Introduction
Work Without Jobs – Article by Ravin Jesuthasan and J.W. Boudreau
Leaders need a new operating system for work – one that better supports the high degree of organizational agility required to thrive amid increasingly rapid change and disruption, and that better reflects the fluidity of modern work and working arrangements.
In our last two books, we’ve argued that this new system must enable leaders and workers to increasingly – and continually – deconstruct jobs into more granular units such as tasks, and that it must identify and deploy workers based on their skills and capabilities, not their job descriptions. Deconstructing work is essential to implementing new options for sourcing, rewarding, and engaging workers, and to understanding and anticipating how automation might replace, augment, or reinvent human work.
The rapid evolution of work is making it increasingly urgent for leaders, workers, organizations, and society to master deconstructed work. These shifts have been accelerated by responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has underscored the critical importance of enabling agility and flexibility.
