormation we need to inorm organizational strategy, things have
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The Top Ten Strategies For Managers O Mobile Workers
already changed. Our organizational identities are ragile. Even chameleons and camouaging octopi are not thissensitive.Examining actors leading to competitive advantage over time provides insights into some o the major drivers oorganizational transormations.
FIGURE 1
Each step on this pyramid represents a major shit in the competitive advantage o an organization. Going back tothe turn o the century, economies o scale and manuacturing led to price advantages. When price was equalizedin the market, quality and service became the new dierentiators. Producing widgets with ewer deects and/ or providing value-added services to enhance an enterprises’ product oering allowed them to compete moreeectively.The explosion o inormation technology led to the central role o data in an enterprise. Collecting, disseminating,and managing data in cost-eective ways, aligned with continuous improvement o an organization’s businessprocesses, were key measures o viability and growth. Inormation technology became a critical success actorin evaluating organizations. Organizations unable to leverage automation and inormation technology to reducecosts and realize new opportunities were at a huge disadvantage.The next phase o competitive organizational evolution revolved around knowledge. This has been elusive, partlybecause knowledge in essence is unstructured data. Unlike the 0s and 1s o this document that can be digitallystored as one sel-contained document, knowledge sits in the minds and experiences o people. Thereore,
RelationshipsKnowledgeInformationQuality And ServiceManufacturing
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