Overautomation – the Value of Returning to Manual Work

I regularly post about the advantages of using natural (as opposed to artificial) intelligence in the workplace.  I also carefully say that there are two kinds of work: routine work that should be automated, and unpredictable work that should not be automated, and it should be fairly easy to distinguish the two.  But is it?   Continue reading

Absolutely Self-Managed Workers

Why not get rid of management entirely? That was the thesis of Doug Kirkpatrick’s talk at the Building Business Capability conference this week about the Morning Star Company, a company which has tried the radical approach of being entirely flat, and having no managers are all.  Far from failing, they have become the largest company in their domain (tomato processing).  In Dec 2011, Harvard Business Review called them the world’s most creatively managed company. Continue reading

Automation Elevating Workers, Not Eliminating

A new study from Oxford says that 47% of the jobs in America are at risk of automation.  There is a lot of fear that a job automated is equivalent to a job eliminated. It is the same fear that fueled the Luddites, however history shows that fear to be misplaced then, as it is now.  Automation drives a transformation of the workplace, not an elimination. Continue reading