New life on Planet Work

It's an exciting time in the world of work. Several things are coming together. The stock market may have fluttered for a while, but that was ages ago-three months, right? So, everyone can settle down a little. Deregulation in many industries-not just telecom-is creating new markets to support new companies, and new niches within those markets to support more companies. A new attitude about companies is prevalent, lots of attention is being paid to the development of companies as social environments and work as a social experience. There's much less talk of productivity.

Most important, there are tons of jobs-and apparently fewer people than jobs available. That has created a lot of talk about talent and how much companies must give to get the right, or the best, talent. What people are saying is that the real competition in any industry is about people and that the best manipulators of the new working world economy thrive as free agents. The rest are won over only by excessive stock options, future guarantees or a stunning array of social and cultural window dressing.

Another workplace trend: There is not a whole lot of discussion of completely new ideas. But are there any new ideas left? You are thinking right now that, no, you just heard a new idea the other day. But, wasn't it actually an idea to somehow copy a really hip, but already existing, idea? It was indeed.

There's nothing wrong with that, really. There is a strong measure of safety in such behavior: If someone already came up with the idea, that means it's nearly a trend, and trends are good. Smart people come up with new ideas, but the smarter ones are the second, third, fourth and fifth people who build on the trend. Also, any completely new idea can be dangerous, subject to both excessive celebration and excessive criticism-it's best to play it safe by copying the work of others.

In the Internet age, where someone can stumble on an interesting idea one day and set up a virtual business to exploit it by the following afternoon, focusing on idea trends, rather than original ideas, could quickly become the norm. If you think you are the first to hear about it, five companies already do it. For example, some people might have thought eBay was the first Web-based auction house, or that Jeff Pulver's Min-X or Sean Whelan's RateXchange were the first commodities exchanges for communications capacity.

With cases such as this and an overload of information about new opportunities to process, the working hours are truly flying by. There are no clock-watchers anymore.

What does all this tell us about the organization of the future? Apparently, it will be a place built on government-sanctioned market opportunity rather than traditional market segments. Necessity is the mother of deregulation; deregulation is the mother of invention.

Also, companies will spend all money and energy luring a high-paid cadre of expert people into a prefab plastic bubble of fun and social/cultural stimulation. In a seller's market, you don't talk about the productivity of the team as much as you do the value of the individual. And apparently the majority of these new people will spend more time exploiting freshly hatched ideas rather than gestating new ones. Going one better on whoever thought of it first.

Is this a dangerous situation? Ultimately, you get back to that productivity issue. Most traditional productivity measurements don't have much to do with the individual, which is really a subjective matter. Instead, as companies become star-makers, judgments about productivity will have to be based more on the intangible.

The effects of judging intangibles can be seen on the stock market. Companies are valued erratically, the value of certain individuals sometimes having an unrealistically positive effect on these overall valuations. Then huge unpredictable surges and drops occur, similar causes sometimes generating wildly different effects.

This means those new companies, especially in a telecom industry thick with small entrepreneurs, need to heavily weigh the impact of significant hiring decisions on their overall workplace chemistry. Having a lot of people running around with huge stock options and big, but short-term, contracts in a funky, climate-controlled setting may be a good thing for a company operating in a software niche. But in the world of access lines and value-added services, it may not work.