The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life

Description

Based on twenty-five years of groundbreaking research and insights from MIT's "Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century" initiative - MIT professor and leading organizational theorist Tom Malone argues that a dramatic revolution in the world of work is underway. Malone shows us that our current notions about decentralization and empowerment merely scratch the surface of what will be possible as technological and economic forces render "command and control" management obsolete. In its place will be a "coordinate and cultivate" approach that will spawn entirely new types of decentralized organizations - from internal markets to democracies to loose hierarchies - that reap the scale and knowledge efficiencies of large organizations while enabling the freedom, flexibility, and human values that drive smaller firms. Malone provides credible models for creating each of these types of organizations, offers compelling examples of companies that are already moving toward these models, and outlines the skills managers will need to succeed in a workplace in which no one - and everyone - is in control.

Thomas W. Malone is the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Information Systems at the MIT Sloan School of Management.He is also the founder and director of the MIT Center for Coordination Science and was one of two founding co-directors of the MIT Initiative on "Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century."