The Future of Work

Imagine organizations where bosses give employees enormous freedom to decide what to do and when to do it. Imagine that workers are allowed to elect their own bosses and vote directly on important company decisions. Imagine organizations where most workers aren't employees at all, but electronically connected freelancers living wherever they want to. And imagine that all this freedom in business lets people get more of whatever they really want in life—money, interesting work, helping other people, or time with their families. These things are already happening today and—if we choose—they can happen even more in the future. We are now in the early stages of a profound increase in human freedom in business that may, in the long run, be as important for businesses as the change to democracies was for governments. The key enabler for this remarkable change is information technology. By reducing the costs of communication, these technologies now make it possible for many more people, even in huge organizations, to have the information they need to make decisions for themselves, instead of just following orders from above. And so, for the first time in human history, we can now have the best of both worlds—the economic and scale efficiencies of large organizations, and the human benefits of small ones: freedom, motivation, creativity, and flexibility.