The Skills-Powered Organization: The Journey to the Next-Generation Enterprise

THE MIT PRESS, 2024

How to design and activate the skills-based enterprise that is pivotal for navigating the “next” of work.

As the world navigates the rapid and disruptive effects of AI, climate change, and geopolitical conflicts, the world of work, too, needs to change. Jobs are giving way to skills as the currency of work to ensure a more agile, resilient, and flexible enterprise that cannot just respond but must thrive in the face of these challenges. This pivot from jobs to skills will require us to rethink everything we know about work. Building on his bestselling book Work without Jobs, Ravin Jesuthasan returns, this time with coauthor Tanuj Kapilashrami, an international human resources leader, to provide the framework organizations need to thrive in a world demanding perpetual reinvention.

Many business and management books focus on individual skills and competencies, the power of AI to make companies more agile through enabling “internal gigs,” and the societal and policy implications of the external gig economy. The cases in Reinventing the Organization, however, discuss how leading companies are reinventing themselves to be skills-based organizations and transforming value for customers, communities, and stakeholders. Jesuthasan and Kapilashrami describe the need for new organizational capabilities like work design and AI-driven resourcing, as well as the need to reinvent current work systems, to realize the agility, productivity, and value-creating potential of an organization where skills are at the center of its operating model.

Providing a step-by step guide for both new and seasoned leaders, this practical and informative book shows just how to future-proof organizations for the post–fourth industrial revolution world.

Book Praises

“The Skills Powered Organization is an important and eye-opening book with the potential to transform the organizations of the future. The authors present a world where, now more than ever, skills-powered organizations foster agility and teamwork across the growing number of areas of expertise that require cross-boundary collaboration.”

Amy C. Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership, Harvard Business School; Author, Right kind of wrong: The science of failing well (Atria 2023).

“The world of work requires a reset. Our traditional beliefs about jobs are being transformed by AI and new ways of working. Jesuthasan and Kapilashrami are our clear-eyed guides for navigating this new world of work and its core building blocks of skills instead of jobs so we can continue to learn, lead and thrive.”

Arianna Huffington, Founder & CEO, Thrive Global

“While many might look to technology and artificial intelligence as the pivotal elements of a next generation retail business, ours is ultimately a people business. For us, it is all about how we bring people and technology together. The skills of our workforce, the ones that define our success today and tomorrow, will be the ultimate determinants of our success in the future. Jesuthasan and Kapilashrami have given us a clear roadmap for keeping the “human” in work.”

Simon Roberts, CEO, Sainsbury’s

“How do organisations grow and thrive in a fast-paced AI and technology driven world? Jesuthasan and Kapilashrami in their new book The Skills Powered Organization take us on a fascinating journey that puts skills, not college degrees, at the Center of the response to this question.”

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Director General of the World Trade Organization

“Client expectations, especially around sustainability, artificial intelligence and technology, continue to evolve rapidly. Skills are increasingly at the centre of our operating model in order to drive the organisational transformation that is required in order to keep pace. This drives the strategic decisions we make about how we align evolving demand signals from our clients with the induction, development and deployment of talent. Ravin and Tanuj have penned a business leader’s guide, backed by strong research, on what the journey towards a skills-powered operating model can look like.”

Bill Winters, Group Chief Executive, Standard Chartered Bank

“The move to skills as the currency of work is a fundamental shift that upends the focus of the last century where work has primarily been organized around jobs. Jesuthasan and Kapilashrami are our expert navigators on this challenging journey that has numerous benefits to businesses, workers and society. The Skills-Powered Organization provides a compelling and practical roadmap to leaders on how they can future proof their organizations by adopting a skills-first strategy, and advances thinking on what is set to be one of the most significant shifts in human capital over the next decade.”

David Green, Managing Partner at Insight222, co-author of Excellence in People Analytics, host of the Digital HR Leaders podcast

Buying Options

The Fast Future Blur

WILEY, 2024

Discover Transformative Interconnections Shaping the Future

Fast Future Blur provides invaluable insights and strategic frameworks to navigate the complexity of our current period of rapid and radical transformation (‘Fast Future’ phase). Focused on the interconnected nature of the evolution underway, the book serves as an eye-opener for business leaders, providing guidance in understanding this dynamic and complex landscape.

Fast Future Blur delves into 12 key areas of change, including platform businesses, regenerative innovation, artificial intelligence, the future of healthcare, the future of work, the future of mobility, blockchain, metaverse, virtual & augmented reality, leadership, agility, fintech, and the impact from 6 inter-connections.

With compelling, powerful, and timely insights from the Fast Future Executive faculty ― a global consortium of experts and industry leaders, many of whom are associated with the World Economic Forum, top business and technology schools and leading global companies ― Fast Future Blur is an essential resource to prepare for the complexities of the future.

Amazon

WORK WITHOUT JOBS

THE MIT PRESS, 2022

The future of work requires the deconstruction of jobs and the reconstruction of work.

Work is traditionally understood as a “job,” and workers as “jobholders.” Jobs are structured by titles, hierarchies, and qualifications. In Work without Jobs, Ravin Jesuthasan and John Boudreau propose a radically new way of looking at work. They describe a new “work operating system” that deconstructs jobs into their component parts and reconstructs these components into more optimal combinations that reflect the skills and abilities of individual workers. In a new normal of rapidly accelerating automation, demands for organizational agility, efforts to increase diversity, and the emergence of alternative work arrangements, the old system based on jobs and jobholders is cumbersome and ungainly. Jesuthasan and Boudreau’s new system lays out a roadmap for the future of work.

Work without Jobs presents real-world cases that show how leading organizations are embracing work deconstruction and reinvention. For example, when a robot, chatbot, or artificial intelligence takes over parts of a job while a human worker continues to do other parts, what is the “job”? DHL found some answers when it deployed social robotics at its distribution centers. Meanwhile, the biotechnology company Genentech deconstructed jobs to increase flexibility, worker engagement, and retention. Other organizations achieved agility with internal talent marketplaces, worker exchanges, freelancers, crowdsourcing, and partnerships. It’s time for organizations to reboot their work operating system, and Work without Jobs offers an essential guide for doing so.

Book Praises

“This timely book will help you radically rethink how to organize work.”
ADAM GRANT, #1 New York Times best-selling author of Think Again and host of the TED podcast WorkLife

“The world of work is changing, purpose and social impact are becoming more important than ever, and employees are demanding more from their employers. It is time we reinvent the world of work as we know it. Work without Jobs provides the radical framework needed to completely rethink the working models we use to ensure work works for everyone.”

LEENA NAIR, Global Chief Executive Officer, CHANEL
“How can an organization evolve in an ever-changing world? This book is essential reading for any business leader who wants to understand the future of work, jobs, and skills.”
SAADIA ZAHIDI, Managing Director, Centre for the New Economy and Society, World Economic Forum
“The world is changing fast but the way we work is, in many crucial ways, stuck in the past. Ravin Jesuthasan and John Boudreau lay out a powerful argument for moving beyond the staid and outdated assumptions and toward a reimagined work system. This engaging book will help both individuals and organizations become more agile, resilient, and inclusive.”

DANIEL H. PINK, #1 New York Times bestselling author of When, Drive, and To Sell is Human
“Work and jobs are changing fast and in this fascinating book the authors provide a masterful guide that will help every manager make the most of the extraordinary opportunities to rethink jobs and boost productivity.”
LYNDA GRATTON, Professor of Management Practice, London Business School; author of Redesigning Work
“Work Without Jobs should be required reading for the leader and HR manager of the future! Masterfully written, Ravin and John guide readers in understanding the changing landscape of technology in the workplace and how to approach some of today’s toughest questions and fears for employees. Become versed in a profound, new understanding of your team and company’s jobs with this incredible new book!”
MARSHALL GOLDSMITH, New York Times #1 bestselling author of Triggers, Mojo, and What Got You Here Won’t Get You There
“Work without Jobs is a joy to read, an innovative and thoughtful account of where the workplace is, and where it is going. It is extremely well-written, with gold nuggets of ideas scattered throughout. This is a must read for anyone concerned about the future of work from two thought leaders.”
Professor Sir Cary Cooper, CBE, 50th Anniversary Professor of Organizational Psychology and Health at the ALLIANCE Manchester Business School, University of Manchester

Book Review

Work without Jobs is about how work is changing, inexorably, in ways that will eventually transform every aspect of society. Deeply researched and compelling, this is the book to read this year if you want to gain a deep understanding of how work is changing and what it might mean for your organization. Full of history, data, research, and ideas, it will be an invaluable resource for academics and practitioners alike.

Reading the title, the first thing that comes to mind is likely the gig economy, or the gradual lessening of mutual commitment between employees and employers, along with the rise in freelance work and short-term assignments. In other words, fewer of us will be full time employees for extended periods in the same organization. Fewer jobs, more work. But the authors are not so much focused on whether you’re employed by a single company as whether the work you do can accurately be described as a “job.” The book’s overarching idea is that people will be engaged in work in far more fluid ways than the term job, with its implication of a finite set of specific responsibilities, can convey.

They are interested in questions that are hard to answer, without a crystal ball. How, for example, will work be organized to encompass a perpetually changing mix of full time employees, part time employees, contractors, freelancers, gig workers, robots, volunteers, and more? How will society be reshaped as a result?

As the book makes clear, the future of work will be complex and dynamic and fraught with both ethical and practical dilemmas. How we will navigate these challenges, and who will be most influential in doing so, are important, highly related areas for continued study. But the book’s core idea that work will be increasingly disconnected from jobs. That does not mean you won’t have an employer, nor that you won’t be able to stay at a single organization for a long time. It does mean that you will not be hired by an employer to deliver a knowable, limited set of tasks tied to a job or job description. Nor will your advancement opportunities involve being promoted out of one job, into another better one.

Despite the ambitious, encompassing topic covered in this book, the authors manage to provide practical ideas that will help managers and work-seekers alike navigate the fluid world that lies ahead. I particularly appreciated the authors’ emphasis on starting with what needs to be done: rather than designing a job, we must figure out the objectives we’re trying to serve, and go backwards from there to how best to achieve them. What role will automation play? What role will people play? What skills and competencies will be needed, in what sequence?

There is too much covered in the book for me to do it justice here, but I would be remiss in not mentioning its clear, elegant writing, which makes the prospect of learning about how work is changing an enjoyable investment of time.

Buying options

REINVENTING JOBS

HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW PRESS, 2018

A 4-Step Approach for Applying Automation to Work

Your organization has made the decision to adopt automation and artificial intelligence technologies. Now, you face difficult and stubborn questions about how to implement that decision: How, when, and where should we apply automation in our organization? Is it a stark choice between humans versus machines? How do we stay on top of these technological trends as work and automation continue to evolve?

Reinventing Jobs presents leaders with a new set of tools to answer these daunting questions. Based on groundbreaking primary research, this book provides an original, structured approach of four distinct steps–deconstruct, optimize, automate, and reconfigure–to help leaders reinvent how work gets bundled into jobs and create optimal human-machine combinations. Jesuthasan and Boudreau show leaders how to continuously reexamine what a job really is, and they provide the tools for identifying the pivotal performance value of tasks within jobs and how these tasks should be reconstructed into new, more optimal combinations.

With numerous examples and practical advice for applying the four-step process, Reinventing Jobs gives leaders a more precise, planful, and actionable way to decide how, when, and where to apply and optimize work automation.

Book Praises

“Amid all the apocalyptic visions about tomorrow’s workplace—from widespread unemployment to pitched battles between man and machine—comes a bracing dose of common sense. Reinventing Jobs cuts through the hype and hysteria and shows leaders how to apply automation and artificial intelligence in their organizations. Jesuthasan and Boudreau are the clear-eyed guides every organization needs to track their way through the future of work.”

DANIEL H. PINK, Author, Drive and When

“In the age of the internet of things (IoT) and AI, the traditional notions of ‘Economic Man’ and ‘Social Man’ need to be superseded by the concept of ‘Self-motivated’ Man. Reinventing Jobs is a book ahead of its time and points the way to the ‘humanization’ of the enterprise.”

ZHANG RUIMIN, Chairman & CEO, Haier Group

“Reinventing Jobs provides a step-by-step guide to rethinking how organizations deal with automation. Jesuthasan and Boudreau provide leaders with a thoughtful framework that helps us ask the right questions when we’re considering where and when to automate. They recognize that automation is not a simple ‘rip and replace’ of certain jobs and tasks, but rather something that requires a layered approach.”

JIM WHITEHURST, President & CEO, Red Hat

“This book provides an excellent, much-needed framework to guide the collaboration necessary among CIOs, CHROs, and other functional leaders to optimize work and the application of automation in today’s rapidly changing environment.”

RALPH W. BROWN, Chief Technology Officer & Senior Vice President, Research and Development, CableLabs

“A must-read for every CEO. A most thoughtful approach with examples from numerous industries that illustrate that automation and workflow optimization are critical to competing effectively.”

ANTHONY G. PETRELLO, Chairman, President, and CEO, Nabors Industries

“Reinventing Jobs is a book that CIOs, CHROs, and all C-suite leaders should read together. This four-step framework takes the guesswork out of building your digital strategy and a future-ready, engaged, and agile workforce.”

DIANA MCKENZIE, Senior Vice President & CIO, Workday

“This book provides a thoughtful, step-by-step guide to responsible automation that is relevant to all leaders in government, academia, and the private sector. Jesuthasan and Boudreau bring an insightful and practical approach to dealing with one of the most significant challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

SAADIA ZAHIDI, Head of Education, Gender and Work and member of the Executive Committee, World Economic Forum

“We live in a world where advanced technologies are disrupting entire industries, yet few have advanced the discussion beyond a surface consideration of technology either eliminating or creating jobs. Now, Jesuthasan and Boudreau offer a comprehensive approach to transforming work while enabling organizations—and individuals—to adapt and thrive.”

ALAN MAY, Chief People Officer, Hewlett Packard Enterprise

2019 Best Business Books
Axiom Gold Award

Buying options

AMAZON
HBR STORE
BARNES & NOBLE
INDIE BOUND

LEAD THE WORK

WILEY, 2015

Navigating a World Beyond Employment

Lead the Work takes an incisive look at the evolving nature of work, and how it’s affecting management and productivity at the organizational level. Where getting things done once meant assigning it to an employee, today’s leaders are increasingly at risk if they fail to recognize that talent can float into and out of an organization. Long-term employment has given way to medium- or short-term employment, marking the first step in severing the bond that once fixed an individual inside an organization. Getting work done by means other than an employee was once considered a fringe event, but now leading organizations are accepting and taking advantage of the notion that talent has shown itself to be mutable. This book explores this phenomenon in detail and provides a new roadmap to help managers navigate this new environment.

The workplace has undergone many changes over the years, but the emerging trend away from traditional employment represents a massive shift that has profound implications for the business model of every organization, large or small. This book describes how management is changing, and how managers must adapt to survive.

Book Praises

“The new world of work has new ways of working. Boudreau, Jesuthasan, and Creelman brilliantly capture the increasingly granular and customized work world where more employees will be free agents. This forward-thinking book offers creative and relevant insights for managing employees as agents. It has implications for leaders, human resources, rewards, and employees.”

DAVE ULRICH, Rensis Likert Professor of Business, University of Michigan, and Partner, The RBL Group

“Anyone leading an organization through the rapidly changing and challenging landscape of today’s workplace will find Lead the Work tremendously valuable. Boudreau, Jesuthasan, and Creelman expertly chronicle how work has evolved into multiple methods of employment, focused less on managing employees and more on providing work-based leadership. They give concrete advice on how organizations can thrive in this environment. The concept of ‘beyond employment’ will soon be commonplace to business leaders.”

HENRY G. JACKSON, President & CEO, Society for Human Resource Management

“Lead the Work invites business leaders to free their minds from the shackles of traditional regular full-time employment. The book pushes the boundaries of flexibility in work arrangements to a future where we not only just build or buy talent but also borrow and share talent.”

JOHAN MAHMOOD, Merican, CEO, TalentCorp
“How leaders and organizations assemble the right teams of talent today is rapidly evolving to utilize teams of much more than just permanent employees, temporary help, and outsourcers. Reinventing Jobs does an excellent job of describing what the trends are, brings them to life by showcasing real examples that expand your thinking, and helps to alleviate any fears about this new talent marketplace.”
JILL SMART, President, National Academy of Human Resources, retired Chief Human Resources Officer, Accenture

“Lead the Work explores a seismic shift in the very concept of work. For anyone looking for a fresh way to think about competing, innovating and leading, this book will stimulate your creativity and give you new ideas on how to tap into an emerging ‘free agent world.’”

EVA SAGE-GAVIN, Vice Chair, Aspen Institute's Skills for America's Future Advisory Board, formerly Executive Vice President, Human Resources and Corporate Affairs, Gap, Inc.

“Knowing how to manage the multitude of contractors, vendors, and temps who now work side by side with our regular employees is a crucial skill, and Lead the Work shows us how to do it right.”

PETER CAPPELLI, George W. Taylor Professor of Management and Director of the Center for Human Resources, Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania

“Finally a book that takes us into the rapidly evolving nature of work and how workers and organizations will respond! The authors have provided the first book to enable HR leaders and organizations to better understand where work is going and to create tools and methods to respond to these changes.”

LIBBY SARTAIN, Former CHRO, Yahoo! and Southwest Airlines, and Director, Manpower Group and AARP

“John, Ravin, and David’s look at the evolution of work has arrived not a moment too soon. It is time that every person who occupies a position of leadership or aspires to be a leader fully appreciates this new world of work, and this well-grounded research is an important step in that direction.”

DEBRA ENGEL, Board Member, Institute for the Future, former Senior Vice President of Corporate Services, 3Com

Buying options

AMAZON
BARNES & NOBLE
INDIE BOUND

TRANSFORMATIVE HR

JOSSEY-BASS, 2011

How Great Companies Use Evidence-Based Change for Sustainable Advantage

This book demonstrates how some of the world’s most admired and prominent organizations are redefining HR leadership by using evidence-based change to inform human capital decisions that optimize efficiency, effectiveness and strategic impact. The authors present the five foundational principles to the new HR decision science: Logic-driven analytics, segmentation, risk leverage, synergy and integration and optimization.

This groundbreaking book reveals a new approach to deliver sustainable change and business results. It is enhanced with success stories from leading companies that engage leadership and involve employees in ways that make a lasting impact on their companies.

Book Praises

“With its focus on the power of evidence-based change, Transformative HR takes the practice of effective talent management to a new arena. The principles it presents incorporate the best of HR fundamentals and offer a new level of sophistication for today’s human capital leaders. Backed by real-world examples and written by two of the most respected thinkers in HR today, Transformative HR is a must-read for HR leaders.”

EDWARD E. LAWLER III, Director, Center for Effective Organizations and Distinguished Professor of Business, University of Southern California; Author, Management Reset: Organizing for Sustainable Effectiveness

“This book highlights a critical area for successful HR professionals and business leaders, bringing science and rigor to the decisions that organizations make about talent. At the end of the day we all have to make choices, and Boudreau and Jesuthasan provide us with the road map for ensuring that those choices deliver the greatest value to our organizations.”

STEPHEN J. CERRONE, Executive Vice President, Human Resources, Sara Lee Corp.

2012 Best Business Books
Axiom Silver Award

Buying options

AMAZON
BARNES & NOBLE
INDIE BOUND

Subscribe today!

Be always up to date with the latest news and trends on the Future of Work and Digital Transformation.

    First Name *

    Last Name *

    Email Address *