future of work - sap

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WORK FR GMENTED

WORK RECOM INED A N EXPLORATION OF THE F UTURE OF W ORK .



WORK FRAGMENTED, WORK RECOMBINED: AN EXPLORATION OF THE FUTURE OF WORK

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INTRODUCTION

This document summarizes the outcome of a two-dayhands-on workshop on the topic of the Future of Workheld at SAP Labs Palo Alto on March 20 th-21 st , 2012.

Half of the thirty workshop participants were SAPemployees drawn from various areas, while the otherhalf included SAP customers, SAP partners, futurists,

journalists and academics. The workshop was facilitatedby Tamara Carleton and Bill Cockayne from StanfordUniversity’s Foresight and Innovation program.

THE FUTURE OF WORK WORKSHOP

The purpose of the workshop was to understand how adiverse group of persons drawn from SAP, its ecosystemand beyond thinks about the Future of Work. What arethe major trends they observe? Which aspects of work

will change quicker over the couple of decades? Whatseemingly unsolvable challenges do they see on thehorizon? How can we start inventing the future today?

The time horizon was voluntarily set to 2030 in order tostretch the participants’ thinking beyond the predictablenext few product cycles and allow enough time fortechnological, economic or societal trends to unfold.

Looking at the past in order to understand how thepresent came to be is our core methodological principle.

Workshop participants first identify the ongoing trendsmost likely to carry over into the future, then map outthe spaces where future opportunities will appear, andfinally draw possible paths to get there first.

DEEP CHANGES AT WORK

All workshop participants were unanimous in saying thatthe landscape of work is currently undergoing deep

transformations along a number of different dimensions.Digital technologies and the Internet featuredprominently among the trends driving these changes and

were systematically considered within the context ofdeeper-running societal and economical trends.

The approach to the Future of Work that we followed iscentered on the individual: it is the future of the workerbefore being the future of businesses, the future ofspecific industries or the future of the economy.

Armed with a shared understanding of the trendstransforming work, the workshop participants identifiedfuture opportunities and created a number of actionable

challenges. Trends, opportunities and challenges are alldocumented in a summarized form in this document.

FRAGMENTATION OF WORK

The main overarching theme identified by workshopparticipants is the fragmentation of work. We identifiedfour main aspects of work that used to be whole and are

now fragmented. Each one of them is addressed as aseparate chapter in this document.

This change from a one-size-fits-all approach to work toa personalized, custom-made one happened around thetime when digital technologies and the Internet wentmainstream. And this is not a coincidence.

We start by looking at careers: the lifelong career withone employee is gone, that much is clear, but what willreplace it? Will we all become free agents, contractingfor multiple employers in parallel? Or will currentforms of employment remain, only with the employeetaking more responsibility for his own career andcontinuous learning? Will the divide between highlyskilled workers and the rest of the workforce keepgrowing, and with which consequences?

From fragmented careers we move on to fragmentationof work in space and time. Working no longer means 9-to-5 in the office, we can now work anytime anywhere.But is this always a good thing? Are there situations

where face-to-face meetings are irreplaceable? How can we use technology to achieve the perfect balancebetween distance collaboration and co-location?

Employee profiles are also fragmented: with increaseddiversity in the office, there is no longer any such thingas a typical employee. Beyond being morally desirable,diversity makes complete business sense, with manycompanies already reaping the rewards of fostering amore diverse, inclusive and empathetic workforce.

Finally, we looked at fragmentation of the very notion ofa corporation. Companies are now smaller and shorter-lived than ever before. Where will this trend take theeconomy? Will we see swarms of micro-corporationsorbit around larger ones? What happens to businesscollaboration and intellectual property when socialnetworks become the most permanent entity in thelandscape of work? What new forms of value creationare happening in the cracks between companies?




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WHAT THIS DOCUMENT IS NOT

This document is not an exhaustive collection of trendslikely to affect the future of work; neither does it havethe ambition to describe the future of work for everyindustry, culture and model of employment. Our

workshop covered a lot of ground, but it definitely didnot explore the entire global landscape of work.

This limitation is plainly visible in the fact that the worker you will see appear between the lines of thisdocument is very similar to our workshop participants:an educated person in the western world who ispassionate about his work in information technologies,high-tech, marketing, media, academia or biosciences.

In order to address this limitation, the conclusionsection at the end of this document outlines how this

work could be expanded by repeating the exercise andincreasing the diversity among workshop participants:more geographies, different types of employment,different sorts jobs and industry sectors.

HOW TO READ THIS DOCUMENT

The next four chapters present the four ways in which work is increasingly fragmented. Each aspect of workfragmentation is documented using trends, facts,educated guesses and open questions.

We then present our shared frame of reference: sevenideas on just one page that encapsulate how we think thefuture of work will be different from the present.

Next come four very, very ambitious and very, very hardchallenges dreamed up by workshop participants: “Theone-person ERP”, “My colleague is a robot”, “Social tothe core” and “Better than life itself”.

The document finally provides a deeper dive into the workshop methodology and concludes with thoughtsabout how to take this work forward.

We hope that you will enjoy reading this document asmuch as we enjoyed participating in the Future of Work workshop. We look forward to seeing you at a future workshop and hearing your own unique point of view.

All remarks, questions and enquiries can be addressedto Julien Vayssière, [email protected] . !




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Back in the days, college education was a sure ticket to a first job, a good career, and retirement at an ageyoung enough to actually enjoy it. This world is gone – and will not come back. Careers are becoming

increasingly fragmented into multiple employers, multiple forms of employment, and multiple careers – andoften in parallel. What is the new landscape of work created by the recombination of those fragments?

THE CAREER FOR LIFE IS DEAD

ONE LIFE. ONE JOB. ONE EMPLOYER.

Princeton Professor Henry S. Farber wanted to find outif there was any truth to the popular belief that thelifelong career had become a thing of the past.

Analyzing US census data over the period 1973-2006,he concluded that not only had long-term employmentrelationships in the private sector become less common,but also that the proportion of workers who spend lessthan one year in a job had increased. Job safety wasdisappearing from both ends of the employmentspectrum. The two main causes he identified for thisphenomenon were increased international competitionand the wave of corporate downsizing in the 1990s.

While the typical career became fragmented betweenmultiple employers and multiple careers over a lifetime,it remained in most cases a career in full-timeemployment with one employer at a time. What we arenow seeing emerge is a deeper form of careerfragmentation, one affecting the very forms of work andemployment. This is the rise of temp work, part-time

work, casual work and, of most relevance to persons working primarily with digital assets, self-employment,contracting and free agency.

FREE AGENTS

The topic of Free Agency started drawing attention in1997 when Daniel H. Pink remarked in Free AgentNation that the number of free agents in the US alonealready totaled 25 millions and kept growing. A freeagent is defined by Pink as someone who works forhimself or herself, without any exclusive relationship toany company. This includes self-employed persons,independent contractors, casual workers and temps.

Why do Free Agents choose to leave secure corporate jobs behind and strike out on their own? Well, hereinlies the paradox, according to Pink: free agents actually

feel more secure. Or, to put it in terms of portfolio

management: why invest all your human capital in justone employer when you can diversify across many?

The fact that the notion of Free Agency became popularat the same time as the Internet is no coincidence:technological changes lowered the barrier to becoming afree agent at the same time as successive waves ofdownsizing increased both the supply of contractors andthe demand for contract work.

All digital trends seem to converge in favor of freeagents: more work is being dematerialized than ever andonline communication and collaboration tools keepgetting cheaper and better. Thanks to social media andonline marketplaces for free agents, it's never beeneasier to build and promote a profile or portfolio.

FLUID AND FRAGMENTED WORK

When talking about the future, it pays to look at earlyadopters and the companies that cater for them since, asSci-Fi writer William Gibson famously put it, “the futureis already here – it's just not evenly distributed.”

Start-ups that operate online marketplaces for freeagents typically focus on niche markets where work canbe entirely dematerialized and therefore easilyperformed at a distance without any loss in quality:graphic design, software development and testing, onlineadvertising, but also product design and pricing.

A criticism often leveled at such marketplaces is thatthey only work for small-sized tasks submitted bycustomers more interested in a low price than quality.Contractors hence engage in a price race to the bottomfor producing commoditized assets. While there may besome truth to the criticism, we believe that this is only

“It seems clear that more recent cohorts of workers areless likely than their parents to have a careercharacterized by a “life-time” job with a singleemployer.

Henry S. Farber, Princeton University




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one possible incarnation of the concept. Others arepossible where quality and reputation come first.

This nascent industry is currently moving away fromdoing one-off jobs for small businesses and scaling outto handling large-size projects for corporate customers.

The site topcoder.com, for example, is an onlinemarketplace with a half-million registered softwaredevelopers and graphic designers. The process ofbreaking down a large project into chunks small enoughto be executed by individual free agents is a task calledatomization that is itself crowdsourced to thecommunity. Members compete on solving this task justlike they would for any other task submitted to them.

Part of the appeal for free agents is that these platformsdirectly address the single biggest pain point of all self-employed contractors: wasting non-billable time doingmarketing, negotiating contracts, billing customers andgetting paid. With that aspect of the business taken careof by the platform, free agents can concentrate on thetype of expert work customers actually pay for. On topof that come other benefits, such as access to a networkof peers with whom to collaborate on projects too largefor just one contractor, benchmarking and a robustreputation system.

COEXISTING EMPLOYMENT MODELS

Is Free Agency the Future of Work? We believe thatthe model will become part of the landscape of work foreveryone: free agency does not need to displace existing

employment models. It complements them.So why don't we see more free agents around us? Is it

just because governments are slow at passing laws tosupport Free Agency? Is it that people do not want to

vote for politicians who pass laws they fear threaten theadvantages they enjoy as employees in terms of taxes,financial safety and access to social benefits? Is it thatfree agency is only beneficial in unbalanced markets thatbenefit the rare few with the skills to do the largeamounts of work at hand?

It is a hard question to answer, especially given the variety of work cultures, attitudes, regulations and

policies in place across the world. The only constant weobserve is the desire of individuals to act as free agents.

ALL FREE AGENTS ON THE INSIDE?

Part of the motivation for becoming a free agent isfinancial; part is self-realization and increased controlover one’s work life and financial freedom. Even if thelargest majority of us have not taken the step to leave thecomfort of “traditional” employment and become freeagents, and maybe never will, we believe that we have allbecome free agents on the inside, and this is what willshape future careers more than anything else.

How do we work today? We make sure our LinkedIn

profile is up to date. We groom our network of businessconnections. We maintain an amount of social media

activity as a projection of our work persona. In short, webuild our personal brand and personal portfolio.

The massive changes that are reshaping education andtraining, collectively referred to as Education 2.0,illustrate this point quite well. Why are so many peopletaking to the Internet, producing training videos andtutorials for free? Of course, it is about peer recognitionand a genuine desire to help others. But this is also aninvestment in the future. It is about accumulating socialand intellectual capital in the hard currency of theInternet: comments, reviews, mentions and pageranking on search engines. It is about making sure theprofessional you is appreciated beyond the walls of thecompany you happen to work for right now.

Career management is no longer something we do when we look for a new job. It is a continuous activity that

runs in the background of everything we do.THE LIFELONG FLUID CAREER

In the future, we will all be free agents to some degree. While a sizeable fraction of the workforce will embracethis model, the majority of us will remain in moretraditional forms of employment, complemented withfree agents activities on the side. But in the process we

will all have become free agents in spirit, and that’s thereal change.

Employees will expect a lot less from their employers interms of continuing education, personal development orcareers options. That’s just as good because this is not

something companies want or can deliver any longer.The only thing that will be non-negotiable for employeesis freedom: freedom to have side jobs within negotiatedbounds, and freedom to use their current job to raisetheir profile externally.

Smart companies will understand that and allow theiremployees to come and go. Attractive companies willkeep good people within their orbit throughout theirentire life, and leverage them to expand their ecosystem.Innovation will be facilitated across the ecosystem byallowing individuals to find the right distance betweenthe stable core of the ecosystem and the disruptive ideasthey want to contribute to the ecosystem.

The workers of the future will navigate the tumultuous waters of work by constantly cultivating their careers ona variety of fronts, always learning, always contributing,and trying out ideas in the market in parallel with whatused to be known as the regular job. !

"Today each individual is ultimately responsible forguiding their own career and economic future. Today,everyone is an entrepreneur; everyone is their ownsmall business".

Andrei Cherny, Author




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Work used to be a place we went to every day in addition to being something we did once we got there. TheInternet and digital technologies have changed this forever: we can now work anywhere and everywhere.

Once a well-defined physical place, the workplace has become the sum of myriad locations, some of themonline, the rest in the real world. Adapting to this new reality is harder than expected: we struggle to organizework efficiently in fragmented workplaces and virtual teams. Has the time come to reconsider co-location?

WHEN AND WHERE WE

CHOOSE TO WORK

WHEN WORK WAS STILL A PLACE

In pre-Internet days, teams used to be bound to thesame physical location. This was the only way for

workers to access company data, means ofcommunication and, most importantly, each other. This

was a world of typewriters, photocopiers, three-ringbinders, filing cabinets, rotary dial telephones, faxmachines, office memos, mainframe computers, andonly later PCs and local area networks. Information

would reach the worker through postal mail, phone, faxand face-to-face meetings. Finding information wasdifficult, creating information was hard work, andsharing information was expensive.

Around the turn of the Millenium, personal computers,the Internet and wireless networks changed the way we

work. Personal computers shrunk in size and eventuallybecame laptops, tablets and smartphones, and gained inmobility and connectivity. Connectivity was a good thing,mostly because there was an Internet to connect to.Suddenly the rest of the world was easily within reach,including access to corporate systems through secureconnections. The tyranny of distance was abolished andthe world was proclaimed flat.

THE WORKPLACE IS FLAT

With the cost of distance collaboration dramaticallylowered, new business models and new ways of workingappear. Outsourcing to countries halfway across theglobe with cheaper skilled labor becomes not onlypossible, but also a necessity for companies trying tocontain costs while tapping into the global talent pool.

Telecommuting, working from home, working fromairport terminals, hotel rooms and coffee shopsbecomes commonplace. As more and more people

work from home some of the time, companies realizetheir office real estate is under-used, and hot-deskingfollows as a natural consequence. Workers no longerhave an assigned desk in the office but can make use ofshared office spaces on-demand. Even in the office the

worker becomes mobile, which many interpreted as thedawn of a new era of extreme mobility.

A related phenomenon is the rise of the virtual team. While outsourcing is driven by cost reduction, the

formation of virtual teams is driven by excellence: withdistance no longer an issue, teams can be assembled bychoosing talent from a much larger pool than before,leveraging people’s unique skill sets, access to localbusiness networks and the ability to work across timezones. Teams find themselves collaborating on an everyday basis across continents, knowing each other’s livesintimately, achieving results as a team but never meetingphysically. Virtual teams are seemingly destined tobecome the norm and co-location the exception.

THE PRICE OF FREEDOM IN SPACE

However, what became clear after this initial wave of

excitement was over was that virtual teams had their ownspecific sets of problems. Virtual teams fear being "outof sight, out of mind", i.e. less visible than non-virtualones, and their achievements may not be recognized bythe rest of the organization as much as they should. Inan economic downturn, mobile workers get increasinglynervous that not showing enough “face time” in theoffice may be detrimental to their career. To say nothingof the difficulty of accessing informal companyknowledge and building trust remotely.

Fragmenting work over space indeed comes at a pricenot always offset by reduced costs, increased




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productivity or better outcomes. To the point that thependulum is now swinging back towards co-location,and it started with the very people who created distancecollaboration technology in the first place: tech nerds.

In software engineering for example, practitioners of Agile software development methodologies rediscoverthe power of small empowered teams sharing the sameoffice space. Techniques such as stand-up meetings andpair programming deliver superior benefits and onlymake sense in a co-located setting.

The fact that this realization dawned first on computerprogrammers, the very group typically at the forefront ofremote collaboration techniques, is no paradox. Earlyadopters of collaboration technology turned into earlyskeptics, giving the rest of us an early signal that the roadto the future may not be a straight path towards pure

location-independence, as we might have believed.LOCAL IS THE NEW VIRTUAL

Moving away from a pure technological focus, DesignThinking workshops go one step further than Agilesoftware development in their need for co-location. Keysteps of the process are for the co-located design team tointerview stakeholders, watching out for both verbal andnon-verbal cues, and later create a low-fidelity physicalprototype of the proposed solution. This is usually doneusing low-tech supplies such as paper, glue, Play-Doh,Legos and rubber bands. All practitioners agree that thequality of interaction achieved in such workshops, the

wealth of subtle feedback and cues exchanged by thedesign team and stakeholders in face-to-face meetings

just cannot be replicated online.

Creative people, entrepreneurs and tech experts are notonly hyper mobile, they are also hyper gregarious. Theylove to flock together and experience the increasedcreativity and productivity that comes with sitting next tolike-minded people. It is no accident that mosttechnology and Web companies have adopted the largeall-inclusive campus as a workplace model rather thanthe extended virtual team.

The phenomenon is even stronger among young,independent creative workers. Co-location spaces aremore than a big room with desks for hire, Wifi and a

water cooler. They are real communities wherecooperation takes precedence over competition.

Hacker hostels take the concept of a co-working spaceto the extreme by providing shared accommodation ontop of co-working spaces. What initially started as ananswer to the rising cost of living in tech-intensivelocations such as the Bay Area now delivers benefits tobudding entrepreneurs beyond budget accommodation:easy access to a network of peers, camaraderie, sharedenthusiasm, support and collaboration.

FRAGMENTATION IN SPACE AND TIME

With the ability to work anywhere comes the ability to work anytime. How we split time between our work and

private life is different today from what it was in the past. When we talk about time, work is also fragmented.

Workers who still go to the office everyday choose tointersperse personal tasks throughout the workday. Start

work at home very early in the morning, get the childrenready for school, drop them off, go to work, maybe takean hour around mid-day for some physical activity, laterpick-up the kids or perform household duties, andresume work late in the evening once the house is quiet.

This style of work hits what a 2010 KPMG survey callsthe "sweet spot" of work fragmentation whererespondents report an increase in work satisfaction,sense of freedom, health and quality of personal time.Beyond this point is the domain of the so-called "fullyblended worker", someone who works long hours withlittle time for personal or social activities, and often

experiences negative health consequences.How will this trend unfold in the future? Fragmentationof work is definitely not going away: 50% of respondentsin the survey mentioned above expect fragmentation toremain the same in the future (and enjoy having thechoice of when and where they work) and 34% expect itto increase

SEE YOU BACK AT THE OFFICE

Have we come full circle, from the traditional office tothe mobile worker and now back to the office? Notquite, since in the process we have acquired somethingtremendously important: the freedom to choose where

we work.If we work in the same place as the rest of our teamtoday, it is because we choose to. We spend time in theoffice because we need to convince a colleague to lend ahelping hand outside of project structure and reportinglines. We may go to the office because the computerscreen is bigger, the Internet faster, or the coffee and thefood better. Or simply because we are honest enough toacknowledge that working from home may be boring attimes, and we enjoy the social interactions tin the office.

The worker of the future will be someone who takes fulladvantage of technology for optimizing the geography of

his or her work in a unique and personal way, and as aresult will always look forward to going to the office. !

“The most efficient and effective method of conveyinginformation to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation” .

The Agile Manifesto, 2001

“We have the talent. We just need to work together.Different environments need to overlap, to connectand to interact in order to transform our culture”.

The co-Working Manifesto, 2012




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Diversity in the workplace is not only desirable, it is the reality of the new workplace, and an approach tobuilding and managing teams that makes absolute business sense. Diversity comes in various flavours such

as gender, age, educational background, ethnicity or sexual orientation. We know the workplace of the futurewill be more diverse than ever. What we do not know yet is if and how this will affect the way we work.

YOUR

TYPICAL EMPLOYEE

NO LONGER WORKS HERE

ALL THE DIMENSIONS OF DIVERSITY

Do you remember that scene in the movie Apollo 13 when the damaged spacecraft is re-entering Earth’satmosphere and everyone at Mission Control anxiously

waits for the astronauts to come out of radio blackout?Now, can you remember one person who was not white,male and in their twenties or thirties?

Contrast this picture with the control room for thelanding of the Curiosity rover on Mars on August 6 th,

2012. Females, males, mixed ethnicities. Some young,some less young, some surely old enough to remember

watching the moon landings live on the family TV. Longhair, short hair, even a Mohawk. This is today’s

workplace, forty years after the Moon program ended.

Diversity in the workplace has come a long way. Beyondethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, there are otherdimensions of diversity in the workplace that are alsodefinitely worth exploring, such as educationalbackgrounds, family status or age.

THE GLOBALIZED WORKPLACE

Diversity in terms of ethnicities entered the workplace

from different directions. While minorities alreadypresent in the local population gained increasing accessto qualified jobs, corporations at the same timeembraced globalization by opening offices in foreigncountries with lower labor cost and growing, untappedmarkets. The effects combined to make the global

workforce of large multinational companies a celebratedpicture of diversity.

Beyond the statistical increase in diversity though,differences remained. Workers in remote locationsoften found themselves in the role of “extended

workbench” for their colleagues located nearer the

company headquarters, where control over keydecisions and budget remained. It took many years foroverseas locations to conquer their independence andobtain that entire projects or lines of business movefrom the core of the company to the edge.

In parallel, individual employees from remote locationsstarted moving to the headquarters, facilitating cross-cultural communications and giving a face and a nameto colleagues from distant locations who may otherwisetoo often be seen as a threat to the jobs of the“historical” company employees.

MORE WOMEN PROFESSIONALS

Diversity in terms of genders seems to be a given thosedays, but recent debates sparked by Anne-MarieSlaughter’s piece in the Atlantic Monthly titled WhyWomen still can’t have it all reminded us that the pricefor success paid by women remains higher than formen. Change is on the way though: flexibility in whereand when we work helps solve family schedulingconflicts, while at the same time younger couples seemmore ready than their parents to share the family

workload. This is however not an irreversible trend, and

it is still a possibility that the dominant model eventuallyreverses to the more traditional family model.

Of particular importance is the fact that, according to2011 US Census data, more women than men now havecollege degrees in the US. It is too early to tell how this

will impact the future workplace. The critical questionis: will this trend lead to more women in the workplace,and eventually more women in management positions?In other terms, what will be the "conversion rate" rategoing from female college students to active femaleprofessionals, and from females in management andsenior management positions?




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THE FOUR-GENERATIONS WORKPLACE

Age is an oft-forgotten dimension of diversity. We aremoving into an era where three or even four generations

will work in the same company. This is mostly aconsequence of the age of retirement going up, driveneither by legislative changes to state-run pensionschemes in Europe or dwindling retirement savings inthe US context. In other words, a young hire born in1990 may soon be working alongside a baby boomerborn in 1950 or even before.

Here again, we have more questions than answers. How will this situation affect the future of work? Will workingstyles be so far apart as to render teamwork ineffective,as some predict? Will the gap in age, on the other hand,create enough empathy in both directions to bridge thegap and learn to work together? After all, grandpa is no

threat to the career of grandson, and the other wayaround. And there is so much to learn, and not only warstories involving punch cards or hard drives the size of a

washing machine.

FAMILY STATUS

Family status is the last dimension of diversity that wediscussed at our Future of Work workshop. It is nolonger about working full time or not working at all. It isfor example about successfully managing a team while

working part-time. It is about male employees takingseveral months off to become the primary care giver totheir young children. It is about both members of a

couple working part time for sharing family duties. Therange of options is infinite, since digital technologies onthe one hand, and evolving mentalities and workplacepolicies on the other hand have greatly expanded thespace of possible work arrangements.

FROM DISABILITY TO OPPORTUNITY

Disability was one of the first dimensions of diversity tobe acknowledged and protected by regulations and

workplace policies. The modern workplace, especiallyin industries where the main assets are knowledge andde-materialized goods, has created a level playing fieldfor all regardless of physical disability.

While progresses are being made on integrating persons with mental disabilities in the workplace, it needs to beacknowledged that progress on that front is slower.

Some inspiring examples need to be highlighted though,such as that of integrating persons with autism in the

workplace and especially in the IT industry.

Dutch company Passwerk for example employs a largenumber of software testers with autism spectrumdisorders. These workers are appreciated for theircapacity to focus for a long time on a task, their absoluteattention to details as well as the speed at which they canperform repetitive tasks. The company providescoaching for skills that are missing, such as adapting tonew environments and new people when working asconsultants on the customer’s premises.

THE ROLE OF EMPATHY

Empathy plays a growing role in the design andcontinuous improvements of products and solutions in

various industries. In the IT industry and at SAP inparticular, the need to empathize with end users is acornerstone of the Design Thinking methodology.

Diversity in the workplace is an enabler of empathy. When surrounded by work colleagues from variousages, disability and cultural backgrounds, one needs toconstantly see situations from the other person’s

viewpoint in order to perform at his or her best.

DIVERSITY WORKS

Diversity is not just a cause that is morally right. It alsomakes business sense, and a growing body of evidence isproving the point. A 2008 study conducted by the

University of Colorado found that firms with a strongcommitment to diversity outperform their peers onaverage. A 2009 survey by the University of Illinoisfound that diversity in race and gender is associated withincreased sales revenue, more customers, and greaterrelative profits. A 2010 McKinsey report shows thatcompanies with the highest share of women in theirsenior management teams outperform those with no

women by 41% in return on equity and by 56% inoperating results.

MANAGING DIVERSITY

To make diversity work on an everyday basis foreveryone, we need more than acceptance of diversity inthe workplace. We need management practices thatfavor and leverage diversity.

It starts with understanding the regulations and policiesabout diversity, but also understanding how diversityimpacts organizational behavior, getting to the root ofproblems and opportunities, and identifying bestpractices for a diverse working environment.

There is a fine line between promoting diversity andprofiling employees though. While assigning a person ofa specific ethnic background to designing or sellingsolutions to the market she knows best may be seen by a

well-intentioned manager as promoting diversity whileaddressing business objectives, the employee in questionmay perceive the same move as reducing herindividuality to her background.

THE TYPICAL EMPLOYEE IS GONE

There is no longer such a thing as a typical employee.Even though a lot remains to be done for diversity alongall dimensions to be truly embraced in all workplaces,

we have more reasons to believe the future will be betterthan the present. And this is not just because people aremore aware or enlightened. It is because diversity makesbusiness sense. An inclusive workplace attracts andretains the very kind of people most needed for running

innovative businesses and inventing the future. !




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Which one comes first, the corporation or the individual? Is it simply a question of perspective? Or is theremore to the story? We believe that the Internet and digital technologies are tilting the scale towards the

individual: empowering individuals while threatening corporations as the dominant structuring concept for theeconomy. Fragmented corporations will likely recombine around the most stable aspect of the landscape ofwork today: the social networks that link individuals and disseminate ideas across and beyond companies.

THE BROKEN -DOWN CORPORATION

Asked to draw a picture of the economy, we may startby drawing boxes representing corporations, thenconnect the boxes along value chains and finally addlittle stick figures representing people inside the boxes.

Or we may start the other way around. First draw stickfigures, boxes around them, then more boxes, and morearrows connecting corporations in value networks ofincreasing complexity. Which begs the question: whichone comes first, the corporation or the individual?

SMALLER AND YOUNGER COMPANIES

For a long time, you would have been forgiven forthinking corporations came first. Corporations,especially the largest and most visible ones, oftenoutlived people and acquired the status of institutions.

Nowhere else than in family corporations is this ideamore prevalent: the firm is passed down from onegeneration to the next and embodies values andpermanence. Some of the world’s largest firms, such asSamsung, Tata or Walmart are actually family firms

Things are changing though. According to RichardFoster from Yale University, the average lifespan of acompany listed in the S&P 500 index of leading UScompanies has decreased in the last century, from 67

years in the 1920s to just 15 years today. And this trend

keeps accelerating: Professor Foster estimates that by2020, more than three-quarters of the S&P 500 will becompanies that we have not heard of yet.

At the other end of the spectrum from the venerablefamily firm stands that icon of the digital economy, thestart-up company. In the words of serial entrepreneurand writer Steve Blank “a startup is an organizationformed to search for a repeatable and scalable businessmodel.” A startup is not a small version of a bigcompany; it is a convenient, necessary and ultimatelydisposable container for a few people and their ideas.

Not all corporations will shrink down and see theirlifespan shortened as dramatically as startups though.

The emerging model is a hybrid one where a largenumber of small corporations come and go, trying outnew ideas and new business models and failing far moreoften than not. Of the ones that succeed, a few grow tobecome very large while the overwhelming majoritybecome “assimilated” by larger, longer-lived companies

whose strength lies in execution and branding more thaninnovation and disruption.

NOT THE ONLY WAY TO CREATE VALUE

In parallel with corporations getting smaller and shorter-lived, we also see new modes of value creation appearand co-exist alongside corporations.

Digital technologies and the Internet have enabled near-free communication and collaboration regardless ofdistance, which in turn enabled new ways ofcollaboratively creating means of productions thatpreviously only belonged to the realm of corporations.This movement started with digital assets and is nowreaching the world of things that we can touch and hold.

In the almost thirty years of its history, Open Sourceideas has moved from the libertarian and academicfringe to the corporate mainstream. It is now a standard

way of procuring and continuously improving software within commoditized categories such as operatingsystems, application servers, development tools andframeworks or legacy databases.

The Open Source approach inspired other movementssuch as the collaborative creation of content epitomizedby Wikipedia. Not only is the quality of Wikipediaarticles often comparable to the paper encyclopedias ofold, it is also unique in being available in 185 languages,109 of which have more than ten thousand articles.

Examples of collaborative creation and curation ofcontent in other industries and niches abound. The




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online community deviantART.com, for example,allows 23 million artists and art appreciators to shareover 230 millions pieces of art, a lot of which is availablefor re-use under generous terms. Arduino, a platformfor open-source electronics prototyping or Contraptor, acommunity for any sort of hardware prototyping,demonstrate that the movement towards collaborativecreation is not restricted to creating immaterial assets.

In the publishing sector for example, a growing numberof authors decided to do without publishers altogetherand self-publish their books instead. They typically use acombination of on-demand printing such as LightningSource and online retailers such as Amazon,complemented by tactical use of specialized skills suchas proofreaders, editors or cover designers. Notsurprisingly, this community collaborates intensively

online. Collaboration lowers the cost of thecommoditized parts of the process, leaving authors freeto compete directly for the reader’s attention.

INNER SOURCING

Inner sourcing is the ideas of applying the principles ofOpen Source software development inside theenterprise. Typically, when too many products inside asoftware company depend on a platform product underthe responsibility of just one team, the pressure on thatteam to answer everyone else’s demands grows so highthat the best way to prevent a bottleneck is to shareownership and responsibility for that shared piece ofsoftware across the company, open-source style.

Needless to say, inner sourcing has far-reaching effectson the organizational structure and culture of thecompany. Done well, it is a transformational tool thatcan help break silos and increase communication,collaboration and transparency across all departments.

THE RISE OF MICRO CORPORATIONS

What this all means is that the barrier to trying out newideas in the marketplace has been dramatically lowered.

Economics theory tell us that entrepreneurial individualstypically form companies in order to put their moneyand efforts into just one pot so as to be able to afford

expensive means of production such as machinery,offices, warehouses, etc. With this constraint largelyremoved, what does the future hold for the corporation?

The corporation as a legal entity will most certainly notgo away since the legal system is essential for enforcingfair competition in the market place. The corporation asa legal construct creates an explicit boundary around anenterprise, encourages transparency and allows a groupof people to act as one in all matters of business life.

What we may see though is the rise of micro-corporations: companies with no employees, operatedon less than a full-time basis by one individual, but with

global visibility and a global customer base. The goal ofthese corporations is not necessarily growth but rathercreating a sustainable income stream for an individual

by serving a very niche business need. Their keydifference is a focus on containing costs in terms of timerather than money and leveraging of cloud-based tools.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTYFrameworks for Intellectual Property, especiallypreservation of intellectual property through patenting,are increasingly challenged. And not just by libertariansclaiming that “all ideas should be free and patents aretherefore evil”, but also by business-minded persons

who realize that a system created for the industrialrevolution is increasingly becoming a hindrance on the

whole economy. The common perception is that thesystem is increasingly gamed by large corporations toprevent disruption from smaller competitors, while atthe same time exploited by “patent trolls” for pure profit

without any contribution to innovation.

PERMANENCE OF SOCIAL NETWORKS

If corporations become disposable vehicles, whichelement will replace them in their role of providingpermanence to the landscape of work? People. Or,more precisely, the networks people form and maintain.

Successful investors do not follow ideas or corporationsto know where to invest next in the fast-moving digitalindustry. They rather follow successful people. Thesepeople are not called serial entrepreneurs for nothing:bright individuals go from one corporation to the nexttaking with them a network of equally bright people.Corporations come and go, they are the stable core.

We need to adapt our vision in order to observe thefuture as it emerges: looking at business as a network ofconnected people rather than as corporations doingbusiness with each other. In the span of their work life, acreative person will be the nexus of many idea streamsand influence countless organizations, while companiescome and go. People bring permanence to business.

THE CORPORATIONS OF THE FUTURE

A possible future is one in which small, nimbledisposable companies work alongside sustainable micro-corporations to provide services and ideas aggregatedand orchestrated by larger corporations. While this is adesirable future for some, and a feasible future sincemost of the tools necessary are already available online,the largest impediments remain regulations that weredesigned for corporations in the industrial age.

Which regulations need to be overhauled is a matter ofdebate. Different countries will settle on different trade-offs between individual and collective freedom. It isclear though that we cannot invent the corporation ofthe future within today’s regulatory framework. What

will the corporation of the future look l ike is one of themost open and contentious topics we encounteredduring our workshop, one that seems to crystallize a lot

of our hopes and fears about what the Future of Workmay be. !




12

The full first day of our Future of Work workshop was dedicated to creating a shared frame of reference forthinking about the future. What are the dimensions along which work is most likely to change over the next

decade and beyond? How will these changes affect individual workers and the companies they work for, dobusiness with or dream about creating? These seven ideas capture how we think about the future of work.

THE FUTURE OF WORK IN

SEVEN IDEAS

1.

The lifelong career with one employer is gone and won’t come back. Our main job willremain but will be complemented with a number of microjobs on the side – and ouremployer will encourage it. The lifelong career is now with the ecosystem, not the company.

2.

Companies of the future will take extreme forms: small and ephemeral vehicles for trying outideas, large and eternal companies that embody ecosystems and brands or micro-

companies optimized for sustainability, not growth, and that follow an individual through life.

3.

In the future we all take responsibility for guiding our own careers, continuously educatingourselves and securing our economic future – because no one else will do it for us.

Continuous learning, helping and teaching will become an intrinsic part of work for all.

4.

Diversity in the workplace will keep increasing, maximizing access to the global talent poolby including more women, more age groups, and more disabled workers. Attracting and

successfully managing diversity will become a key skill of innovative companies.

5.

The social network will be the most permanent element in a worker’s life. Good companieswill allow and encourage employees to nurture their network across company boundaries.Great companies will leverage their employees’ social network for growth and innovation.

6.

Online marketplaces for tasks, projects and skills will become a mainstream way ofmanaging and allocating work – even for large companies. Internal marketplaces willconnect to external ones, creating one platform for managing work across the ecosystem.

7.

In the future, value is created in the spaces between companies as much as withincompanies. Companies collaborate openly with each other and with individuals for

developing commoditized tools which are made available to all under open licenses.




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How can we start building the future today? How can we set ourselves objectives that are ambitious enoughto make a real difference while retaining a non-zero chance of succeeding? How do we avoid falling back to

the comfort of incremental innovation over existing business models and technology platforms? The answerreached in our workshop is: by setting challenges that are actionable, multi-disciplinary and far-reaching.

FOUR VERY VERY HARD

CHALLENGES

SOCIAL TO THE COREOur vision is to create enterprise software that helps all

users grow and leverage their personal online social

network presence by sharing what they do at work.

It is almost impossible to achieve today because

corporate policies and business models inhibit sharing of

information and because enterprise software is only

occasionally integrated with social networks.

By working with lawyers, executives, designers and

developers we plan to make this vision real by creating

new business models that are social at the core and

enterprise software that supports and promotes them.

THE ONE-PERSON ERPOur vision is to create enterprise software owned and

controlled by individuals that integrates effortlessly with

the enterprise systems of employers and other

companies that the individual works with.

It is almost impossible to achieve today because

enterprise software is architected around corporation

boundaries and cross-company integration is limited.

By working with designers, lawyers, security and privacy

experts we plan to make this vision real by creating a

new breed of enterprise software that is truly personal

and can be operated with no time overhead at all.

MY COLLEAGUE IS A BOTOur vision is to make conversational interfaces the main

mode of interaction with enterprise software for all users.

It is almost impossible to achieve today because current

solutions are limited to simple queries, do not have

access to the full context data of the enterprise and the

user experience is stuck in the “uncanny valley”.

By working with psychologists, natural language experts,

artificial intelligence and big data specialists we plan to

make this vision real by creating the most supportive,

efficient and mightily helpful virtual work colleague.

BETTER THAN LIFE ITSELFOur vision is to create distance collaboration solutions

that deliver an experience so good that users actually

refuse to go back to face-to-face meetings.

It is almost impossible to achieve today because most of

the non-verbal and situated information exchanged by

humans is lost in interactions mediated by technology.

By working with psychologists, neuroscientists,

biotechnologist and technologists we plan to make this

vision real by creating a solution based on disruptive

technology and augmentation of the human body.




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FUTURE OF WORK METHODOLOGY

Our workshop was conducted according to theForesight Framework developed at Stanford Universityby Dr. William Cockayne and his colleagues. Dr.

Cockayne himself and Dr. Tamara Carleton facilitatedthe workshop and helped us analyze the outcomes.

This was the first time the methodology was used atSAP, building on previous successes at Microsoft, Tata,

Volvo, Panasonic and Deutsche Bank.

The core idea of the Foresight Framework is to look atthe past in order to understand how the present came tobe. The workshop participants identify ongoing trendsthat are most likely to carry over into the future, mapout the spaces where future opportunities are most likelyto arise, and draw possible paths to get there first. Themethodology structures ten group exercises in threephases: Perspective, Opportunity and Solution.

PERSPECTIVE

In the first phase, workshop participants build a frameof reference for thinking about the future. This stepaddresses an issue common to all exercises about thefuture: where do we start? How do we make sense ofthe complex environment that surrounds the Future of

Work? How do we avoid getting stalled taking intoconsideration an infinite number of points of view? Theoutcome of this phase is a shared understanding of themain dimensions of the problem. Each dimension ischarted on a timescale starting in the past, so that weknow where we come from. This timeline is thenextended into a number of possible futures.

OPPORTUNITIES

Armed with a frame of reference for thinking about thefuture, the next phase looks for opportunities. Long-running demographic, economical and societal trendsare explored with an emphasis on those least likely tosuffer from disruption. Here we favor personas overtrends, using key differences between generations tounderstand what aspects of today’s people will changegoing through life, and which ones will remain the same.

This phase culminates in a “Future Telling” session where participants play the role of future users and actout scenes set in possible futures. This is a fun and

thought-provoking moment where teams not only share visions of the future, but also express the fears andhopes that they brought into the exercise.

SOLUTIONS

The third phase is about taking our shared vision of thefuture, both at the level of macro-trends and futureindividuals, identifying opportunities for innovation, andcharting a path forward. For that we go back to thedimensions of the problem identified at the start of the

workshop and systematically search for white spaces. We then create stories about the many steps we aregoing to take for exploiting those opportunities. Thisstep is grounded in the creation of a physical low-fidelitymockups of the future solution we are planning to build.

We have found the methodology to be the perfectcombination of breadth and depth given the timeframe

we had. It allowed everyone to leave the workshop withboth a frame of reference for thinking about the future,and concrete steps for how to prepare today for futureopportunities, and adapt quickly as the future unfoldsbefore our eyes.

GOING SOCIAL

All outcomes of the workshop were recorded andfurther analyzed by a core team of workshop members

who complemented this raw material with extraresearch. The main ideas from the workshop weresocialized through a number of social media channelsfor extra validation and inspiration. This included SAPStreamWork, the SAP Community Network, Twitterand specific LinkedIn and foresight online groups. Theresult of this work is this document, which is the finaloutcome of this particular workshop and the launchingpad for future activities along the same lines.

More information about the Foresight Frameworkmethodology can be found at foresight.stanford.edu. !




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CONCLUSION

This document presented the outcome of a two-dayhands-on workshop on the topic of the Future of Workheld at SAP Labs Palo Alto on March 20 th-21 st , 2012.

THE FUTURE OF WORK WORKSHOP

The workshop participants first created a frame ofreference for thinking about the future, then identifiedcurrent trends most likely to carry on into the nextdecades and finally outlined hard and far-reachingchallenges aimed at addressing future opportunities.

In a nutshell, we identified four dimensions along which

we believe work is becoming increasingly fragmented:fragmentation of the workplace in space and time (weno longer work nine-to-five in the office), the end of the

very notion of a typical employee thanks to increaseddiversity in the workforce, the end of the lifelong career,now fragmented into multiple employers and forms ofemployment, and finally the fragmentation of thecorporation itself into the hub of an ecosystem ofcollaborating companies of all shapes and sizes.

While our work did not aim at presenting an exhaustivereview of trends likely to impact the future of work, webelieve that the outcome of those two days of intensereflection and sharing of ideas provides a very solid base

for further work exploring the Future of Work.The feedback received from participants wasoverwhelmingly positive; with many participantscommenting on how deceptively simple and powerfulthe methodology was, and enquiring about applying themethodology internally in their own organization.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

We now plan to take this initial workshop further byexpanding the scope of this work across geographicallocations, business sectors and modes of employment.

The work we did in this workshop was dominated by aNorth American perspective, which we would like tocomplement with, for example, European, Indian andChinese perspectives in order to paint a more accuratepicture of the Future of Work on a global basis.

We would also l ike to tap into societal contexts that arenot represented in our workshops, such as groups of

workers who are not knowledge workers, or knowledge workers on the operational side of the business ratherthan the innovation, management or development side.

Running the same workshop with persons in non-mainstream modes of employment will most certainly

yield fresh insights: self-employed consultants, tempsand entrepreneurs for example operate with differenttrade-offs than workers in salaried employment.

In parallel with running more workshops, we plan todisseminate the results of this workshop to a largeraudience through various publication channels such asbusiness and trade magazines, both paper and online. Inaddition, we are joining online conversations whereaspects of the future are discussed, either in a breadth-first manner (“future global trends”) or a depth-firstmanner (“what future for office furniture?”).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank Dr. Vishal Sikka, member ofthe Executive Board and CTO of SAP for initiating andsponsoring this work from the onset.

We would like to thank all the workshop participants who opened their mind to the Future of Work for twoentire days and participated in follow-up activities. Thisreport is really the output of their collective brain.

The organizers of the workshop are also indebted toTamara Carleton and Bill Cockayne from StanfordUniversity’s Foresight Innovation program who helpedprepare, deliver and exploit the results of this workshop.

CORRESPONDENCE

Questions, remarks and feedback concerning the Futureof Work workshop or this document can be addressedto Julien Vayssière, [email protected] . !



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