I’m still talking about Nine Shift: Work, Life and Education in the 21st Centrury by William A. Draves and Julie Coates this week because it brings up some very important trends and concepts we need to consider as business owners.
As discussed in my last post, during the industrial age, we all left the farm and went to the cities. When we became successful, we moved to the suburbs and commuted to the cities. And, here is where the next chapter in American history begins.
According to the authors, by the year 2020 many of us will be working at home and this will bring about the demise of the company as we know it, and also suburbia. What happens when people work at home? The company intranet replaces the office. It also affects the traditional hierarchical pyramid structure because employees will now collaborate online via networks, making “what� you know almost as important as “who� you know.
We’re starting to see this with Gen Y hitting the workplace. They don’t defer to seniority in meetings; they come with “ubernetworks� where they can source information with a few clicks of a button; and they can’t comprehend why open-source software makes those of us with legal degrees cringe at the thought. Personally, I think most of these are good things as it leads to innovation and performance-based rewards.
While there was a lot of interesting discussion about this in the book, my favorite part was the list of 10 things people will say in a company when its pyramid is collapsing. Maybe that’s because I heard many of them at my last company (which shortly thereafter was sold to a competitor), including:
- I can’t make that decision.
- We’ve always done it that way.
- That’s not in my job description.
- They won’t give us the staff to do that.
So what does all this have to do with suburbia? It will likely be much improved. The authors point out that in suburbia today, everyone has their McMansions which are designed so that you never have to interact with neighbors. Gone are the front porches and sidewalks that were common in earlier decades. Also gone are the car ports and street parking. All of these were aspects of suburban life that allowed for interaction with neighbors. Now, many suburbanites simply go from their kitchen/mudroom to their attached 3-car garage to hop into their SUV and drive to the office.
What’s wrong with this picture? Perhaps it correlates with the fact that community involvement is down. When you don’t have to see your neighbors, then you don’t have to justify that you voted against affordable housing or school improvements. You also don’t feel obligated to clean up the local park or paint the library.
What’s next? As more people work at home, they’ll still seek out communities both locally and online to replace the one they had at the office. Just stop by any Starbucks or library and you can see that people still like to work besides other people. This (and the fact that most Boomer McMansions are well beyond the reach of the next generation) will lead to people seeking more dense communities. In correlation with the authors’ prediction that light rail will replace cars (because you can work on trains, and there’s no solution to traffic congestion), these dense communities will be centered around light rail train stations.
So what does this mean for entrepreneurs? It may be easier to find employees if you run a virtual company. Or, if you want to open that bagel/coffee shop, you might want to skip the office park or downtown location and locate in a neighborhood. From my own business standpoint, I enjoyed the authors’ predictions that associations and both in person and online communities will grow.
Moreover, I had to smile as my “exclusive� suburb is trying to adjust to the light rail that’s going to start running through town next month, as well as the new sidewalks and affordable housing that are being built (my town, along with the other surrounding suburbs had been fighting all of these things for decades – yet, I moved here last year precisely because these changes were coming).
The Bottom Line:Â Per the theory of the book, our society is going to undergo more changes in the next decade than we have in 100 years. Are you and your business ready?
Other related reading: Bowling Alone : The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam
Next post – The Year 2020, Part III – Good news for the girls and Gen Y, bad news for boys and Boomers.
This entry was posted on Friday, August 31st, 2007 at 8:20 am and is filed under Nonfiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.Leave a Reply
