Mass Career Customization

SEVEN

Living in a Lattice World

Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey.

—Cynthia Ozick

All organizations either adapt to change or deal with the consequences of stagnation. Change can be about the trivial things, such as the rituals of the business lunch. Up through the early 1980s, for example, employees often were expected to linger with clients over three-martini lunches; few organizations today would think to mandate their employees’ liquor consumption with valued clients (except perhaps to forbid it!).

Or change can be about the big things, such as technologies that impact how, where, and when people work. When the Internet first became accessible to people in the mid-1990s, many ...