Page 237 - Managing the Mobile Workforce

216 � mAnAgIng the moBIle workForCe

side of it along with the tools and methodologies,” says Steve. “I’m
involved in a number of businesses, and when people don’t understand
how to collaborate, it doesn’t matter what the tools are. [Collaboration
is] the next frontier.”
It makes sense. If you want to keep up with the Phoneses in a
virtual world, you’d better know how to work with each other, with
outside others, and with others who are across the desk or across the
continent.

` metAskIll Four: ConsIlIenCe

Consilience is the idea that there are methods to unify the sciences
and humanities. But for Phoneses, consilience represents the conver-
12
gence of mobility and mobility technology with differing or unusual
others. Brian Dolan is the cofounder and editor of MobiHealthNews,
an online daily trade journal covering the emerging wireless health
space. Right now he’s observing the uniting of two industries: the
wireless industry and health care. “Every day we are taking the pulse
of convergence and keeping an eye on it,” he told us. The mobile
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workforce is uniquely positioned to harvest this idea of pulling dis-
parate ideas or groups or interests together because of its flexibility,
the requirements for ever-new and applicable technology, and we al-
ready know that the Hewlett-Packards and the Ciscos of the world
are studying the human interface with technology. The combination
of hard and so-called soft sciences is being played out through the
development of commercial products such as telepresence.
To keep up, though, means that your organization has to think
creatively, nonparadigmatically, and opportunistically all at once.
Who and what can benefit by “jumping together” in new ways? You
can bet that your competitors are looking at every possible combina-
tion that will move them to the top of the heap. 14