This Guest paper was submitted for publication here on July 5, 2018.
Published here October 2018

Editor's Note | Introduction | Globalization 
The Project Revolution | Everyone a Project Manager

Introduction

According to Peter Drucker:[1]

"The purpose of an organization is to enable ordinary human beings to do extraordinary things"

Figure 1: Transformative Visions
Figure 1: Transformative Visions[2]

Work has always been considered an essential part of being human: a means of providing for food, clothes, and shelter. In the wake of the social turmoil and rising unemployment which led to the February Revolution of 1848 in France, the French socialist leader Louis Blanc argued that human beings have "the right to work", or engage in productive employment, and may not be prevented from doing so.

The right to work was later safeguarded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations General Assembly and recognized in international human rights law through its inclusion in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

But since the industrial revolution, workers have been progressively reduced to numbers, headcount, assets, fixed costs; and organizations have been driven primarily by targets and control systems. Significant innovations in management have mostly focused on doing the work faster and more cheaply.

Yet, there is one model of collaboration, a method of work to generate value that has remained constant over centuries, resisting to any organizational evolutions. This universal method has proven to be the most human-centric, the most engaging and inspiring, and the one that has created most of the value for our planet.

Figure 2: Intellectual Work
Figure 2: Intellectual Work

But even more importantly, it is resilient to robots, artificial intelligence and many of the technological advances that aim at eradicating our right to work.

Editor's Note  Editor's Note

1. This article was first published on Linkedin.
2. Photo by: Julien Eichinger/fotolia.com
 
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