Blog

Paul Millerd takes a look forward to 2025 and writes about what winning organizations will look like.

I have studied organizations, people and motivation and am fascinated by the changes that have unfolded in my relatively short career. I’ll defer to Neils Bohr to qualify this entire piece:

Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future — Neils Bohr

Since I can’t predict the future, I promise this will contain ideas that are not fully baked. I hope you can help me improve them.

Accelerated Transformation

Most people agree that change is happening and that the pace of change is accelerating. However, if you look around, our modern organizations are not much different than they were 20 years ago. When I talk to people and HR leaders about their organizations they share with me the feeling that something is not right and that organizations need to evolve.

I’ll get to my vision of that future, but first wanted to call out three trends that I believe are driving this uncertainty. These are trends that are equal parts powerful and also hard to notice on a day-to-day basis:

Increased competitiveness — In the 1920’s, the average lifespan of a company on the S&P 500 was 67 years. Now? 1 company is dropping off the S&P 500 every two weeks!

Open Talent Networks: Individuals are increasingly becoming aware of their own market value thanks to resources like Glassdoor and LinkedIn. This information is not perfect, but it’s getting better. As more talented people realize they are worth more, they will seek to maximize their value either by switching to a new job, or as technology continues to facilitate a freelance path — go it on their own.

Dis-aggregation — Paul Graham had an excellent essay on what he called “the refragmentation” (see here). A key insight was that organizations are setup to minimize transaction costs (coase theory). Technology has dramatically reduced the cost of doing business across many industries. While still substantial, scale advantages will continue to diminish.

But Wait!

Key points include:

• Size of workforce

• Purpose-Driven Cultures

• Adaptive Technology

Read the full article, The Future of Work: What Winning Organizations Will Look Like in 2025, on Think-Boundless.com.