Or new problems arise, which don't fall within the boundaries of anyone's job. So a new job is created and a new person hired.
Or the growing company discovers that its old structure is inadequate to the situation it faces. So it reorganizes -- and people fight the reorganization because it threatens their jobs.
To make tomorrow's company work in the long run, people are going to have to let go of the job. That is the single biggest shift in the nature of work in the past 200 years. It means that the old rules are gone. Finished. Disappeared. Left no forwarding address.
Some of the new rules have been slowly coming into focus. These are how they look:
Everyone is a contingent worker -- not just the part-time and contract workers. Everyone's employment is contingent on the results that the organization can achieve.
Recognizing the turbulence in the business environment, workers need to regard themselves as people whose value to the organization must be demonstrated in each successive situation they find themselves in.
In light of their contingency, workers need to develop a mind-set, an approach to their work, and a way of managing their own careers that are more like that of an external vendor than that of a traditional employee.
Workers will be wise to think that they are "in business for themselves" and that their tasks have, in effect, been outsourced to them by the organization. They will go beyond the "company of owners" concept to seeing themselves as the owner of "You & Co.," a microbusiness and company of one. You & Co. is, in fact, the 21st century's most important small-business enterprise.
The wise company will work with those microbusiness people collaboratively to make the relationship as beneficial to them as possible. The benefits of that new work arrangement, however, will differ from the old ones. Rather than being add-ons like sick leave, pensions, and health care, they will likely inhere in the nature of the work itself.
Workers must act like people in business for themselves by maintaining a plan for career-long self-development, by taking primary responsibility for investing in health insurance and retirement funds, and by renegotiating their compensation arrangements with the organization when and if organizational needs change.
Because more and more of the organization's efforts are likely to be undertaken by project teams made up of individuals from different functional backgrounds, workers must be able to switch rapidly from one task to another, to work with people with very different vocational training and mind-sets, to work in situations in which the group is the responsible party and the manager only a coordinator, to work without clear job descriptions, and to work on several projects at the same time.
Just as workers must be prepared to shift from project to project within the same organization, they should expect to move more frequently from one organization to another. Long-term employment with one organization is, for most workers, a thing of the past. The organization will try to minimize those moves, recognizing that they are disruptive to the effectiveness of both the organization and the worker. But both parties will have to make their long-term plans with the likelihood of such moves in mind.
The new rules spell the end of jobs as we have known them. They define an approach to work and career path that few of today's employees understand. Unless we can begin soon to reeducate our work force, we are in for decades of economic chaos that will damage our organizations and devastate several generations of workers.
Although it is ultimately up to individuals to manage their own transitions from the old rules to the new, the government and organizations themselves also need to play a part.
The government needs to recognize the link between dejobbing and increasing productivity and to develop programs to help people learn to work under the new conditions. It may be, in fact, that the most important new mission that the Small Business Administration could assume would be to educate individual workers in the skills needed to manage their microbusinesses.
Recognizing that those are new and difficult demands, the organization will do its part in providing the information, the training, and the counsel to people who are making the difficult transition from the old rules to the new ones. Companies that refuse to help with the transition, on the grounds that workers are transitory, are missing the point. It is only the company that can enhance the effectiveness of those transitory assemblages of talent -- that treat them like a joint venture, if you will -- that can prosper in this time of constant change. It is in every organization's best interests to make sure that its workers can play by the new rules.
The organization cannot afford to wait until individual workers see the handwriting on the wall. You may not notice the change in the rules until you leave your present situation, for until then your assumptions and expectations may be protected by the refusal of everyone around you to deal with the new realities. Such a situation recalls the story of Balmung, the magic sword belonging to the Germanic hero Siegfried. Balmung was so sharp that it could slice an armored warrior in two, from the top of his helmet to the soles of his iron boots. But the cut was so fine that the wounded man could not even feel it. Until he moved. And then he fell into two pieces. Today's jobholders may likewise feel nothing has happened. But just wait until they leave their jobs!
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Adapted from JobShift: How to Prosper in a Workplace Without Jobs, by William Bridges. ©1994 by William Bridges and Associates Inc. By permission of Addison-Wesley Publishing Co.
