“The true business of people should be to go back to school,” wrote the great architect Buckminster Fuller, “and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
The irony is, that people need go about the business of learning, because things are changing:
1. In the future, people will have shorter and more careers, and they will do more part time work and volunteer work.
2. More people will work independently in small businesses where they contract out their services to larger organizations.
3. More workers, especially women, will work from their homes.
With the move toward more self-employment and more work from the home and away from the organization, comes more choice and more responsibility, for both worker and employer. Individuals will have more freedom to shape work to fit the way they want to live instead of fitting life into a work schedule.
But they also will have the freedom to do poor quality work, by cheating or by laziness. The organization will have more flexibility but can abuse that flexibility by exploiting the outsider, tightening its conditions, and reducing the rewards. How important it will be that employees and employers can engage in trust confidence, finding ways and means to talk.
I expect I will also have to work longer; the social philosopher Charles Handy explained we are likely to have three phases of work life:
1. Our main career, where we make our money (I am grateful to have been a CEO)
2. Our passion career, were we enjoy our work (I love teaching and coaching)
3. Our retirement supplement work (our pensions simply won’t be big enough to support our long lives).
I am hoping the Community Hub will help me explores the way in which the world of work is changing and what the thoughtful individual’s choices and responsibilities should be. I a looking forward to having ‘Good Conversations’.
eisba 