Work without Jobs: How to Reboot Your Organization’s Work Operating System by Ravin Jesuthasan and John W. Boudreau.
John Boudreau is Professor Emeritus of Management and Organization and a Senior Research Scientist with the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California. He holds a Masters and PhD from Purdue University in Industrial Administration.
Ravin is Senior Partner and Global Leader for Transformation Services at Mercer. Previously he was a Managing Director at Willis Towers Watson. He holds an MBA from Western Michigan University and is a Part-time Lecturer at Caltech’s Executive Education Program.
As a follow up to Reinventing Jobs, Ravin and John provide deeper insights for organizations to succeed deploying AI services. Reinventing Jobs certainly revealed the impact of deconstructing ‘work’ to address how to optimize workforce tasks.
However, Work without Jobs is addressing what America has long understood the term “job” and workers hired to perform “tasks” that now clash in the age of AI.
Confronting long held beliefs
In fact, organizations must carefully and strategically deconstruct how AI is changing the very idea and definitions of ”work” and address how to optimize their workforce with various AI services. Ravin and John outline this by introducing a new “work operating system” and outline key principles and components.
Ravin and John simply build upon the automation of banking ATMs. Since the mid 1980s the rollout of ATMs was thought to have been the death call for bank tellers. However by 2002 not only had bank tellers not been eliminated, the number of tellers grew by almost 100,000 across the country.
So, today we can measure the impact of new work arrangements: contractors, freelancers, gig workers, and even employees working on internal projects outside of their job description. Yet, the most impactful lesson is that organizations must reconfigure their current AI plans if they have not first addressed their organization’s “work operating system” as they have fallen victim to the buzz of AI.
Their key insights certainly allow organizational leaders to understand how critical they must address workflows that provide the basis of their organization. These workflows are narrowly focusing on current and future work tasks regardless of their current employee’s ‘jobs’ that were defined perhaps more than 20 years ago. In addition, AI will certainly shift the capabilities of workers to perform these tasks. Here, the idea of training or re-skilling moves front and center. Yet, perhaps at a deeper level how can organizations see AI redefining the most effective work arrangements to engage these new AI capabilities.
So, is your organization ready ?
In conclusion, Work without Jobs is certainly a must read for every organization. Remember how your organiziton first considered how to engage web services 30 years ago? Well much more has evolved since then and leaders must understand how to correctly address this in-house well before even thinking to contract with an AI service.