Rating: 
Summary: From kingdoms to democracies...
Review: It turns out that Thomas Malone of MIT is the person who (along with a colleague) coined the term "e-lancer" (i.e. electronic freelancer) back in 1998. This book takes that concept and expands it to outline Malone's view about how business is in the process of a metamorphosis from dense, centralized hierarchies to loose, decentralized networks of workers, specialists, and consultants. Like the transition from kingdoms to democracies, he feels that the rise in accessible communication technology will give employees a greater degree of control in how their companies are run.
He spends the first half of the book explaining how such a system is possible and providing these examples. Malone touches on a great many modern examples of this in action, from websites like Elance, Ebay, and Amazon to the freeform open-source creation of the Linux operating system to more traditional companies that have a decentralized, employee-centered viewpoint.
The last half of the book focuses on how to go about implementing these sort of decentralized systems, like internal and external marketplaces where employees can bid on jobs and use reputation systems to track their success and efficiency. In addition, Malone touches on the need to incorporate human values into the very corporate structure, to motivate people to take part in them.
While the book provides a lot of great starting points, it's clearly an academic approach and only an introductory one at that. It's not a how-to manual. There are many aspects of this revolution that are unclear. For example, how will such a revolution affect health insurance, which many people get through their companies? Would companies or workers be able to band together to create massive co-op-like organizations that can successfully take advantage available to large-scale groups? Malone acknowledges that steps would have to be made to deal with these and many other issues. In most cases, he addresses some possibilities, but they are by no means all-encompassing.
To return to Malone's analogy of the transition from kingdoms to democracies, history has shown us that merely stating the need for a transition isn't enough ... it takes people working hard to figure out how the day to day operations of such a system can work. Malone makes it sound possible and, more importantly, appealing.
Rating: 
Summary: The Future of Work, by Thomas W. Malone
Review: "The Future of Work" began changing my thinking and attitudes about work from its very first pages. It clarified and extended my understanding of myself as a worker, as well as of friends and colleagues, many of whom are either, like me, self-employed, or have entrepreneurial-type positions within organizations. I've already begun using Malone's ideas in consulting with individual clients and organizations, and found them relevant, productive and fun. Malone's central tenet is that the nature of organizations has been substantially influenced throughout history by the cost of communication. Thus, face-to-face communication characterized hunting and gathering bands, but the advent of writing--with its reduced cost of communication compared to face-to-face talking-- made larger, more powerful and more centralized societies possible. Kingdoms and empires were richer and more powerful than hunting and gathering bands, but at the cost of some of the freedom of most of their members. The advent of the printing press, by further reducing the costs of communication, made possible the reversal of the ancient trend toward greater centralization, facilitating the democratic revolution. Business organizations show a similar developmental path. Up until the 1800s, most businesses were small and local. By the 1900s, the telephone, telegraph, typewriter, and carbon paper allowed centralization on a large scale, and business "kingdoms" emerged. Today, e-mail, instant messaging, and the internet make it economically feasible for huge numbers of workers to access the information they need to make, for themselves, more of the choices that matter to them. This change, Malone asserts, is driving a revolution in our attitudes about organizational leadership. "We need to shift our thinking from command-and-control to coordinate-and- cultivate...Good cultivation involves finding the right balance between centralized and decentralized management, between controlling and letting go...Coordinating and cultivating... include the whole range of possibillities for management...To be an effective manager in the world we're entering, you can't be stuck in a centralized mind-set." Reading "The Future of Work" made me think about the political implications of Malone's vision of the future. Malone grew up on a farm, and his vision of self-employed, or loosely employed, freelancers (or "e-lancers") evokes the same values of independence, and a combination of self-sufficiency and interdependence when necessary, that characterize people who live by working the land. Thomas Jefferson saw the educated independent farmer as the backbone of the American experiment in democracy. But the Jeffersonian polity has been fundamentally altered by the evolution of large, hierarchically organized, centrally managed organizations, in which only those at or near the top have the same sense of personal stake in their work that characterizes the independent farmer. This has contributed to the development of an electorate which sems to me to be largely apathetic or dependent. Malone's vision of a nation of independent or semi-autonomous freelancers might presage a return to Jefferson's vision and values among a substantially larger proportion of the electorate than currently. Another direction of thinking provoked by "The Future of Work" is to wonder how many people are really capable of the measure of independence which Malone envisions. As a well-established leading international management thinker, and professor at MIT, Malone has been rubbing shoulders with people at the top of the planetary organizational learning curve. His stories about how they've grown their companies, both in the U.S.A. and internationally, delight and inspire throughout this book. But as somone who's been closer to the bottom of things, I see a lot of stupidity, as well as success, when people actually get more control over their work-lives. I discussed this with a client who is the CEO of his own successful company, and who sits on the boards of several others. He agreed that Malone's vision was optimal and appealing, but felt that only about 1/4 of the people he knew could actually thrive with that level of independence. Most people, he felt, needed to have their hands held and be told more or less what to do. In any case, Malone's is a refreshing, insightful and inspiring vision of humanity's nature, history, and future, and of the power of organizations and markets to maximize human efficiency and ingenuity, for whatever proportion of humanity who are, or may become, ready, willing and able to take their economic fates into their own hands and make their future work.
Rating:
Summary: The Future of Work, by Thomas W. Malone
Review: "The Future of Work" began changing my thinking and attitudes about work from its very first pages. It clarified and extended my understanding of myself as a worker, as well as of friends and colleagues, many of whom are either, like me, self-employed, or have entrepreneurial-type positions within organizations. I've already begun using Malone's ideas in consulting with individual clients and organizations, and found them relevant, productive and fun. Malone's central tenet is that the nature of organizations has been substantially influenced throughout history by the cost of communication. Thus, face-to-face communication characterized hunting and gathering bands, but the advent of writing--with its reduced cost of communication compared to face-to-face talking-- made larger, more powerful and more centralized societies possible. Kingdoms and empires were richer and more powerful than hunting and gathering bands, but at the cost of some of the freedom of most of their members. The advent of the printing press, by further reducing the costs of communication, made possible the reversal of the ancient trend toward greater centralization, facilitating the democratic revolution. Business organizations show a similar developmental path. Up until the 1800s, most businesses were small and local. By the 1900s, the telephone, telegraph, typewriter, and carbon paper allowed centralization on a large scale, and business "kingdoms" emerged. Today, e-mail, instant messaging, and the internet make it economically feasible for huge numbers of workers to access the information they need to make, for themselves, more of the choices that matter to them. This change, Malone asserts, is driving a revolution in our attitudes about organizational leadership. "We need to shift our thinking from command-and-control to coordinate-and- cultivate...Good cultivation involves finding the right balance between centralized and decentralized management, between controlling and letting go...Coordinating and cultivating... include the whole range of possibillities for management...To be an effective manager in the world we're entering, you can't be stuck in a centralized mind-set." Reading "The Future of Work" made me think about the political implications of Malone's vision of the future. Malone grew up on a farm, and his vision of self-employed, or loosely employed, freelancers (or "e-lancers") evokes the same values of independence, and a combination of self-sufficiency and interdependence when necessary, that characterize people who live by working the land. Thomas Jefferson saw the educated independent farmer as the backbone of the American experiment in democracy. But the Jeffersonian polity has been fundamentally altered by the evolution of large, hierarchically organized, centrally managed organizations, in which only those at or near the top have the same sense of personal stake in their work that characterizes the independent farmer. This has contributed to the development of an electorate which sems to me to be largely apathetic or dependent. Malone's vision of a nation of independent or semi-autonomous freelancers might presage a return to Jefferson's vision and values among a substantially larger proportion of the electorate than currently. Another direction of thinking provoked by "The Future of Work" is to wonder how many people are really capable of the measure of independence which Malone envisions. As a well-established leading international management thinker, and professor at MIT, Malone has been rubbing shoulders with people at the top of the planetary organizational learning curve. His stories about how they've grown their companies, both in the U.S.A. and internationally, delight and inspire throughout this book. But as somone who's been closer to the bottom of things, I see a lot of stupidity, as well as success, when people actually get more control over their work-lives. I discussed this with a client who is the CEO of his own successful company, and who sits on the boards of several others. He agreed that Malone's vision was optimal and appealing, but felt that only about 1/4 of the people he knew could actually thrive with that level of independence. Most people, he felt, needed to have their hands held and be told more or less what to do. In any case, Malone's is a refreshing, insightful and inspiring vision of humanity's nature, history, and future, and of the power of organizations and markets to maximize human efficiency and ingenuity, for whatever proportion of humanity who are, or may become, ready, willing and able to take their economic fates into their own hands and make their future work.
Rating:
Summary: The Future of Work, by Thomas W. Malone
Review: "The Future of Work" began changing my thinking and attitudes about work from its very first pages. It clarified and extended my understanding of myself as a worker, as well as of friends and colleagues, many of whom are either, like me, self-employed, or have entrepreneurial-type positions within organizations. I've already begun using Malone's ideas in consulting with individual clients and organizations, and found them relevant, productive and fun. Malone's central tenet is that the nature of organizations has been substantially influenced throughout history by the cost of communication. Thus, face-to-face communication characterized hunting and gathering bands, but the advent of writing--with its reduced cost of communication compared to face-to-face talking-- made larger, more powerful and more centralized societies possible. Kingdoms and empires were richer and more powerful than hunting and gathering bands, but at the cost of some of the freedom of most of their members. The advent of the printing press, by further reducing the costs of communication, made possible the reversal of the ancient trend toward greater centralization, facilitating the democratic revolution. Business organizations show a similar developmental path. Up until the 1800s, most businesses were small and local. By the 1900s, the telephone, telegraph, typewriter, and carbon paper allowed centralization on a large scale, and business "kingdoms" emerged. Today, e-mail, instant messaging, and the internet make it economically feasible for huge numbers of workers to access the information they need to make, for themselves, more of the choices that matter to them. This change, Malone asserts, is driving a revolution in our attitudes about organizational leadership. "We need to shift our thinking from command-and-control to coordinate-and- cultivate...Good cultivation involves finding the right balance between centralized and decentralized management, between controlling and letting go...Coordinating and cultivating... include the whole range of possibillities for management...To be an effective manager in the world we're entering, you can't be stuck in a centralized mind-set." Reading "The Future of Work" made me think about the political implications of Malone's vision of the future. Malone grew up on a farm, and his vision of self-employed, or loosely employed, freelancers (or "e-lancers") evokes the same values of independence, and a combination of self-sufficiency and interdependence when necessary, that characterize people who live by working the land. Thomas Jefferson saw the educated independent farmer as the backbone of the American experiment in democracy. But the Jeffersonian polity has been fundamentally altered by the evolution of large, hierarchically organized, centrally managed organizations, in which only those at or near the top have the same sense of personal stake in their work that characterizes the independent farmer. This has contributed to the development of an electorate which sems to me to be largely apathetic or dependent. Malone's vision of a nation of independent or semi-autonomous freelancers might presage a return to Jefferson's vision and values among a substantially larger proportion of the electorate than currently. Another direction of thinking provoked by "The Future of Work" is to wonder how many people are really capable of the measure of independence which Malone envisions. As a well-established leading international management thinker, and professor at MIT, Malone has been rubbing shoulders with people at the top of the planetary organizational learning curve. His stories about how they've grown their companies, both in the U.S.A. and internationally, delight and inspire throughout this book. But as somone who's been closer to the bottom of things, I see a lot of stupidity, as well as success, when people actually get more control over their work-lives. I discussed this with a client who is the CEO of his own successful company, and who sits on the boards of several others. He agreed that Malone's vision was optimal and appealing, but felt that only about 1/4 of the people he knew could actually thrive with that level of independence. Most people, he felt, needed to have their hands held and be told more or less what to do. In any case, Malone's is a refreshing, insightful and inspiring vision of humanity's nature, history, and future, and of the power of organizations and markets to maximize human efficiency and ingenuity, for whatever proportion of humanity who are, or may become, ready, willing and able to take their economic fates into their own hands and make their future work.
Rating:
Summary: A book for its time
Review: Given all the controversy regarding outsourcing, offshoring and its impact on the economy and the upcoming presidential election, this book couldn't be more timely. Malone says we're in the early stages of another revolution -- a revolution in business that may ultimately be as profound as the democratic revolution in government. Given his years heading up the Center for Coordination Science at MIT, it's no wonder that he concludes that new information technologies make this revolution possible. No doubt. One need look no further than the impact Napster and Kazaa have had on the recording industry, or the potential for Skype to disrupt the telecommunications sector. Malone suggests that as businesses and technologies decentralize, we will have to manage in new ways. He summarizes this perspective by saying that managers must begin shifting their thinking from command and control to coordinate and cultivate. Given the very changing nature of work itself, this is sound advice, and Malone offers guidance, if not a prescription, for how to navigate the shifting currents of management and work. This book provides important insights for managers and non-managers alike. It's also refreshing to read a business book that doesn't offer a lame 10-step guide to survival. The presidential candidates and their staffs would be well advised to read this book. Maybe then, we'll get past the superficial bromides that permeate the current debate about offshoring, and begin to substantively address the very changing nature of work itself.
Rating: 
Summary: Troublesome perspectives.
Review: I am only in the third chapter of the book but I have to agree with one of the above reviews that I feel a little talked down to with this book. I also find it somewhat male-centric and would like to see socially conscious examples of the value of the large company.
I don't completely agree with outsourcing, which the author seems to regale. Nike, in my opinion, has been irresponsible in its outsourcing choices.
The second chapter has a section on the military advantages of large organizations. I was completely taken aback by the statement that "If they choose to kill the neighbors, they can also take the neighbor's women as their wives. Or if they let their neighbors live, they can turn them into slaves." I personally find this example troublesome on many levels and feel as though the author might condone this behavior. Many of these practices still exist in times of war and change should be sought.
In chapter two, also, the author talks about how democracy in Athens was possible because most of the population was literate. Women were rarely literate during this time and, if at all, they were women of high social standing.
Rating:
Summary: A very good book, so why am I disappointed?
Review: I know I have enjoyed reading a book when I have a number of pages dog eared for future reference and/or I take notes. I have done both in this book. Yet, I fell disappointed. Why?
My theory is that Dr. Malone has attempted to write a book for the masses, but has oversimplified his thinking in an attempt to reach the broadest audience. I finished the book yearning for more theory and more case studies. I know that the Internet can be used to decentralize work. I know that large companies such as Intel have internal "auctions" for products and resources. But how is this applicable to a 3-person company? I see the consulting firm example in multiple places. How many times can eLance be metioned as an example without being repetitive?
I recognize the challenge in taking a sophisticated body of research and distilling it down to a book for the masses. Trust me, I've flipped through a few of Dr. Malone's research papers. I would like to see a second edition, expanded to include a bit more theory and more thinking along the lines of how these concepts are applicable to both large and small companies.
Rating:
Summary: Typical Academic Vapor
Review: Interesting theoretical stab, but lacking in substantiation. Will be of interest to governance theorists, as a thought-provoker or dialog-starter. We heard similar things twenty years ago. This lacks a true big-picture perspective and is too rooted in organizational design and leadership thinking to be of true utility in terms of enterprise-level or industry-level business architecture. While it presents some intersting concepts, few of these are new ideas The author either does not grasp, or assumes the reader cannot grasp, the true complexity of the situation in large, complex organizations -- issues of centralization and decentralization must be examined across a number of interrelated parameters (strategy, business/performance model, policy, information frameworks for interoperability, business process framework ownership/standardization, actual business processes and busieness rules, organizational model, actual organizational structure, information technology governance, corporate infrastructure -- and, of course, time. This is highly dynamic n-dimensional network of interacting forces, flush with uncertainties. Academia routinely spouts prophesy based on a sophomoric grasp of business reality. This is interesting and worth reading, but of limited practical value.
Rating:
Summary: Typical Academic Vapor
Review: Interesting theoretical stab, but lacking in substantiation. Will be of interest to governance theorists, as a thought-provoker or dialog-starter. We heard similar things twenty years ago. This lacks a true big-picture perspective and is too rooted in organizational design and leadership thinking to be of true utility in terms of enterprise-level or industry-level business architecture. While it presents some intersting concepts, few of these are new ideas The author either does not grasp, or assumes the reader cannot grasp, the true complexity of the situation in large, complex organizations -- issues of centralization and decentralization must be examined across a number of interrelated parameters (strategy, business/performance model, policy, information frameworks for interoperability, business process framework ownership/standardization, actual business processes and busieness rules, organizational model, actual organizational structure, information technology governance, corporate infrastructure -- and, of course, time. This is highly dynamic n-dimensional network of interacting forces, flush with uncertainties. Academia routinely spouts prophesy based on a sophomoric grasp of business reality. This is interesting and worth reading, but of limited practical value.
Rating:
Summary: A Glimpse of the Future
Review: It is so seldom to see a book focused not on what to do right now but on identifying the long term trends that need to be looked for in years to come that this book is very refreshing. If you agree with Dr. Malones conclusions or not, you need to at least understand them. And with some of them I agree and some I don't.
A major part of his thesis is that the dramatically lowering cost of communications will change the nature of business organizations dramatically, as dramatically say as the changes brought about by the printing press. Yes, that you are reading this on a computer means that you are part of this revolution, although the people at the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, Germany have a different opinion. For instance, you don't know where I'm writing this, what time of day it is here, or if I'm by myself or in a large office. That's an organizational change from the way the big magazines and newspaper write book reviews.
There is another point that he doesn't mention strongly enough. That is, the every rising cost of oil will force more decentralization. Commuting the distances we do simply won't make sense. (Commuting hasn't slowed much with oil at $50 a barrel, but what would happen at $200, $500 or $1,000 a barrel). Countering this is the desire of a number of managers I've had over the years who want to see all of their employees sitting at their desks so they can see what they are doing.
Don't look at this book as a how to reorganize your company, it's more longer term, more bigger picture than that. But forewarned is forearmed, there is every indication that this is the way of the future.
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