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what works thoughts on managing change and analysing work what works thoughts on managing change and analysing work home about the value of human work 26 april 2014 uncategorized leave a comment i work in it but i m not a programmer i get non it stakeholders to agree on what they want from a new computer system and communicate that to the techies who are putting it together and then test the completed system against what the various stakeholders said they wanted a job like that isn t a long term job and the quality of the projects can be uneven for lots of reasons but it provides both challenges and variety which i need to keep going often projects like that involve reductions in employee numbers those decisions aren t ones i take but i facilitate them when i was younger i would go on about how people should be liberated from jobs that they for all their lamentations after the fact find dull and unfulfilling while they last now i have a keener appreciation of how important a good seeming job can be and how people can be ambushed by events that i come to regard as obvious now i understand how stupid and crass prime minister abbott sounded when he talked about liberating car workers from subsidised jobs still i think i have developed a keen eye for the doomed job and for the person beavering away at a task that will be done by a piece of software into the not too distant future conventional wisdom has it with the mass redundancies like those coming to the australian car industry that about a third of employees will get jobs straight away another third will spend some time unemployed before finding other work not necessarily at the same pay grade while another third will never work again far reaching economic social and technological changes like those responsible for that decision gives rise to questions like what is human work worth most considered writing about the future of work is written from the perspective of what technology makes possible where a sober piece of news on economic or technological developments leads to barely restrained flights of science fiction fancy you know the writer is having a lend of you when they use the word simply e g the person will simply push a button and a delicious meal will appear here is one example on the future of retail shopping should be much easier and more enjoyable in the future computers and robots will come to your aid and enable you to shop at the very best stores you won t have to lift a finger let alone a shopping basket for shopping will be yet another service that the home videophone computer will be able to provide instead of going out to the shops and stores in your town or city you contact them through your videophone computer you ll need to see what you re buying even if you can t handle it so the viewscreen of the videophone computer shows you the goods available you then instruct the computer to order the goods you want and have them delivered to your house your computer talks to the store s computer which in turn orders robots in the store to collect the goods together and pass them to a delivery vehicle under the guidance of the computers this brings them to your home in this way your home computer can make sure that your home is always supplied with all its essentials for it automatically orders new supplies as soon as they are needed it also instructs your bank to pay for the goods so you do not need to part with any cash what s missing from that is how your home is supposed to have the money to pay the retailer all that work from growing basic foodstuffs to supply chain logistics and the automated retail outlet warehouse featured in that article makes no economic sense unless there are customers at the end of the supply chain with the readies to consume the product such people need to be doing work of economic value in order to pay for that stuff we already know that welfare and a living wage are unsustainable that you don t just get paid for being a human any more an assumption once shared by left and right in developed countries and not shared by most people outside them retail was the sector of the economy most responsible for employing australians until five or so years ago to go into even a busy store and see busy workers scurrying around gets your antennae for doomed jobs quivering if you have them the self serve checkout is like a whirlpool set to devour the jobs of the checkout operators and back end workers pushing resupply trolleys likewise face replacement by automated systems training is scarcely an answer most people can get across the full gamut of retail knowledge after about six months on the job people shopping online make different decisions than they do when physically within a shop which rustles the jimmys of marketing people but rarely translates into changes to the way that retail workers operate this push to automate and even obviate lower paying work is real and driven by both economic drivers and technological possibilities how strange them that the pressure to automate higher paying jobs out of existence is not all the greater pieces like this questioning the economic value of modern nonsense jobs as opposed to a non modern jobs like say silver stick in waiting are commonplace they tend to veer off into snark rather than attempting to explain why such non jobs both have such high value for the holders of such jobs as well as a social structure around them and why they seem impervious to being rationalised out i couldn t find any austrian economists who could explain this at all convincingly the nearest i got was this economist i don t think capital in the twenty first century adequately answers the most telling criticism of the executive power hypothesis the concentration of very high incomes in finance where performance actually can after a fashion be evaluated i didn t mention hedge fund managers idly such people are paid based on their ability to attract clients and achieve investment returns you can question the social value of modern finance but the gordon gekkos out there are clearly good at something and their rise can t be attributed solely to power relations although i guess you could argue that willingness to engage in morally dubious wheeling and dealing like willingness to flout pay norms is encouraged by low marginal tax rates it may simply be the case where so long as a deal maker can bring in a multiple of what they are taking home they can t be rationalised out surely and i haven t read the book krugman is critiquing there are diminishing returns from having so many of these dealmakers on the books many of whom may overstate their contribution to their firm s performance maybe there is a kind of bez effect where the contribution of an individual member je ne sais quoi doesn t really matter where there s plenty of money being made krugman s point about morally dubious wheeling and dealing is a poor attempt to give moral force to an economic construct he finds distasteful and can t otherwise explain consider nick leeson whose dubious trades were valued highly by his then employer barings until they broke that employer consider also cat burglars and street level drug dealers who cut their wares who are not in a position to flout norms on pay or anything else in a sustainable fashion but who come under greater social pressure to conform and have their business models smashed the moral issue seems to be appreciated better once it is couched in the mechanistic language of risk management umar lee tries to make a moral argument against economic and technological drivers and doesn t succeed driving a taxi is not a profession and those who use lyft and uber are not scabs he should come to sydney and subject himself to reg kermode s cabcharge he states how much he enjoys driving a taxi in st louis but says nothing about the coming of driverless cars to the taxi industry or who s going to clean the vomit from them the problems he attributes to hipsters and lyft users are things cabbies everywhere whinge about linking those apps to gentrification is another example of his reactionary short sightedness that any change is bad news for working people the conditional plug for the mayor at the end is a deft touch in a piece lacking them in general back to krugman just about all economic models tell us that if economic growth falls which it has since 1970 a decline that is likely to continue due to slower growth in the working age population and slower technological progress return on investment will fall too but piketty asserts that return on investment will fall less than economic growth this doesn t have to be true however if it s sufficiently easy to replace workers with machines if to use the technical jargon the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor is greater than one slow growth and the resulting rise in the ratio of capital to income will indeed widen the gap between return on investment and economic growth and piketty argues that this is what the historical record shows will happen in 1970 many countries were just getting started in terms of economic growth in 1970 the british economy was four times bigger than china s now the reverse is true the degree to which it is easy to replace workers with machines is known as the cobb douglas function a mathematical formula that assumes perfect competition stop laughing and constancy over time i mean it healthcare is one area that is both ripe for automation and resistant to it it is the sector of the economy most responsible for employing australians today the doctor who insists on reports and emails being printed should be billed for printing in the same way that foi cases are when i m small e elderly i doubt that a robot will be taking me to the toilet though it is possible the thing is such work is only valuable if you think the consumer has value in themselves rather than just as the payer of bills or the instructor of banks this whole issue of people being valuable and adding value is the sort of thing this blog will be doing more of but perhaps in a bit more focused way as time goes on some people are born to do certain jobs 26 march 2014 uncategorized leave a comment change in focus 2 march 2014 uncategorized 2 comments i still read a lot about change management knowledge management and what have you while i take it on board as you can see over the past year or so clearly i cannot be bothered blogging about it what i will start blogging about and hence altering the nature of this site and the frequency with which i post here is the state and future of work in australia since i was a schoolboy i was fascinated by the idea of work and career and the idea that computerisation and other social shifts were causing some jobs to not only become cooler or more fashionable than others but that they rose in value while others diminished this interest led me into politics and out of it i built a career kind of around it on the back of it when politicians talk about jobs they can be terribly condescending but when they do so they are getting closer to core business than when they walk about almost anything else you have to start somewhere so let s talk about this article that one and this interview by paul wallbank at the turn of last century sydney city council employed six men to clean the streets of horse manure and a prediction at the time held that the city would run out of space to store it all by about 1970 technological and social change solved that problem and created others at that time cobb co was australia s largest transportation network with a command over the markets for transporting goods and people that no modern company has matched cobb co could have snapped up the fledgling qantas for a song but it didn t instead cobb co crashed as qantas took off and nobody seems to want to catch the falling knife that is qantas today at that time australians feared societies to our north and west where labour was cheap as they were competitors who would destroy our way of life by doing the same work for less back then there was an extra layer of condescension that australians could put upon such people to shift the debate away from like for like product outcome comparisons and that was racism today knowledge work jobs are either being done by software as wallbank points out or as he doesn t software is facilitating the transfer of that work offshore so that middle class jobs and entry level professional opportunities are starting to decline here in quantity and status today racism isn t a factor in deciding whether or not to offshore jobs but it is still a factor in political debates about who is physically admitted to australia it is hard enough making points about technology driven social and economic disruption particularly for a country that tends to avoid discontinuity and upheaval where possible without buying in to debates about offshoring which tends to affect professions with little political and social clout anyway hopefully this blog will be a bit more focused and fact driven and less rambly than this post but as far as subject matter goes this is the road we re on less travelled thorny and laborious with a strong suspicion there has to be an easier way and someone else is doing this stuff better and while you might not want to start from here i have no choice so bear with me what this blog is about 27 january 2013 uncategorized 2 comments i read lots of articles on business analysis change management knowledge management and similar issues this blog will be about posting links to those articles and interrogating them others are free to contribute this will not be about plugging myself as some sort of expert or showing only unrelentingly positive articles given that something like 70 of projects change initiatives fail this is an unsustainable approach there will be discussion and analysis of failure here as well for the sake of learning rather than entertainment if you want the blog about australian politics and media go here if you want the life coach counsellor go here recent posts the value of human work some people are born to do certain jobs change in focus what this blog is about archives april 2014 march 2014 january 2013 categories uncategorized meta create account log in entries feed comments feed wordpress com blog at wordpress com subscribe subscribed what works sign me up already have a wordpress com account log in now privacy what works subscribe subscribed sign up log in report this content view site in reader manage subscriptions collapse this bar design a site like this with wordpress com get started
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