The Future of Work: Attract New Talent, Build Better Leaders, and Create a Competitive Organization

Chapter 8The Organization of Today

Around 100 to 150 years ago many people worked for themselves as blacksmiths, carpenters, masons, or one of the many other jobs around at that time. Education also wasn't the primary driver for getting a job, schooling for many jobs was actually irrelevant. What was important was the ability to get an apprenticeship where you can learn skills and get training. Today education takes precedence. An entire book could easily be written about (and many have) the issues and challenges with our present-day education system and why organizations are so focused on hiring people who earned a piece of paper from a university, but that's a whole separate topic. For the most part, organizations as we know them today started growing around the time Henry Ford started his automotive empire close to 100 years ago. This is what many consider to be the creation of a true company.

Organizations were not created with the idea of change and adaptability in mind. Instead they were created to be immovable fortresses, impenetrable by any force or any competitor. After all, it was not possible to predict the changes that we see today nor the continued increase in the rate of change that is taking our organizations into the future. Organizations were not constructed in an adaptable way, so they tend to break apart or fracture in a rapidly changing world. Companies like Blockbuster, Loehmann's, Borders, Research in Motion, and others are examples of companies that have ...