“There’s an unmistakeable zen about the place. Staff aren’t allowed to take phone calls on the office floor – instead they must slip into a nearby meeting room.”
“The sharing economy is used to describe more than exchange; it refers to a ‘socio-economic system’. It involves a spectrum of activity based on maximising the potential of our underused human and physical resources, from our skills to our things.”
Thomas Davenport and Julia Kirby offer five career strategies that treat the threat of automation as an opportunity for augmentation.
“Seattle became the first U.S. city to pass collective bargaining legislation on Monday. Unions pose a new kind of threat to Uber and Lyft’s businesses, which connect riders with freelance drivers through a smartphone application. While the companies have been facing legal battles around the U.S. to reclassify drivers as employees and offer benefits, the new Seattle law bypassed that issue in favor of a focus on allowing them to organize into a union, giving drivers more weight in negotiations. A similar bill is expected to be introduced in California as soon as next month, according to the Los Angeles Times.”
“Perhaps most important to the future of IoT in the workplace is rethinking the workplace… The challenge is to connect everything without losing human interaction—that old chestnut of having people around the table but they’re all staring at their smartphones. [Sam Yen, chief design officer at enterprise tech and software giant SAP]’s task as a designer is to avoid that isolation and humanize technology, using it as a way to get teams together and preserve the human feeling of teamwork, even if they’re not physically together.”
“The over-arching implication from [McKinsey’s] research into automating tasks is that roles will be redesigned and organizations will have to become very good at understanding where machines can do a better job, where humans have the edge, and how to reinvent processes to make the most of both types of talent. The largest benefits of information technology accrue to organizations that analyze their processes carefully to determine how smart machines can enhance and transform them—rather than organizations that simply automate old activities. This is a lesson that it took us a long time to learn in earlier IT revolutions and that bears repeating.”
“in order to attract and retain high-calibre employees, companies need to foster a more collaborative environment. This might involve hot-desking, ideas workshops and regularly switching teams. Not only do employees respond well to this style of working, but corporations benefit too as it better equips them to compete with the startups that are disrupting their business.”