Lynda Gratton investigates the future of work

PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE: GRATTON
Work is universal. But, how, why,
where and when we work has
never been so open to individual
interpretation. The certainties of the
past have been replaced by ambiguity,
questions and the steady hum of
technology. Now, in a groundbreaking
research project covering 21 global
companies and more than 200
executives, Lynda Gratton is
making sense of the future of work.
In this exclusive article she provides
a preview of the real world of 21st
century work.
You may be a Baby Boomer in your
50s with Gen Y children just joining
the workforce; an alumnus of a
business school, a 40-year-old Gen X
preparing for 30 more years of work,
with young Gen Z children; or an
MBA student thinking about the years
of work ahead of you.
Whatever your age, one of the most
crucial questions you face is how the
FORCES
SHAPING
THEFUTURE
OFWORK
future of work will develop and the
impact on you and the organisations
of which you are a member. If you
are now aged 30, you can expect to
work for the next 40 years — that
means in 2050 you will be a member
of the workforce. If you are 50, you
can expect to be actively employed for
another 20 years — that’s 2030. If you
have young children, they could be
working until 2070.
Work is, and always has been, one
of the most defining aspects of our
lives. It is where we meet our friends,
excite ourselves and feel at our most
creative and innovative. It can also be
where we can feel our most frustrated,
exasperated and taken for granted.
Work matters — to us as individuals,
to our family and friends and also
to the communities and societies in
which we live.
Many of the ways of working that
we have taken for granted for 20
years are disappearing — working
from nine-to-five, aligning with only
one company, spending time with
lyndagratton
investigates:
THE FUTURE
OF WORK
16 BUSINESS STRATEGY REVIEW Q3– 2010
BUSINESS

Photo:LCGriffiths
17Q3–2010 BUSINESS STRATEGY REVIEW
the future of work

family, taking weekends off, working
with people we have known well
in offices we go to every day. And
what’s coming in its place is much
less knowable and less understandable
— almost too fragile to grasp.
Facing the future
Over the last two years, my mission
has been to understand how work
and organisations will evolve. What
I wanted was not firm predictions,
since I know these are notoriously
unreliable, but rather a point of view,
a basic idea of what the hard facts of
the future are, and a way of thinking
about the future that has internal
cohesion. I wanted to discover,
with as much fine-grained detail as
possible, how the future of work is
likely to evolve.
Why it is so important now, to
at least attempt to paint a realistic
picture of the future, is that we can
no longer imagine the future simply
by extrapolating from the past. The
past six generations have experienced
the most rapid and profound change
mankind has experienced in its 5,000
years of recorded history. If the world
economy continues to grow at the
same pace as the last half-century,
then by the time my children are the
age I am now — in 2050 — the world
will be seven times richer than it is
today, world population could be over
9 billion and average wealth will also
have increased dramatically.
We live at a time when the schism
with the past is of the same magnitude
as that last seen in the late 18th
century. A schism of such magnitude
that work — what we do, where we
do it, how we work and with whom —
will change, possibly unrecognisably in
our lifetime. In the late 18th century,
the drivers of this change were the
development of coal and steam power.
This time around it is not the result
of a single force, but rather the subtle
combination of five forces that will
fundamentally transform much of what
we take for granted about work: the
needs of a low-carbon economy, rapid
advances in technology, increasing
globalisation, profound changes
in longevity and demography and
profound societal changes.
It is not just our day-to-day
working conditions and habits that will
change dramatically. What will also
change is our working consciousness,
just as the industrial age changed
the working consciousness of
our predecessors. The industrial
revolution introduced a mass market
for goods and with it a rewiring of the
human brain towards an increasing
desire for consumption and the
acquisition of wealth and property.
The question we face now is how
the working consciousness of current
and future employees will be further
transformed in the age of technology
and globalisation we are entering.
What is inevitable is that, for
younger people like my two sons,
work will change dramatically — and
those of us already in the workforce
will be employed in ways we can
hardly imagine.
The wise crowd
To better understand the future of
work, from October 2009 to May
2010 I led a research consortium of
21 companies and over 200 executives
from around the world. The major
business sectors were represented by
a wide array of firms, including Absa
(the South African bank), Nokia,
Nomura, Tata Consulting Services
(TCS), Shell, Thomson Reuters,
Novartis and Novo Nordisk, SAP,
BT and Singapore’s Ministry of
Manpower, as well as two not-for-
profit organisations, Save the Children
and World Vision. My colleagues,
Dr Julia Goges-Cooke and Andreas
Voigt, also took part.
The consortium community
met initially in November 2009 at
London Business School where we
looked closely at the hard facts of the
future, then took the conversation
into their own companies. We were
able to work together virtually in an
elaborate shared portal and also to
discuss the emerging ideas in monthly
webinars — and later in a series of
workshops in Europe and Asia. At the
same time, I tested out some of my
initial thoughts by writing a weekly
blog (www.lyndagrattonfutureofwork)
on which a wider community
commented. It was these ideas,
insights and anxieties that became
stitched into storyline narratives and
brought depth to our conversations.
What excited the community was
finding answers to three questions:
n How will external forces shape the
way my company and its people
develop over the coming decades?
n How best can we prepare for these
developments to ‘future proof’
the company?
n What can we learn from others
about where to focus our attention
and resources, what will be
tough, and what will be more
straightforward?
Working it out
How will these five forces affect the
way we work in 2025, and what
does this mean for the choices and
actions we should be taking now?
My research and conversations about
the future of work have led me to
understand that the future will be
less about general skills and more
about in-depth mastery; less about
working as a competitive, isolated
individual and more about working
collaboratively in a joined world; and
less about focusing solely on a standard
of living and more on the quality
of experiences. Here are the ways I
believe these three shifts will play out
in our lives and the lives of others.
The shift to mastery I believe
that in the future the means by which
individual value is created will shift
from having generalist ability to having
specialist ability and achieving serial
mastery. Why? Because if you remain
a generalist, there are thousands,
perhaps even millions, of people who
can do the same work as you do —
yet faster, cheaper and perhaps even
BUSINESS

01 Emerging markets are taking over
02 The robots are real
03 The new global jet set
01 02 03
Technological
developments
Technology will influence the size
of the world population and life
expectancy and will influence our
working lives in other deeper and more
indirect ways — the way we engage
with others, our views on morality and
our own human nature. You don’t
have to be a supporter of technological
determinism to recognise that
technological capability (through its
complex interactions with individuals,
institutions, cultures and environment)
is a key determinant of the ground
rules within which the games of human
civilisation get played out.
By 2025, we can expect that
more than five billion people will be
connected by mobile devices, the
Internet ‘Cloud’ will deliver low-cost
computing services, an increasing
amount of work will be performed by
robots and self-created content will join
the digitalisation of books to create an
unprecedented amount of information
in the world knowledge net. We can
expect that, across the globe, billions
of cognitive assistants will be collecting
information, monitoring people’s
behaviour and taking actions from
their preferences. This massive crowd
of computers is becoming increasingly
capable of learning and creating new
knowledge entirely on its own and with
no human help.
Globalisation
The combination of technology and
globalisation will have a profound
impact on the way we work in the
future. While many of the new poles
of economic activity are in the Big
Six emerging economies (Brazil,
China, India, Mexico, Russia and
South Korea), the economies of
next-wave locations such as Egypt,
Nigeria and Turkey are increasingly
important. These emerging economies
will increasingly add value through
innovation as well as low-cost
manufacturing. Greater numbers of
people will choose to move to the
mega-cities of the world, and new
talent pools will emerge in areas across
the globe where the population is
connected to the world knowledge net.
Much of the world will become joined
— both in terms of trade in goods and
services, the mobility of labour, the
opening up of new talent pools and in
the extent of global connectivity.
Globalisation will bring
opportunities for talented and
energetic people to become part of
the world economy wherever they are
born. It will also increase the exclusion
of those who are not part of the global
market, either because they don’t have
access to broadband or because they
have neither the talent nor the energy
to compete.
FIVEFORCES
0201 W
One of the first tasks of the research
was to identify the external forces
that will fundamentally change the
way that work will be done by 2025.
We determined that five forces
will be crucial:
lyndagrattoninvestigates:
THEFUTUREOFWORK
the future of work

01 Older for longer
02 Fathers are increasingly involved
03 Wind power
030201
Societal
trends
The mental life of human
beings has been transformed by
developments such as language,
literacy, urbanisation, division of
labour, industrialisation, science,
communications, transport and
media technology. These changes
will continue over the coming
years. By 2025, we can expect that
people will be more individualistic
and increasingly prepared to forge
lifestyles based on their own needs
rather than societal expectations. At
the same time, we can expect trust
in business and business leaders to
continue to plummet.
I predict that, in 2025, many
people will live their lives alone or
in small family groups and some
of these relationships will become
more virtual. It will increasingly be
the norm to work much of the time
from home or in small community
hubs to avoid the carbon costs and
general wear and tear of lengthy
commutes. Most employable women
will work outside the home, so the
majority of households will have two
working members with conventional
households no longer the norm.
Younger men will have decided to
spend more time at home and to
take a more active part in caring for
their children. More people will work
as freelancers and ‘neo-nomads’,
expecting increasing autonomy and
freedom. As families become smaller
and more dislocated, friends (and
what I have termed the ‘regenerative
community’) will play an increasing
role in individual happiness.
Low-carbon
developments
The extraction and use of energy
have always framed the way we
live and the way we work. Each
time a new, more complex energy-
consuming development takes place,
it increases the pace, flow and density
of human exchange and creates
more connectivity between people.
Our uses of energy will also frame
the way we work in the coming
decades. We can expect oil prices to rise
substantially as the developing world
uses more energy and the sources of oil
have become depleted and expensive
to extract. Carbon output will rise
steeply, particularly in China and India
with their rapidly developing urban
populations and manufacturing bases.
The world will have heated up, with
sea levels rising and climates changing.
Some governments will have introduced
a carbon tax, and the carbon footprints
of individuals and companies will be
scrutinised and forced to reduce. This
could result in a rapid escalation of the
cost of moving goods across the globe
and a rapid reduction of commuting
and work-related travel. This will be
a significant driver to virtual working
and home-based working.
While I have described these
forces separately, in reality these
five trends will work together.
For example, the combination of
advances in technology and growing
globalisation will significantly increase
the use of tele-presence, webinars
and other communal tools.
04 05
FIVEFORCES
03
Demographic
changes
The new demography will reshape
our understanding and expectations
of work. In many ways, the coming
decades will be defined by the largest
demographic group the world has
ever seen — the Baby Boomers. In
2010, they are in their 50s and 60s;
and by 2025 most will have left the
workforce, taking with them a huge
store of tacit knowledge and know-
how as well as, if some commentators
are to be believed, much of the
wealth of the next generations.
The future will also see
unprecedented increases in life
expectancy. There is a strong
possibility that many of the healthy
children born in 2010 will live
more than 100 years, as will some
of those currently in their 20s.
This will fundamentally bring into
question our current assumptions
about retirement, about the
employment of the over-65s and
about the provision of pensions.
BUSINESS

“The future will be
less about general
skills and more about
in-depth mastery.”
Phasetwoof
thefuture
The second phase of the research was launched
in October 2010 with companies from all over
the world. You can follow the progress on Lynda
Gratton’s blog: www.lyndagrattonfutureofwork.com
You can also be part of the conversation about the
future of work by joining the community
at www.hotspotsfutureofwork.com
The research will focus on
taking action around the four most
crucial themes that emerged in the
first phase of the work:
n How can executives support
the development of a talent pool
and leadership cadre which is
future proofed?; 
n what are the means by which
organisations can build and support
the communities, networks and
ecosystems crucial for the future?;
n how can we create the teams and
collaborative working essential in an
increasingly virtual world?;
n and what are the implications
for those who have to deliver the
future of work – in particular the
learning, organisational development
and human resource functions?  
better. In the future, you will have to
differentiate yourself from the crowd,
build depth and yet be prepared to
shift gears across the course of your
working life. I believe that the perfect
storm of the five forces has created an
opportunity to shift from the age of
mechanisation to the age of mastery.
In this new age, there is a possibility
for people to put their stamp on who
they are and what they choose to do.
However, this possibility carries with
it the necessity to become more aware
of what is valuable and unique and to
craft credentials in a thoughtful and
energetic way. This means becoming
specialised in a variety of areas and
achieving mastery in them and building
and carrying valuable credentials
in a way rarely seen in the past.
The shift to connectivity
I believe that one of the paradoxes
of the future will be that to succeed
one will need to stand out from the
crowd while at the same time being
part of the crowd or, at least, the
wise crowd. So, you will need to both
stand out with your mastery and skills
and simultaneously become part of
a collection of other masters who
together create value. Otherwise you
will always be on your own, isolated
and competing with thousands of
others, with no possibility of the
leverage that the crowd brings.
In the past, success was achieved
through personal drive, ambition and
competition. In the future, it will be
achieved through the subtle but
high-value combination of mastery
and connectivity.
That’s because, in a future
increasingly defined by innovation,
the capacity to combine and connect
know-how, competencies and networks
will be key. It’s in this synthesis or
combination that real innovative
possibilities lie. So, whom you choose
to connect with, and to whom they
are connected, will be one of the
defining aspects of future working life.
High-value networks will consist of a
combination of strong relationships
with a few knowledgeable people
(what I call ‘the Posse’) and a larger
number of less-connected relationships
with a more extensive network (what
I call ‘the Big Ideas Crowd’). Your
high-value networks will connect
you with people who are similarly
specialised as well as those with very
different competencies and outlooks.
It is in the diversity of these broader
networks, the Big Ideas Crowd, that
the possibility of innovation lays.
The shift to quality of experiences
Finally, having confronted the paradox
of both being individually masterful
and yet joined with others, I believe
that there is an even more complex
shift. You, your friends and children
will need to think very hard about what
sort of working life you want. Simply
opting for a high standard of living
is not going to do it. Why? Because
in the future, quality of experiences
will trump quantity of consumption
every time and words like ‘happiness’
and ‘regeneration’ will become the
touchstone of future working lives.
The 19th-century industrialisation
of the Western world heralded the
move to cities and the breaking down
of traditional communities. In its
place came the nuclear family, often
uprooted as father moved to seek
work. So while the standard of living
throughout the developed countries
rose, often the quality of life hardly
shifted. People may have been able
to enter the consumer society and
consume at quantity, but this did
not necessarily bring them quality
of experiences such as happiness
or contentment.
I believe there is an opportunity
over the coming decades to shape
work and life in a manner that
enables people to reconnect with
what makes them happy and creates
a high quality of experience. The
breakdown of automated work, the
rise of home-based working and the
increase in the possibility of choice
provide the foundation for a shift in
focus away from quantity consumed
as the only measure of success.
Challenges and opportunities
The future workplace will create both
challenges and opportunities. Grasping
these opportunities will be crucial.
Some of these changes are inevitable
(for example, flexible working), so the
focus is on making them work as soon
as possible. Other actions will be tricky
and will require the creation of new
practices in the way that companies are
building competencies around virtual
team working.
Perhaps those responses needing
the greatest focus are those I call
the ‘contested’ aspects of the future,
workplace processes and procedures
that have not been fully tested, such
as the need for more democratic
processes and a focus on experiences
rather than on standard of living. Such
new ways of working are going to
demand a level of trial and error in the
workplace that will prove challenging
to workers and managers alike. Yet, in
tomorrow’s brave new world of work, a
healthy dose of courage and optimism
will go a long way.
the future of work

01
Transparent
and authentic
leadership
In a future world of transparency
and connectivity, leaders will
be looked upon to work in a
collaborative manner. We can
expect their behaviours and
actions to be closely scrutinised,
so their authenticity will be key. At
the same time, globalisation will
create the need for more complex
networks and for leaders to take
the initiative in engaging with
global problems and challenges.
Leaders will increasingly be
called upon to be members
of a team, most of which will
02
High-performing
virtual teams
Increasingly, work is performed
across businesses, functions and
organisations. As a consequence
of this cross-border working,
teams often work virtually,
actually seeing each other only
occasionally. Our own work on
these teams shows that many
fail as they become overwhelmed
by the sheer complexity of their
task. So it’s no surprise that the
executives in our consortium
ranked the capacity to manage
and lead high-performing virtual
teams as crucial for the future.
At SAP, working virtually inside
and outside the company has
become the norm and has
been shown to create wider
networks and allow a more
flexible working style. Executives
are using complex dialogue
and decision-making tools and
social-networking tools. At BT,
virtual team working has been
enhanced with Telepresence,
next generation high-definition
The impact on
organisations
The future of work will change not just for individuals but
also for the organisations of which they are members. To
understand the breadth and extent of these changes, we
first identified the 20 areas we believe to be important for
the future and then asked executives in the consortium
companies to rate those they believed to be most
critical for the future. We also investigated where ‘future
proofed’ examples existed — areas in which members
of the consortium had already developed practices and
processes that can provide insight and inspiration.
Five areas emerged as the most important:
lyndagrattoninvestigates:
THEFUTUREOFWORK
consist of a diverse group
of people, which will put an
emphasis on their skills of
inclusion. ThoughtWorks, a
bespoke software development
company, has developed a set
of organisational tools: pairing
decision makers, holding
democratic elections for specific
teams and setting up virtual
networks. The philosophy behind
the practice is that leadership
is shared to improve decision
making and create balance.
Pairing happens at all levels,
from the highest leadership level,
to developers writing or testing
software, to mentoring. Leaders
are encouraged to be democratic
and authentic through the
process of election, in which
groups are nominated and voted
for by their peers.
video conferencing. BT has 60
studios around the world that
bring people together in multiple
locations. At Save the Children,
the executive team is pioneering
new ways to build a collaborative
approach across virtual teams
brought together for emergencies
and development work. The
executive team believes that this
is a trend that will accelerate
in the future both in terms of
whom they work with and how
collaborative work is performed.
Other companies are focusing
on how the competencies within
teams can be understood
and developed. At Tata
Consulting Services (TCS), a
competency development and
training tool (iCALMS) holds a
master dictionary of all roles
in TCS, with a description
of the accountabilities and
competencies. This creates an
important global base from which
to identify the best candidate for
a role as well as any knowledge
gaps that training modules
can rapidly fill. It also creates a
strong foundation for ongoing
learning to take place.
,,,,
BUSINESS

03
Valuable cross-
business networks
and relationships
Increasingly, the value of the
organisation will be held in its
‘social capital’, that is, the value
of the networks and relationships
held within businesses, across
businesses and into the wider
community and ecosystems.
Building relationships across
businesses will become
increasingly important in the
future as the driver of innovation
will require businesses to combine
assets and resources in ever more
unusual and creative ways.
We saw a number of examples of
how organisations are breaking
down the barriers between
functions and businesses and
creating relationships across
the company. At Nokia, for
example, the process of strategy
development has been opened
to many employees in order to
develop and gain commitment
to implementing the strategy.
At Shell, the scenario planning
process, with the recent
release of the 2050 scenarios,
creates a level of conversation
and depth of knowledge that
has become crucial to the
firm’s long-term planning.
At the Danish pharmaceutical
company Novo Nordisk,
social media plays a crucial
role in internal and external
communication. The key tools,
NovoTube, Novopedia and
NovoIdeas, are designed to
improve collaboration and
facilitate knowledge sharing.
Social media has also played a
key role at SAP, where a series
of tools has been developed for
business networking, business
processes and business
decisions. These have enabled
more complex dialogue and
decision making than original
social networking tools.
Building valuable networks is
crucial to Nokia, where executives
launched a programme called
‘Booster’ in 2008 to encourage
cross-functional and cross-
hierarchical working and to
raise the capacity to acquire
and use external resources. The
programme covered all 5,000
employees of the business unit
and started with a two-day face-
to-face workshop with 700 team
leaders, followed by involvement
of the whole community through
online social networking.
04
Valuable
relationships
with partners,
consumers and
entrepreneurs
Networks are not simply those
that arise within the business.
Increasingly, value will be
created through the relationships
held with those outside, be
they partners, consumers or
entrepreneurial businesses. At
Thomson Reuters, for example,
strong networks with independent
people across the world have
been crucial to their success. For
many years, a network of highly
flexible independent journalists,
called ‘stringers’, have worked
on an ad hoc basis in order to
ensure that news around the
world is covered at minimum cost.
Some work on a retainer, others
are hired for ad hoc projects. The
system has existed for decades
and works through strong trusted
relationships and reciprocal
benefits. For Thomson Reuters,
the system provides global reach,
flexibility, speed and tight control
over costs; the stringer gains
valuable journalistic experience,
increased international visibility,
higher pay, the chance of full-
time employment, and career
development through working with
a range of companies. Stringers
are allowed to work for other news
networks as well as local media.
ARM, the world leader in
semiconductor intellectual
property, is pioneering an
innovative organisational model
— an ‘ecosystem’ — intended
to capture the needs of end
consumers (thus providing
more targeted products) while
maintaining a high degree
of specialisation. ARM is at
the centre of a coalition of
companies, all using the same
underlying technology. This
creates a wide range of products
from which to select, so a mobile
phone manufacturer can use
the ARM ecosystem to compare
across a range of chips produced
by different companies, all using
ARM research and development.
05
Flexible working
The capacity to work flexibly was
seen by our consortium members
as key to the future. This flexibility
is a growing competence for
companies such as BT with its
‘Follow the Sun Project’ designed
to hook up the UK and California
in a continuous 24-hour operation.
The project involved new work
schedules and a twice-daily
transatlantic handover that has
brought high levels of continuity
and customer satisfaction.
Lynda Gratton
lgratton@london.edu
Gratton is Professor of
Management Practice at
London Business School.
She is the author of a series
of bestselling books including
Hot Spots, Glow and
Living Strategy.
Overview
At Thomson Reuters, flexible
working practices are
widespread, with employees
encouraged to work from
home whenever possible. Such
arrangements cover home
working, part-time working,
job sharing and flexi hours.
These help to meet the personal
needs of staff as well as the
demands of a company working
across many time zones. Flexible
working creates challenges for
performance management, and
at Tata Consulting Services, a
new system has been created to
accommodate workforce needs.
Formoreon
LyndaGratton
seePage 74
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