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

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, how it is organized, and how talent is connected to it. 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 The Skills-Powered Organization, however, discuss how leading companies are reinventing themselves to be skills-powered, 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.

Ravin Jesuthasan, a recognized futurist and authority on the future of work, human capital, and automation, is Senior Partner and Global Leader for Transformation Services at Mercer. He is a member of the World Economic Forum’s steering committee on work and employment. He is the author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller and top 10 business book of 2023; Work without Jobs (MIT Press), as well as Transformative HR, Lead the Work, and Reinventing Jobs.

Tanuj Kapilashrami is an international banker, currently Chief Human Resources Officer at Standard Chartered Bank. She is a Non-Executive Director on the Board of Sainsbury’s PLC, a Board member of the UK Financial Services Skills Commission, a member of the Asia House Board of Trustees, and a Board member of Autumn, an integrated digital wealth, health, and lifestyle solutions start-up.

Chapter 1 explores the foundational elements underpinning the skills-p powered organization and the differentiated capabilities required to lead it. It also examines the key leadership mechanisms and the five new skills required of leaders.

In chapter 2 we discuss how the organization is being reinvented with skills as the currency of work, exploring three alternative models for organizing work and their significant consequences for organizational performance and the human experience of work. We also explore why a skills-powered construct is essential to enabling an agile, team- driven organization.

Chapter 3 illustrates the changing work experience for talent that results from the evolution to the skills- powered organization. It also explores why a skills-powered foundation is essential to delivering an ethical, equitable, and inclusive work experience.

Chapter 4 explores the three critical organizational capabilities underpinning the skills- powered organization. This chapter also illustrates the transformative changes required of legacy infrastructure
and routines that have shaped 140 years of work being organized as jobs.

Chapter 5 discusses how AI is accelerating and enabling this journey, exploring the evolution of multiple skills insights and marketplace platforms and their increasingly pivotal role in powering this journey,
including the accelerative implications of generative AI.

We then shift our attention in chapter 6 to exploring the crucial role of the function formerly known as HR in powering and governing this journey as human work and AI become inextricably woven together.

In chapter 7, we examine how the shift to skills as the currency of work is enabling a more seamless talent ecosystem comprising various types of employee and nonemployee labor. We also explore the evolving role
of different stakeholders and the efforts by governments around the world to prepare their citizens for this next era of work.

We conclude in chapter 8 with a call to action for leaders and talent at all levels, providing a detailed roadmap and examples to shape their path to building and leading the skills- powered organization and enabling them to thrive individually in a skills-powered world.