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fewer workers, but they want them all to be literate, numerate, to be able
to engage in team-based problem solving. They want a scientific mind for
production, an empathic heart for their fellow workers, for customers.
They know that manufacturing nutters, but that developing a piece of
scheduling software for a plant in Taiwan is manufacturing. All in all, this
new style of work is significantly more satisfying than what it has replaced.
3. The game into which workers are recruited has changed.
The new tech–
nologies have changed the rules of management: the old division of labor
that supported mass production has been replaced by more integrative
approaches, what we call interfunctional teamwork, knowledge sharing. A
business's most important asset is its "intellectual capital." I myself am
Director of Intellectual Capital at KBMG. Intellectual capital is the com–
petencies of employees that allow them to be innovative, to be learners
throughout their lives, not just specialists. They must also understand the
business's strategy. Companies used to be like a football team, in which
only senior managers, like quarterbacks, saw the whole field, and most
everybody else performed a single task. Bigness mattered. Now companies
have to be more like a basketball team-or I might add like a theater arts
company-lean, disciplined in spontaneity. Marketing, design, and produc–
tion people take on problems together; senior managers must be more like
a point guard or a director. Communication is horizontal, not vertical.
Networks are replacing hierarchy. The corporate office looks much more
like a holding company, a teaching center, or a bank than a command center.
4. Labor's real crisis is not unemployment but unemployability.
Of course the
only thing worse than a boring job is no job, which is why some people–
opponents of NAFTA, or the critics of outsourcing, for example-view
the loss of old industrial jobs with alarm. Their concerns are reasonable.
Their solutions are not. Don't be fooled by apparent fluctuations, last year's
"downsizing" or this year's drop in unemployment. For the first time in
the history of industrial labor markets, the problem for unskilled people is
not cyclical unemployment but chronic unemployabili ty. The bottom
rungs of the ladder are disappearing; protection and macro-economic
"stimulation" packages and so forth can do nothing to change this trend.
When I was a teenager, we would hear about friends who dropped out of
high school to start a family and "go to work." Actually, in any largely
Jewish neighborhood, we didn't hear about that too much. Today the idea
would be ludicrous. For people with reasonably sophisticated skills, the job
market will always recover: Lazard Freres for example has found that dur–
ing the recovery of 1994-96, 1.5 million jobs were created for every
million jobs lost, and most of the new ones in small businesses. But peo–
ple without skills will be heartbroken. The days of UAW people making
$18 an hour with nothing but a couple of years of high school are gone.
