A summary of a piece I did on Broadstuff on the emerging New Economy, this is germane to New Ways of Working:
I was prompted to write the post after reading Gideon Lichfield’s useful article on all the different types of systems jumbled up in the term “Digital Economy” and the muddy thinking about it that results. To summarise Gideon first, these are the different types of systems operating up in this new economy, and the reality behind the hype – the expurgation is mine:
Sharing economy – The name is apt for any service that allows a thing previously available only to its owner to be used by other people, thus making more efficient use of resources.
Peer (or peer-to-peer) economy – It’s meant to get at the more direct connection between the people on either side of a transaction, unmediated by a big faceless company, but “peers” economy” is very misleading as to the relationship between borrowers, lenders and intermediary
Gig economy – not a steady job but a series of gigs. But the gig economy could be short-lived: Legal disputes about gig workers’ rights, liability, and so forth could force the creation of a new category of worker that is neither freelancer nor employee.
On-demand economy – this is where the venture capital money is: services that offer cars, food, home-cleaning, and other services at the touch of an app button. [My note – and it relies on “Gig-economy” labour]
Platform economy – a digital platform that, whether through algorithms, a rating system, or some combination of the two, serves to connect customers with providers of goods or services.
Networked economy – See “Platform economy.”
Bottom-up economy – the newfound ability of small businesses and freelance workers to find customers or band together with other workers from all around the world.
Access (or Rental) economy – services that let you pay to use things like cars (Zipcar), movies (Netflix), or music (Pandora, Spotify) without owning them. Been going on since long before the Ubers of this world came into being,
Uber economy – “Uber for X” has become an easy shorthand, but it’s simplistic—the Uber model is only one of many.
The first takeaway is that these different “New Economies” will drive many different ways of working.
But what this summary also really made clear to me is that all these “Next Economies” (possibly with the exception of a Bottom Up collaborative system) is that they like to use the impressive (and more upmarket ) term “Economy” whereas in reality they are just good old Markets – either simple ones flogging something, or two sided markets matching a buyer and a seller via a mediator.
So it’s a lot more like the Old Economy than one is led to believe at first reading.
And this is hardly a new feature of the digital age (I am reminded that many “vertical markets” and “e-market” dotcoms were proto-Unicorns until the dotcom crash, and its hardly as if the last 15 years haven’t seen a lot of new digital markets emerge).
Some Implications..
The implications are that there is little “this time it will be different” New Economy in the next iteration – it’s the Old Economy, but mainly with added automation and more part time, low wage workers. New Ways of Working will have to obey Old Rules of Economics more than on would ideally like, so any new structures will be judges on old metrics, like:
- Efficiency
- Effectiveness
- Dependability (predictability of output)
- Reliability (uptime)
- Mean times between failure/ faiure per unit output
As Texas oilfield accidents lawyers has stated that it is the right of employee to claim compensation for the injury caused during the course of employment.There are some following implications – regardless of the ways of working or organisatio chosen, human centred work will need to be structured at all times to be better a than a low cost “gig” worker or automation.This implies the sort of thought into work structure that Toyota put into its systems, a point made by Professor of Operations Management Zeynep Ton at the O’Reilly #NextEconomy conference last week.
If the structure can’t do that, it won’t be part oaf any New Economy.
[…] A summary of a piece I did on Broadstuff on the emerging New Economy, this is germane to New Ways of Working: I was prompted to write the post after reading Gideon Lichfield’s useful article … […]