Future of Work Briefs

Professional service firms seeking to help companies navigate the demands of globalization face a tough challenge because advisers with the specialized expertise needed to address sophisticated issues are most often distributed throughout the firm and around the globe.

It is neither wise nor effective to turn our backs on the benefits of having a virtual work force. But it is also true that in this increasingly digital age, we stand to lose something integral to what makes organizations both humane and productive places to work

To succeed in this environment, today’s leaders must focus on using persuasion rather than direction to lead their own networks toward a common goal.

The best CEOs are excellent at growing and running a company within a known business model. What they don’t do well enough is reinvent and innovate. It’s not because they’re incompetent, they just fall short at the task.

Would you hire a surgeon who wasn’t trained in medicine or delegate a major financial investment decision to someone who hadn’t studied finance? Of course not. But all too often organizations leave their most consequential people decisions to board members who may be experts in other business domains but who are woefully uneducated about and inexperienced in evaluating C-suite talent.

Try to imagine a leader without this expertise doing your job. You’ll probably conclude it couldn’t be done. But as your career advances, at some point you will be promoted into a job which includes responsibility for areas outside your specialty. Your subordinates will ask questions that you cannot answer and may not even understand. How can you lead them when they know a lot more about their work than you do?

For more than a decade, Linkin Park and Machine Shop enjoyed success and continued to innovate. The band put out new albums regularly and experimented in video games, art, and video content, among other things. Machine Shop began to offer its grassroots marketing services to other bands, film studios, TV networks, and brands. But by 2013, Linkin Park and Machine Shop had to address the fact that digital music had changed the business dramatically. So they began to prepare for their next decade.

GE had hired me for the summer in hopes that they could recruit me for a full-time job when I graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering. I learned a lot of things that summer. Things they don’t teach in college.