TIME EUROPE
May 29, 2000 VOL. 155 NO. 21
What Will We Do for Work?
By TOM PETERS
I believe that 90% of white-collar jobs in the U.S. will be either destroyed or altered beyond recognition in the next 10 to 15 years. That's a catastrophic prediction, given that 90% of us are engaged in white-collar work of one sort or another. Even most manufacturing jobs these days are connected to such white-collar services as finance, human resources and engineering.
I talked to an old London dockhand some time back. He allowed as how in 1970 it took 108 guys about five days to unload a timber ship. Then came containerization. The comparable task today takes eight folks one day. That is, a 98.5% reduction in man-days, from 540 total to just eight.
This time the productivity tool kit aims, belatedly, to reconstruct — make that deconstruct — the white-collar world. In fact, I see a five-sided pincer movement that will bring to fruition my apparently bizarre "90% in 10 years" prognostication.
FIRST The destructive nature of the current flavor of competition, dotcoms. Sure, most will fail. But the survivors will exert enormous pressure — fast! — on the Big Guys. When an Amazon or a Charles Schwab moves into your neighborhood, you've got moments to react. Or take king entrepreneur Jim Clark of Netscape fame. His latest venture, Healtheon/WebMD, intends to squeeze hundreds of billions of dollars of waste out of the health-care system. These new firms aim to create nothing less than havoc in the theaters in which they operate.
SECOND Enterprise software. It's a jargony name for the tools that will hook up every aspect of a business's innards — personnel, production, sales, accounting — and then hook up all that hooked-up stuff to the rest of the "family" of suppliers and the suppliers' suppliers and wholesalers and retailers and end users.
They are your nightmare, these "white-collar robots." The complex products from German software giant SAP will do to your company's innards exactly what forklifts and robots and containerization did to the blue-collar world circa 1960. Installing these tools is not easy. The technical part is harrowing; the politics are horrendous. When the blue-collar robots arrived, the unions raised hell. This time it's management bureaucrats who are turning Luddite. Why? These tools threaten their cozy baronies, carefully crafted over several generations.
But the robots did come. And they triumphed.
THIRD Outsourcing. M.I.T.'s No. 1 computer guru, Michael Dertouzos, said India could easily boost its gdp by a trillion dollars in the next few years performing backroom white-collar tasks for Western companies. He guessed that 50 million jobs from the white-collar West could go south to India, whose population hit 1 billion last week. The average annual salary for each of those 50 million new Indian workers: $20,000.
FOURTH The Web. Ford, GM and DaimlerChrysler announce a rare hookup. They will link all their tens of thousands of suppliers into a single, Internet-based network. This entity will encompass $250 billion annually of suppliers' products (and perhaps an additional $500 billion of those suppliers' suppliers' products). In short, every penny of waste will be wrung from the mammoth procurement system. The order cycle will speed up dramatically. Medibuy aims for the same hat trick in medical supplies, DigitalThink in training, CarStation in the auto-body-shop world. This is the white-hot world of B2B (business to business) electronic commerce, which will soon encompass trillions upon trillions of dollars in transactions.
FIFTH Time compression. It took 37 years for the radio to get to 50 million homes. The Web got there in four. Hence my belief that while it took about a century to revolutionize blue-collar job practices, this brave new white-collar regime will be mostly installed in a tenth of that time — 10 years.
Each of these five forces is fact, not supposition. Each influences the others multiplicatively. Therefore my unwillingness to back off my predictions about the power of the white-collar tsunami bearing down on us. Unsettling madness is afoot. Especially if I'm a 48-year-old white-collar staff member or middle manager entombed in a corporate tower in Manhattan or Miami or Milan.
Yet these forces are liberating. Blue-collar robots took the grunt work out of factory and warehouse and dockside. The same will happen to white-collar work. Just as workin' the line at U.S. Steel was no walk in the park in 1946, passing papers in the tower is no great joy. My dad did it for 41 years at the Baltimore Gas & Electric Co. He was, sad to say, a white-collar indentured servant.
The world is going through more fundamental change than it has in hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. The head economist at Sandia National Laboratories, Arnold Baker, said it's the "biggest change since the cavemen began bartering." Do you want to be a player, a full-scale participant who embraces change? Here is the opportunity to participate in the lovely, messy playground called "Let's reinvent the world."
Here's a new role model I call Icon Woman:
- She is turned on by her work!
- The work matters!
- The work is cool!
- She is "in your face"!
- She is an adventurer!
- She is the CEO of her life!
- She is not God. She is not the Bionic Woman. She is determined to make a difference! (Dilbert would be appalled, no doubt.)
My Icon Woman, of course, embraces and exploits the Web.
- She submits her résumé on the Web and keeps it perpetually active there.
- She is recruited and negotiates and is hired on the Web.
- She is trained on the Web.
- She creates and conducts scintillating projects on the Web via a far-flung "virtual" stable of teammates (most of whom she's never met).
- She manages her career and reputation-building efforts on the Web. And she has a fab personal website!
But what — exactly? — will she actually do?
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