The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style and Your Life

For more than a decade, business thinkers have theorized about how technology will change the shape of organizations. In this landmark book, renowned organizational theorist Thomas Malone, codirector of MIT's "Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century" initiative, provides the first credible model for actually designing the company of the future.

Based on twenty years of groundbreaking research, The Future of Work foresees a workplace revolution that will dramatically change organizational structures and the roles employees play in them. Malone argues that current notions about decentralization merely scratch the surface of what will be possible as technological and economic forces make "command and control" management increasingly less useful.

In its place will be a more flexible "coordinate and cultivate" approach that will spawn new types of decentralized organizations-from internal markets to democracies to loose hierarchies. These future structures will reap the scale and knowledge efficiencies of large organizations while enabling the freedom, flexibility, and human values that drive smaller firms.

Exploring the skills managers will need in a workplace in which the power to decide belongs to everyone, this optimistic book shows how we can help create a world that is not just richer, but better.

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Good Overview - but no "Ah Ha" moments, 2008-12-02
The book's title is somewhat misleading, in that the discussion revolves predominantly around the impact and changes possbile by increased information flow and distributed decision making. Malone does a nice job of providing a general overview of the hsitory of centralized and decentralized management, the reasons for each, and the factors impacting the approaches. However, the book really lacks that "ah ha" revelation that would have made the rating a 4 or a 5. Maybe it is because the book, now 4 years old, is starting to show its age and Malone was somewhat prescient in his predictions - or maybe it is just good common sense on his part. Either way, an OK read for the manager - but certainly not a must read.


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Great Book on the Future, 2008-12-02
I loved it get it and get Gary Hamel The future of management, these 2 books are the best I have read on this topic and by far explain the future of our world!


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Interesting thoughs about future organizations, 2008-07-29

Thomas Malone's book is a this book describing his thinking about the future of organizations. It's well researched, but a little short and contains a couple of interesting concepts, though most has been covered by other books.

The book consists of three parts. The first part describes centralization and decentralization. The second part different organizational models and the third part the change in management practices when moving to more decentralized organizations.

I actually liked the first part most. It contained a lot of interesting information about the history of humans and their evolution from decentralization to centralization and back to decentralization. Tom argues that one of the major reasons for this evolutions is the dropping costs of communication. I agree wit him that this must have a big influence.

The second part of the book describes different organizations. It starts with loose hierarchies, like Linux development. Then democracies and gives the examples of WL Gore. The last examples are most extreme and most interesting, markets of small companies and markets within companies. I liked the ideas, though sometimes felt the grouping in these categories was somewhat random.

The third part talks about switching from command-and-control management to cultivate-and-coordinate management. One chapter about coordination and one chapter about creating the environment for people to work. Here the book also refers to the distributed leadership research Tom was involved in. The last chapter in this part talks about values and different purpose (than making money) for organizations.

I liked the book, though it did not contain very much new ideas. For a book called "future of work", I was slightly disappointed. It was well researched and gives a good start in this area.

Why four stars? Well, the book was still good. I liked this book more than another book on the topic recently published "Starfish and the Spider," so to reflect that, I decided to go for four stars instead of three. If you are interest in speculation about the future of work, this is a good book.


1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

The future of work: democracy and low cost communication, 2007-12-17
The name behind the book has an excellent reputation in the field of organisational theory. Thomas W. Malone is a co-director of MIT's initiative "Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century"; he wrote this book based on twenty years of research.

The Future of Work is proposing a series of arguments demonstrating that the world is on a large scale organisational shift caused by the evolution of technology and communication. To put it simply, the massive drop in the cost of communications triggers a transition from a centralised governing system to a de-centralised model - essentially, a democratic society. The organisational model occurs in larges systems such as countries and transnationals but also in smaller businesses.


The book becomes suddenly captivating when Thomas Malone talks about various types of decentralisation structures: loose hierarchies, democracies, external and internal markets. I found the latter fascinating. Thomas Malone provides concrete examples of companies that run various experiments using the market structure. It is one of the most intriguing developments and whoever follows the financial markets would have to agree with this. Applying market models to organisational structures to stimulate creativity, participation and loyalty using various types of currency other than monetary entities, is one of the most fascinating propositions. There seems to be an immense realisation potential that has only started to manifest in structures such as eBay, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc.

Of course, these models require some conditions. While the book offers a list of rules and ideas, for obvious reasons, if a business wants to implement a decentralised model, it needs to employ services of high calibre consultants and it needs to look carefully at its own realities before committing to anything of this nature. The culture of the organisation is the key to success. People, people and people again are most important. Making the transition from hierarchical CONTROL to a culture based on cooperation and CULTIVATION is a quantum leap.

The book has a non-spectacular ending. I had this nagging feeling that some pages are there to fill the space and the author was dragging on and on repeating some ideas in a very flat manner. The book has 214 pages, without the index and the table of content, from which 20 pages are notes with references. That is more than 10% of the whole book. If you are a researcher in the domain, probably the book is more useful to you than to a casual reader interested in general history of organisation and analysis of trends in the global workforce. Overall, I learned quite a few things from this book and I am happy with the time I spent reading it.



6 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

Light, Western-bias, but worthwhile, 2005-11-11

The bottom line in this book is on page 33, with a table showing how the cost of moving a page of text around the world and to an infinite number of people has gone from astronomical to zero. In the author's view, this changes everything.

The book is somewhat shallow, written for undergraduates, and very western in bias--as I ranted to Interval in 1993 ("God, Man, and Interval" easily found via Google), until these benefits can reach every impoverished individual in the world, so that they can begin using information access to create wealth, then we are simply in isolation.

Interestingly, the zero cost of communications comes at the same time that we pass the "peak oil" point and the end of cheap oil, the end of free water, and the rise of pandemic disease.

In that vein, I give the author high marks, taking the book to 4 stars from 3, for his emphasis on values. There is an ethical underpining to this book that is helpful. There is a broad literature, some recognized by the author, others not, that suggests that we made a very serious mistake when we disconnected work from kinship, and commoditized the human employee. The gutting of the pension funds and the destruction of local production in the face of Wal-Mart using cheap oil to ship US jobs overseas are just the latest examples of how our loss of perspective and ethics at the top of the food chain has hurt our economy and our people.

I believe that the author is on target with his emphasis on communications, but he does not address the other half of the equation, "sense-making" or collective intelligence. For that aspect I recommend Howard Rheingold's "Smart Mobs," and Tom Atlee's "The Tao of Democracy." General Alfred M. Gray, then Commandant of the Marine Corps, drove this point home to Congress in the late 1980's when he said that the Marine Corps, alone among the military services, had communications and intelligence under the same flag officer "because communications without intelligence is noise, and intelligence without communications is irrelevant." You need both.

One important point the author does not cover since he avoids addressing the needs of the Third World is this: the Department of Defense has enormous stores of abandoned communications satellite "residual capability," that last 10-20% of a satellite that has been junked in favor of a newer fancier model. My Air Force colleagues tell me that a national project to make that capability available free could support T-1 connectivity across Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean, Central America, and South America.

Unfortunately, the U.S. Government is not yet in the information age, and not yet able to realize that it is Internet connectivity to all, not guns over all, that will bring peace and prosperity to the Earth. I do believe this author understands that, and I hope he expands his vision to embrace intelligence, and global access.

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