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Subject: Independent workers are the future breed (fw)
Date: Sun, 2 Dec 2001 16:27:36 +1100
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From: "Bala Pillai"
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Independent workers are the future breed
[Yet another reason for you to learn cooperation with Thamil Innaiya
Erumbugal http://groups.yahoo.com/yahoo/group/erumbugal ]
Sydney Morning Herald, Sat Dec 1, 2001
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0112/01/biztech/biztech10.html
CHARLES HANDY
Employers increasingly want to outsource tasks and contractors are seeing
the benefit.
I am an author. My wife is a photographer whose work is published in books
and journals. Our son is an actor and our daughter an osteopath.
We all work with organisations and are dependent on them for our income, but
none of us is an employee of them. None of us receives a regular salary. We
receive fees depending on how much work we do, or, in my case, royalties
from the income stream produced by my work.
This doesn't seem at all odd or unusual. The four of us work in established
professions and traditions where people have always been paid in this way,
as independent agents who work with, rather than for, the organisations that
use them.
Looked at another way, however, it is odd, because we, and people like us,
are the intellectual property of the organisations with whom we work. We are
the assets on which their business depends. Without their authors the
publishers have nothing, yet those authors all stand outside the
organisation, do not figure on the wages bill, nor show up on the balance
sheet as the assets that they undoubtedly are.
Few other organisations would think of putting their intellectual property
outside and hiring it in, but they may be changing their ways, although they
haven't seen it that way. They call it outsourcing when they use strategic
consultants to think through their futures. They link up with universities
to develop new products or contract with outside research laboratories. They
see it as inefficient to keep professionals such lawyers or designers on a
fulltime salary when they can put them outside and call on their services as
they require them. Where it used to be conventional wisdom to have
everything and everyone in house, it is now the fashion to restrict the core
employees to the people and the tasks that cannot be trusted to anyone else.
And more people are beginning to want it that way. We are all professional
now, whether we call ourselves market analysts, Web-site designers, human
resource specialists, research technicians or project managers. We are
increasingly aware that our specialised talents are the new intellectual
property of organisations of all sorts.
Why should we hand this property over to an organisation in return for a
monthly salary? Why, in fact, should we restrict ourselves to selling to
just one organisation when there may well be a wider market for what we have
to offer?
Yes, the income stream outside may be more uncertain, but life inside those
organisations is itself far from certain these days, and, if we are any
good, the rewards are proportional to the risk, we stand to make more when
and if we are in demand. Besides, it is exciting to be independent, to be in
control of your own work and your own time.
More and more people are doing it, even senior managers. When John Birt
became Director General of the BBC in London it was some months before a
journalist dug up the fact that he had not been employed by the organisation
that he was appointed to run.
His own private organisation, which also employed his wife as a director,
had sold his services to the BBC, something that, as a professional media
man, was not unusual, but which struck the BBC as not quite right. He was
obliged to go on the payroll, but then proceeded to shed large numbers of
professional people and hire them back in as and when required.
There were those who argued that he was stripping the corporation of its
core competences, but it was becoming increasingly expensive to hold them
all in-house. The BBC had to go the way of all commercial creatures.
Where will it end? Already organisations are pushing more mundane services
like catering and transport outside and hiring the same people back as
independent businesses, but it may go much farther.
Will doctors and surgeons cease to be employees of our health services and
set up private partnerships which will contract to deliver specific services
to hospitals and health authorities? Will the research departments of
businesses take themselves outside and set themselves up as independents,
selling their ideas and inventions to the highest bidders?
Will interim managers, hired in from outside agencies and taking on
particular tasks for a limited time become more common?
Probably.
If you look inside the outside skin of an organisation it may become more
and more like a box of contracts, signed with independents, be they
individuals or specialist organisations. The job of the organisation will
literally be to organise these bits of intellectual property for the benefit
of the customer and, ultimately, of the residual owners of the business, the
shareholders. No longer will the organisation be the permanent worktime home
of the bulk of the population. The era of the employment organisation will
have gone forever.
It is happening already, under our noses. Sixty per cent of all businesses
in Britain have only one employee the owner. Another 30 per cent have fewer
than five. Most of these tiny organisations, along with the officially
self-employed like myself, are selling into bigger organisations, not to the
general public. Only 40 per cent of the British workforce now have what are
called "indefinite period contracts" the sort that go with continuous
full-time jobs. It is no different in most of the other post-industrial
economies where intellectual property is now the key asset.
We need to prepare for a new world. Few of us have been reared or educated
for the independent life. It may not be what most desire but it will be what
most of us experience before we cease our working lives.
Charles Handy is the author of The Elephant and The Flea, recently published
by Hutchinson.
[To develop the acumen you need to succeed in independent working learn
together with other Tamildom citizens at
http://groups.yahoo.com/yahoo/group/erumbugal ]
