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This is an excerpt from the "Proceedings of the Sixth European Assembly on Telework and New Ways of Working - Telework '99" Aarhuss, Denmark, 22-24 September 1999. The entire proceedings are downloadable as a zipped pdf file (3.5 Mb) by clicking here.

Kevin Kelly - What does the network economy mean for work?

Kevin Kelly is Executive Editor of Wired Magazine, and author of the book "New Rules for the New Economy".

Work in the future will mirror what we value in the future. We can't have a world of lifelong employment in manufacturing industries if what we want as consumers is mostly personalised services and custom products. As intangibles become what we primarily pay for, most jobs will entail intangibles. Jobs, therefore, must reflect the nature of intangibles, and of the networks that produce them.

The intangible products and services we want are dynamic, temporary, personalised, sociable, fast, enabling to individuals, reliable, and new. The conditions of work must be the same.

Jobs will become dynamic, temporary, personalised, sociable, fast, enabling to individuals, rewarding, and new. So new in fact, that in five years from now, most people will be working in a job that does not exist today.

The overarching social trend of networks is to paradoxically amplify both the power of individuals and of the group. The network economy tends to favour work that plays to the uniqueness of individuals, by allowing them to share their talents. The solo, stand-alone artist, like Picasso, or the individual worker on the assembly line is products of the industrial age. But so is the complete socialite, the organisation man, the cog in the machine, the drone in the company hive. All these latter roles are the apex of socialised work, without any enhancements of individuality.

The network economy, by contrast, amplifies both individuality and sociability. Work becomes much more of a social event while at the same time accentuating the uniqueness of each individual. We can imagine the future of work by imagining it as both more social and more individual.

Network technology increases the social dimensions by providing a thousand new ways to communicate within a society: by wireless, by time-shift, by voicemail, by collaborative filtering of priority messages, by long-term community memories, by search engines, and so forth. Each advance in telecommunications is another way to make work more social.

At the same time each advance is another way to make work more personal, more unique. The increasing number of options in general allows individuals to tailor those options to their specific talents. Every worker becomes a highly differentiated node in a highly complex web of workers.

This emerging network of unique workers changes work in several ways. Whereas in the industrial economy, 100% efficiency and productivity was the goal, in the rapidly shifting new economy, learning and exploring are 100% vital, which means business has to be less than 100% efficient. Business comes to resemble laboratories, where mistakes and failure are seen as learning devices, where wasting resources in pursuit of innovations is the only sane move. As business shifts from efficiency to exploration, work shifts from serious work to serious play: it is more open-ended, tolerant of failures, done in intense bursts, and project oriented.

And the physical environment in which this more "serious play" takes place reflects this new sensibility: flexible spaces, open spaces, conversation salons, brainstorming rooms, home offices, deliberate distractions, and designed in-office recreations such as gyms, snack bars, game rooms, and Friday bashes.

Thinking of work as serious play also leads to the increasing role for simulations, demos, pilot projects, games, prototypes, and role-playing within business, and the increasing numbers of workers who specialise in those skills.

Serious players want to work on cool projects. Workers have more allegiance to projects than to companies. Successful companies which are able to retain employees become, then, a series of cool projects. No projects, no loyalty.

Workers also have more loyalty to their craft, their practice, then to their employers. Information and knowledge flows between professionals and experts, regardless of company barriers. This often means that the experts on a particular company's product or service often do not work for the company. They may be in a rival company, or more likely, they are a customer. The point is that expertise is not confined to employees within a company, but migrates merrily everywhere. Workers are not necessarily containers for this expertise. Because expertise changes so fast, skills have to be continually acquired. The operating motto for personnel is: hire for attitude, train for skill.

The network nature of work spins work out of central offices into homes, back offices, cars, third world countries, and outsourcers. (It also spins work from employees onto customers - as ATM machines made bank tellers out of bank customers.) But it is completely wrong to deduce that offices in cities filled with people will go away. Cities aren't going away - they are incredibly wonderful meeting places - and buildings full of people aren't going away either. What we know about workers who are given full freedom and maximum options for work environments is that they choose some like this: 2 to 3 days a week they like to be social and work face to face with others in a conducive environment, and 2 to 3 days a week they like to work in a mobile or personalised home space. This means that instead of lessening the amount of office space, we are increasing the numbers of possible offices - one worker may have an office, a home office, a bedroom office, a hotel office and a car office.

In short work means multiple modes of serious play. It means personally negotiated contracts, it means star workers have agents, it means most people have more than one business card, and careers that don't resemble ladders but map out as spirals honing in on unique talents.

In the industrial age the mandate for every good worker was: perfect your skills, increase efficiency, and do the job right.

In the network age the mandate for every good worker is: perfect your attitude, increase playfulness, and determine the right job to do.

Of the two, the second mandate -our mandate - is the more difficult to accomplish well.