Page 52 - Managing the Mobile Workforce

discovering a new workforce paradigm � 31

component when structuring deals and winning new business. Today,
the world has simply flattened, as Thomas Friedman has so famously
described. Now people can work on international teams with col-
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leagues in many cities and many countries, depending on where the
talent resides.

paradigm Buster number 3: mobility Isn’t Just letting your employees
work Away from the office—It Incorporates every Form of
mass Communication that has Come Before
A great way to get perspective on how the cell phone has busted pre-
vious paradigms about the mass media is to think about what Tomi
Ahonen proposes as the 7th of the Mass Media. According to Ahonen,
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mobile technology has outpaced all forms of mass communication
media. There are twice as many cell phones as TV sets, four times
the number of cell phones as personal computers (PCs), five times
as many cell phones as cars, and three times as many cell phone sub-
scriptions as Internet users. Mobiles (as Ahonen calls them) can do
everything other forms of media can do and can additionally initiate,
respond to, and dialogue with others. (You really need to read what
Ahonen has to say—he has fascinating statistics, such as 60 percent
of the people take their cell phone to bed every night—what other
communication medium can boast that? Over 50 percent of e-mail us-
ers expect a response with 24 hours, but 84 percent of Short Message
Service [SMS] users expect a response within five minutes. Think of
the implications of that—and we haven’t even started talking about
the apps that are available for cell phones.)
Ahonen describes each of the mass media that have emerged
throughout history, and how each one transitioned to the next. They
are: (1) print, (2) recordings, (3) cinema, (4) radio, (5) TV, (6) Inter-
net, and (7) mobile, which materialized in the 2000s. The cell phone,
Ahonen says, will become more and more the “predominate” media
channel, by “cannibalizing” elements from all the previous ones. The
cell phone can do everything all the first six media can do—and more.
He lists seven unique benefits that mobile possesses: