In the knowledge economy, employees will own the tools of production- ideas-and hence the work itself.

By Paroma Roy Chowdhury

Work Bertrand Russell once said, ''is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so.'' Had the philosopher-cum-mathematician been alive today, he would have thought twice before dismissing the word 'work' in such simple terms. In the age when Russell was writing his essays, work was a physical chore. A white-collar worker-as much as his blue-collar counterpart in factories-relied on the power of his muscles to execute a task. There were no computers, fax machines, conveyor belts, or CNC machines that could automate work.

The past three decades or so gave us most of that electronic technology, and look at what it has done to work. The humdrum of muscle power has suddenly been replaced by the quietness of cerebral rumination. Even in the most archaic factories of today, 'job' has evolved to mean work that's more than just cutting or grinding a piece of metal. It means being able to operate more than one machine, self-maintain quality, read statistical charts and graphs, and troubleshoot machine problems. The white-collar job has been transformed no less. The employee of a modern corporation no longer pushes paper from in-box to out-box. Instead, he must co-ordinate with all the constituents of the corporation (like suppliers, customers, and even other employees), communicate, analyse, and make vital decisions-typically, in that order.

Tomorrow, the order will change. Sophisticated infotech systems will automatically take care of the co-ordination and communication bit. It will even crunch mountains of discrete sets of information to throw up intelligent patterns.

The biggest challenge to the employee at Future Inc. would lie in the way he chooses to use that information. In other words, the worker@futureinc.com would be a knowledge worker; in varying degrees, he or she would need to seek ways of constantly adding value to the task at hand. Says Shailesh Shah, Managing Consultant, at compensation consultancy firm Watson Wyatt: ''Employees would need to look at jobs as entrepreneurial assignments, and employers should treat them accordingly.'' Agrees Jagdeep Khandpur, Director (HR), Bharti Televentures: ''We will need internal entrepreneurs who can be given larger responsibilities and asked to combine strategic and operational roles, and it won't be limited to the senior levels.

Work As Strategy

Clues to the future of work lie in the past and the present. Way back in 1986, McKinsey's Amsterdam office estimated that by 2000, 60 per cent of the jobs in Europe would require cerebral skills. Pick up any pink daily today. What do you see? BT analysed classified postings for more than a month in three top financial dailies, and found that more than 90 per cent of the jobs on offer required high skill levels, typically in the area of infotech. Sure, there was the odd marketing or operational job, but even those required a formal degree in the concerned technology. And postings for stenographers, low-end accountants, shopfloor supervisors, or foremen were virtually non-existent.

Clearly, the focus is on work that adds higher value to the organisation; work that is specialised and not easily duplicable by competitors. The work of tomorrow will demand a high degree of formal education or foundation skills, on-the-job learning, and more of cutting-edge knowledge accumulation. But critical still will be competency skills; the ability to use computers for processing information (information skills); understand systems, correct performance, and improve and design systems (process skills); select technology and apply it to a task (technology skills); negotiation skills; leadership skills; and the ability to work with diversity, and to teach and share skills with others. Underlines Riju Vashisht, General Manager (hr), Whirlpool Corporation: ''As organisations like us shift from being product-based to knowledge-based, there will be a corresponding shift in skill profiles, with the accent on knowledge, change, and diversity management.''

Why is the work profile changing? The answers are to be found in the way businesses and their consumers have transformed over the years. On the one hand, technology is increasingly becoming a part of all that a society uses and consumes in its day-to-day life. Be it cars, clothes, food, healthcare, shopping, or banking. Developing and delivering such products or services require higher skill levels. In other words, an organisation's competitiveness will lie not in its ability to source raw materials, cheap capital, or good workers, but in its ability to build, enhance, share, and leverage knowledge; in knowing how to do things better than its competitors. Already, the population of workers engaged in mechanical, blue-collar jobs in developed countries like America has halved to 20 per cent in just four decades leading up to the 1990s. The pace of decline will only accelerate in the future. In fact, a third of all jobs in the US is now believed to belong to knowledge workers-a phrase that itself was coined barely four decades ago.

On the other hand, marketers are increasingly getting pushed to offer better products with better quality at lower prices year after year. There are more competitors-global as much as local-than ever before; the different needs of disparate markets must be married to the inflexibility of the mass-production systems, failing which new methods must be developed. All that requires a better understanding of the consumer, better planning, better utilisation of resources, better manufacturing, and better marketing. And who will shoulder the onus of constant innovation and improvement? The corporation's value creators; in other words, its employees. Notes Mahendra Swarup, Executive Director (HR), Pepsico India: ''Increasingly, managers across all levels will be evaluated and rewarded for their strategic skills and executional excellence will be a given.''

Work As Ownership

Work in the new millennium may continue to be done in the quiet cubicles of today, but its scope will widen considerably, and so will the degree of accountability and ownership. Why? Simply because the knowledge worker will own the 'tools of production'-the ideas. In the industrial era, all the resources and tools-be it the factory, raw materials, machines, or even the blue overalls-were owned by the employer. But since the raw material of future work will change, the only person who will be able to ensure its optimal utilisation will be the employee himself. Also, since the future corporation will be populated by fewer employees, but with higher skills, they will be expected to 'own' their functional responsibilities. In a market with increasingly lesser time-to-market, the cost of failure or correction will be staggering. Therefore, to achieve the specified goal within the budgeted time and money, the worker would need to accept and establish control over all related processes. Agrees Deepak Dhawan, Director (Stragetic Planning), Eicher: ''Careers will have to be broadbased, without concentrating on either strategic or operational skills. A team of people or an individual will have the entire responsibility for a full process, from development to implementation to improvement.''

Partnering, meshing of strategic and operational responsibilities, juggling of roles, and seamless teams will spell the end of traditional workflow models based on broad, non-quantifiable goals, departmental and functional targets. Already, most companies have started looking at work differently-through the window of short, attributable and measurable projects, with distinct time-frames, quality measures, and cost parameters. Says Aquil Busrai, Executive Director (HR) India and SAARC countries, Motorola: ''Work will be a series of small projects that would be measured in terms of vision and implementability and rewarded accordingly.''

Motorola has started practising that in its software division. Even individual jobs are being looked at in terms a series of discontinuous projects. For instance, at Coca-Cola (India), the remuneration manager worked out a performance and market-led package last year for each relevant job grade. This year, she is working out packages driven by flexibility, which will be followed by individual market and value pricing. Confirms Nalin Miglani, Vice-President (HR), Coca-Cola: ''In specific terms, people will move from one project to another constantly and in shorter and shorter cycles.''

Working smarter would mean not just doing a given job well, but also stretching it into a mini profit-making project. Tapping opportunities that allow yield value to the overall corporate work. For example, today, a marketing manager entrusted with the task of putting together a marketing meet may consider his job well done if the meeting goes through without a hitch. Tomorrow, that would be a bare minimum; to score extra points on the performance chart, he would have needed to create a profit stream by, say, roping in advertisers at the venue. Similarly, an accountant's value to the organisation would lie not in his superlative ability to manage the books. Rather, it would be in his ability to create superior work processes (for, accounting will continue to be governed by legal rules) and transplant them throughout the organisation or across group companies. It could even be in tapping third-party projects to turn the division from an overhead to a profit-centre.

Work As Synthesis

Less strategic-operational divide means no functional boundaries either. Job roles will blur across the globe and India is no exception. Says Sanjiv Sachar, CEO, Egon Zehnder: ''Work in this millennium will be characterised by multiplicity of roles and connectivity between functions. Managers would be required to move across functions, across industries with ease.'' The accent will be on seamless merging of functional roles, both to provide a sharper business focus and groom fewer employees for larger responsibilities across industry sectors. The pluses: increased learning and enriched job role for people and lesser numbers for employers. At Reebok (India), multiplicity of roles has been a given right from the start and will be an even more pronounced feature in the future. The company's CFO Manish Dawar is also the country manager for the Rockport brand. At Tupperware, Gaganpreet Uppal, Director (Finance), handles hr, legal, and audit functions as well. At Marico, a five-layer reporting structure limits vertical mobility. To counter this, the company enriches jobs by adding layers of responsibility and encourages functional mobility. The former hr head Jeswant Nair, was also CEO (Sales). Says Rakesh Pandey, Chief hr Officer, Marico: ''This is increasingly going to be the norm in all organisations.''

Physical teams apart, virtual teams will drive specific projects. Already, advanced communication technology has made it possible for people from different locations to combine skills and work together on projects, and increasingly that will be the norm, given the cost of physically relocating employees. In Motorola India, a 16-member team, spread over nine countries is working on a non-unionised factory model under the stewardship of hr Director Aquil Busrai, who has India and SAARC country responsibilities. Such teams are rampant in technical functions in the company as well. ''Work will increasingly come to people, rather than people going out for work,'' says Busrai. At Agilent Technologies, formerly h-p owned and now spun-off, the electronic product solutions group is spread over four countries as is the employee education team.

Work synthesis would also involve matching long-term personal goals with choice of work. For example, more and more people will want to choose careers that allow them to, say, retire by the age of 45. Someone may want to work only six months a year, and spend the other six touring the world. Sure, there will be trade-offs involved in such decisions, but the point is that work in future will allow such flexibilities. Why? In the knowledge economy, corporations' need for knowledge workers will be more than the workers' need for employers. Adds Himanshu Jani, Director (HR), Asia-Pacific, Agilent Technologies: ''Factors like location, and physical presence will be immaterial in employment decisions.''

Work As New Leadership

The future will see smart work, smart roles, and smart teams. But who will orchestrate the process? The (wo)man in the corner room naturally. Underlines Smita Anand, Head (Organisational Change Practice), PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC): ''The leadership paradigms will have to change drastically. Trust will have to replace paranoia.'' Exactly. Flat, hierarchy-less structures, virtual teams, and connected workers will ensure that supervision is replaced by empowerment and command by participation. Focus on teams will demand coaching rather than coercion, or even charisma. New economy organisations and start-ups will ask for comfort with ambiguity. And all this without deviating from performance focus. Affirms Ganesh Ayyar, President, Hewlett-Packard India (H-P): ''The CEO of the future will have to be a team player and a facilitator above anything else. But without losing focus on performance and shareholder value.''

Leader As Team Player: Gone are the days when the leader barked instructions from his corner room and his minions scurried to carry them out. The new leader will work and play with his team, and as a hands-on participant in tomorrow's organisation. At Polaris, CMD Arun Jain often sits with junior programmers, working on tricky problems. At internet service provider and portal Mantra, CEO Atul Kunwar has open doors, does not permit 'sir'ing and has no qualms about asking the junior-most employee about something that he does not know. At the old economy ICI India, Managing Director Aditya Narayan is determinedly 'Adit' to his employees, and prefers smoking on stairwells with them to formal meetings. The Ericsson Head, Jan Campbell, is a hands-on chief executive who leads by example. At Reebok, Managing Director Siddharth Varma admittedly follows a Panchayati Raj system of mutual reporting among functional heads. Says Deepak Gupta, CEO, at search firm Korn/Ferry: ''In future, if the CEO does not relate and participate, he will cease to be a CEO forthwith.''

Leader As Coach: In future, the onus will firmly be on empowerment and facilitation, and not on the top-down chain-of-command. Says Sanjay Kapoor, CEO, Airtel (Cellular Service Provider): ''The onus has moved from the top to the organisation at large. Employees demand empowerment and get it too.'' Accordingly, job structures in Airtel are nebulous and strategy-building is not a preserve of the CEO alone. At Wipro, project leaders are emerging from within teams by dint of skills and technical competency rather than seniority, after it was found that relationship problems led to at least 10 per cent of the attrition. Confirms Dileep Ranjekar, Executive Vice-President (HR), Wipro: ''Leaders cannot impose. At best, they can facilitate and earn respect by their skills.'' The former h-p President Suresh Rajpal was famous for his coaching style. ''He could talk you out of any problem and you invariably came back energised,'' says Raj Kumar Rishi, Small and Medium Business Manager, h-p India.

Leader As Rule-Breaker: A run-of-the-mill engineer-MBA-come-up-the-ranks CEO will not do in future. For, the Future Inc. leader will need to steer his team through business and market ambiguity. All this needs relative youth-a Korn/Ferry study puts the average age of a new-age CEO at 39-comfort with risk-taking, relevant experience to operate in a technology-driven business environment, an ability to break with traditional work paradigms and the energy to evangelise their companies. Emphasises Neeraj Roy, 31, CEO, hungama.com, a Mumbai-based internet branding consultancy: ''Given the uncertainty and the hectic work schedules, the new leader must have a high degree of personal energy and passion to enthuse his people and show an inclination to break some rules.''

Leader As Performance-Driver: Participating, coaching, breaking rules-does this mean performance will have no focus for tomorrow's CEOs with organisations opting for a free-for-all stance? Hardly. As Tarun Sheth, Senior Consultant at hr consultancy firm Shilputsi, points out: ''Performance focus has to come from the corner office. If there is no clear direction, the company tends to become lax.'' At Eicher, for instance, Chairman Vikram Lal's abdication had led to a situation of confusion and lacklustre performance, which the company is now trying to outgrow.

Employee focus is indistinct from performance focus, says Ayyar of H-P, where employee performance is monitored and rewarded thrice a year. In addition, Ayyar is also a business leader and his appraisal takes his business performance into account. At American Express Travel Related Services (TRS), a leader is appraised on thought or idea leadership, result leadership, relationship leadership or customer focus and people leadership, along with a 360 degree appraisal on leadership competencies. Says Sanjay Rishi, Country Manager, Amex TRS: ''The idea is to ensure a comprehensive talent assessment, with focus on performance.''

Leader As Profit Maximiser: Along with performance focus, the key driver for the CEO of future will also be profit maximisation and creation of shareholder value. Says Miglani of Coca-Cola: ''Profit maximisation, rather than span of control, will decide the leader's course of action and, accordingly, the organisation design. Organisations will be amalgamations of profit-making entities with leaders emerging at business levels.'' Coca-Cola's restructuring in India has just done that by creating six regions with six regional operations directors, each of whom has six assistant general managers-who act as profit centre heads-reporting in to them. The structure has decentralised the company and vested control with regions rather than the centre, giving a regional focus to business and maximising earnings by catering to customers better. At LG Electronics, branch managers act as business managers who are responsible for the entire delivery chain from supply to sales. At Hindustan Lever, product categories have been split up to offer its young managers the opportunity to run businesses, and a venture capital fund has been created to encourage intrapreneurship. Says Gupta of Korn/Ferry: ''Leaders will have to be entrepreneurs and encourage their managers to act as micro-entrepreneurs.''

The new leader will combine roles. The new work will straddle functions, industries, and boundaries. And both will combine to create new workers, new work styles, new organisational structures, new career and performance paradigms, and new ways of balancing work and life.

-Additional reporting by Aparna Ramalingam, Jaya Basu, 
Nitya Varadarajan, & Vinod Mahanta

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