-- By John Kador
There always comes a moment in time when a door opens and lets the future
in.
-- Graham Greene
Amazing things happen when work collides with the Web. Everything we have
ever learned about work from watching TV or watching our parents turns out
to be irrelevant. The most basic concepts of work-jobs, time, loyalty,
compensation, experiences-have been permanently redefined.
The Web exposes work for what it is, reminding us of what our earliest
ancestors knew. In the agricultural period of human history, work was
conspicuously tied to survival. If you didn't work and grow crops, you
would starve to death and you would die. People saw that work was directly
linked to a product that was directly consumed.
The Industrial period, the next wave of human history, unlinked work from
its purpose. Most people performed tasks in exchange for wages. Most
people had little or no say about the nature of the tasks, how to do them,
or even why they needed to be done. The wages, in turn, were used to
purchase products and services produced by other people who similarly had
little or no connection to what they produced. Although the lot of working
people in industrialized nations improved during this period, it was not
without cost or turmoil. One of the most unfortunate costs of disengaging
work from its purpose was the disconnect between life and work that many
people still experience today.
In a fundamentally new way, the Web offers the possibility of connecting us
to our jobs. It reconnects jobs to what matters to people: creativity,
meaning, responsibility, and humanity. By bringing buyers and sellers
together, by rendering irrelevant the tyranny of time and space, the Web
allows people to express their creativity, create wealth, and do it with a
level of personal power, responsibility, and authority that has not been
seen since humans invented the plow and domesticated beasts of burden.
In all of this, well-accepted beliefs and assumptions about the nature of
work and business have been turned topsy-turvy. Most of all, the Web has
completely transformed the balance of power between employees and employers,
buyers and sellers, organizations and individuals. In every case, the Web
has shifted the balance of power. Today, employees, buyers, and individuals
call the shots.
More Power to Employees
Concentrations of capital, raw materials, and transportation channels fuel
the growth of industrial organizations. E-businesses are fueled by one
thing only: creative, talented people. E-business leaders know that people
can go anywhere. Which means that their biggest challenge isn't the
competition for products. It's the competition for human resources. The
number one competency for companies such as Microsoft or Computer Associates
International is recruitment and retention.
Are you a talented, creative person? Guess what? That means the balance of
power has shifted to your side. You may not know it, but it's a fact. You
get to exercise a degree of personal autonomy in your job search and career
that is absolutely unprecedented. Let's assume you have the right
combination of talent, competencies, and attitude. In a seller's market for
talent, you get to shop for the right boss, the right colleagues, and the
right environment. In the old economy, it was a buyer's market.
Enterprises had more people than slots, and the question they asked was "Why
should we hire you?" In the Net Economy, there are more opportunities
searching for talented people and there are no slots anymore. Now the
question is, "What else can we tell you so that you will lend us your
allegiance?"
More Power to Buyers
For a number of reasons, the Net Economy shifts the balance of power from
sellers to buyers. Buyers are increasingly calling the shots, from telling
sellers what their products are worth to dictating the way the sellers
format their catalogs. Most of all, consumers expect to be presented with
the highest levels of operational excellence. They insist on being treated
as valued partners; as discerning members of a community in which they have
a right to be well informed.
Companies soon saw that the Net catalyzed a change from the one-to-many
relationships corporations knew to a New World of one-to-one customer
management. It suddenly became possible for companies such as Cisco and
Schwab to manage unique relationships with each of its customers. That
possibility, in turn, inexorably changed many transactional relationships
into transformational relationships, characterized by an aligning of
interests that would have been thought impossible a few years earlier.
Enterprises such as Onsale and eBay are representative of firms exploiting
one-to-one transformative relationships.
At the same time, the Net Economy redefines every assumption about dealing
with customers. Consider the strategy of customer relationship management
(CRM). The Net Economy will throw this well-intentioned but unworkable
management discipline on its ears. That's because with Net Ready customers
having so many options to choose from in any product or service category, it
is most certainly not the customer who's being managed. That's way too
passive. In the Net Economy, it's the customer who gets to manage the
relationship. Net-Readiness requires organizations to let go of the
arrogance that customers and clients can be manipulated. In the Net
Economy, customers can only be served, listened to, and valued. Then, if
the company does everything right, the customer may agree to be served.
The Web allows individuals to reclaim their power. Organizations and the
economies of scale they commanded used to put individuals at a grave
disadvantage in any transaction. No longer. The Web does two main things.
First it levels out the asymmetries of information that kept power in the
hands of large enterprises. Second, it disembowels the notion of mass
production and mass marketing, concepts that sucked power from individuals.
So look for opportunities that exploit one-to-one relationships and mass
customization.
Show Me the Money!
Money has always been important to employees and business. Yet in the
traditional economy, there is a stupefying level of pretense about money.
Even though it's the first thing on the mind of the candidates ("How much
money can I get?"), and it's the first thing on the minds of the executives
doing the hiring ("How much money will I have to pay?"), money is the
absolute last item on the agenda. Does that make sense?
The Web, happily, dismantles some of the pretense. Critics call the new
generation of workers greedy and selfish, in it only for what they can get.
Absolutely true, just as it's always been. Only now we have the decency to
acknowledge it. And the funny thing is, the more we acknowledge it, the
less it is true. It turns out that once we have a frank conversation about
money, are offered what we are worth, and get it out of the way, other
things begin to take on as much or more importance. Learning opportunities.
More training. Cool people to work with. Personal autonomy. All these can
and do become more important than money.
But the conversation about money comes first. And for talented people with
Web savvy, what a conversation it is. Money talks and it's on speaking
terms with Web talent. The Net Economy is simply, or perhaps not so simply,
awash in money. Venture capitalists are pouring funds into startups at a
stupendous rate. In 1999, for example, venture-capital firms raised over
$15 billion. Over 750 companies went public, with a total valuation of more
than $50 billion. The lion's share of that money goes for one thing: talent
to create intellectual property. In other words, it goes to software. And
you are the software. Most of that money is designed to get you to create,
maintain, market, and support the intellectual assets that create value for
the investors
For most Web wannabees, the name of the game is not salary but stock
options. Chalk it up as another legacy of Microsoft and that company's
now-legendary cadre of millionaires. Across the landscape of the new
economy, young, well-educated, talented businesspeople are joining up to get
a piece of the action. They're willing to forgo larger salaries at bigger
and better-established firms in favor of stock options in upstarts that may
be worth a great deal down the road. The result: Even small, little-known
enterprises can compete for top talent. In fact, startups promising high
risk and huge gain are winning.
Continuous Learning
If there's anything more important to Web people than money, it's the
opportunity to learn new technologies, processes, and business skills.
Technical people recognize they cannot advance without business skills.
Business people acknowledge they need a better understand of technology in
order to be successful. Both camps strive for that crucial balance between
technical and business skills and demand a variety of training and
educational opportunities to meet that need.
The most successful Web companies have figured out what it takes to succeed
in a knowledge-based economy. Learning becomes the coin of the realm.
These companies know that talented people join up in order to learn. Of
course, part of the attraction of learning is linked to money. Learn more
today. Earn more tomorrow. But many Web people, especially those focused
on the technology, focus on the intellectual challenge more than the money.
They like being equipped with the latest tools as they explore the frontiers
of the knowledge economy. They appreciate the opportunity to work with the
coolest people, using the most advanced tools, empowered by the best
training in the latest skills. Companies have heard the message. They want
to hire people who maintain their hunger to learn and respond by creating an
environment where such people are presented with opportunities for
continuous learning.
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-- By John Kador, a
freelance writer and author of
Internet Jobs, the complete guide to finding the hottest Internet
jobs, including what they are, where they are and how to get one.
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