Page 67 - Managing the Mobile Workforce

46 � mAnAgIng the moBIle workForCe

` whAt proBlems CAn the new moBIle workForCe
pArAdIgm solVe thAt the old one Couldn’t?

We should have thought right off the bat to list the problems the new
paradigm solves, but it took Joel, reminding us of Rule Two, to actu-
ally do it. They seemed so obvious, but Joel had thought of some that
we’d missed.
One substantial benefit, he said, was that you can bring talent to-
gether in a way that you couldn’t before. “The worker will go where the
work is, so you get this ability to cluster and focus talent that was
much more difficult [to get] before.” Another, he said, is that people
can work from their own homes and still keep their jobs. Workers have
more options when there is, for example, reorganization—they don’t
have to sell their houses. He asked us what some other benefits were,
and we came up with the following items:

1. Organizations can be less asset dependent (e.g., have fewer build-
ings), solving the need to cut unnecessary costs.
2. Knowledge is universal. It’s available to anyone, anytime, no matter
where they are, helping to solve the problems that having less-than-
perfect knowledge causes. It’s especially troubling, isn’t it, when
you know that the information you need exists in some file cabinet
somewhere already, but you just don’t know where. That’s not so
much a problem with readily available electronic knowledge.
3. Access to people is instant and always available. This solves the prob-
lem of finding people when you need to get things done.

These initial thoughts led to further dialogue about something else:

4. In general, connectivity untethers people from offices (“I don’t need
one”) and file cabinets ( “I have them with me wherever I go”).

All those old “rules” we assumed were “truths” just aren’t longer.