SMS, email, voice-mail, Blackberry, Twitter, FaceBook, Linkedin- have any of these technological tethers that binds you to your work in an always-on 24/7 global economy disturbed your personal time ?  If the answer is yes- you are not alone. And what will work be like in the future ?

In the September 2009 edition of the IEEE Spectrum , Susan Hassler explores this issue in the article "Working In an Always-On World".  Big businesses, entertainment companies and even politicians are trying to work their strategies to counter as Hassler writes :

Entertainment and publishing giants like Walt Disney Co., Sony, and News Corp. are struggling to figure out how to make money in a world where people are served up an endless buffet of free news, information, and entertainment, anywhere, all the time. Public relations and marketing firms are scrambling to respond to the Twitter/Facebook effect, which lets companies talk directly to consumers and vice versa, 24 hours a day, without having to go through flacks and marketers.

Telecommunications and computer companies as always are striving to deliver the most flops or baud in the smallest, cheapest, cleverest appliances. But now they’re doing it in an environment in which anything less than a killer app has a shelf life of less than a year. Ouch.

Even politicians are chastened. Speaking at the meeting, former U.S. presidential candidate Howard Dean said that while President Obama’s use of new Web tools put him in the White House, these same tools have the potential to “put politicians out of business.” Citizens, Dean went on to say, may not need politicians to get things done anymore. They can organize for themselves, whenever and wherever they want to.

But what about the rest of us ?  There are many schools of thought as Hassler further explains:

Some say it will be a lot like it is today, only more so. Organizational theorists like Thomas W. Malone, of MIT’s Sloan School of Management and author of The Future of Work, believes that any job that involves parsing or creating knowledge will be carried out by “e-lancers” who will rarely go to an office. No more sweating in traffic jams, but the already-shrinking divide between work and personal life will continue to disappear.

Others think offices will remain important, but that embedded sensors and intelligent agents, combined with high-powered search technologies, will make some kinds of knowledge work obsolete. Machines will research, collect, sort, update, and weight information. People will decide what to do with it next.

E-lancing-  that would be a good career move, eh ?

More here.

In his new book What You Don't Know: How Great Leaders Prevent Problems Before They Happen, author Michael A. Roberto explains that the true problem-finders are characterised by three key skills- intellectual curiosity, systemic thinking and a healthy sense of paranoia.

According to Roberto , a management professor at Bryant University at Rhode Island , US problem-finding requires a certain amount of intellectual curiosity.  He argues, “You must have a restless mind, one that is never satisfied with its understanding of a topic -- no matter how much expertise and experience you have accumulated on the subject. You must have the instinct to explore puzzling questions that may challenge the conventional wisdom. You have to resist deferring to the experts who may feel that a particular matter is closed, that the knowledge base on that subject is complete and certain. Perhaps most importantly, you must be willing to question your own prior judgments and conclusions. “

Secondly, problem-finders Prof Roberto tells us should embrace systemic thinking. He says, “Successful problem-finders not only exhibit a curious mindset, but they also embrace systemic thinking. They recognize that small problems often do not occur due to the negligence or misconduct of an individual. Instead, small errors frequently serve as indicators of broader systemic issues in the organization. Effective problem-­finders do not rush to find fault and assign blame when they spot a mistake being made. They step back and question why that error occurred. They ask whether more fundamental organizational problems have created the conditions that make that small error more likely to occur. Effective problem-finders recognize that you might fire the person who made an error on the front lines, but if you do not address the underlying systemic issues, the same errors will occur again and again. Firing someone who made a mistake without identifying the systemic problem does not constitute effective problem-finding; it simply means that you have found a convenient scapegoat.”

Finally, on having a sense of healthy paranoia, Prof Roberto elaborates, “Andy Grove, former Chairman and CEO of Intel, once wrote a book titled, Only the Paranoid Survive. In the preface, he described himself as quite a worrier. He said that he worried about everything from manufacturing problems to competitive threats to the failure to attract and retain the best talent. Many concerns kept him up at night. Grove argued that he believed fervently in the value of paranoia. He felt that leaders must never allow themselves to get comfortable, no matter how successful they had become. They had to devise ways of staying in touch with those in the organization who were willing to challenge the conventional wisdom, and who might alert them to bad news.”

So there you have it,  add these skills to your management tool set - intellectual curiosity, systemic thinking and a healthy dose of paranoia - to successfully counter modern organisational challenges.

source:  Knowledge@Wharton