Top 10 Strategies for Managers of Mobile Workers

The Top Ten Strategies For Managers Of Mobile Workers:
Surviving and Thriving in the Emerging Mobile Workforce
Terrence L. Gargiulo, President, makingstories.netThe Top Ten Strategies For Managers Of Mobile Workers
Where Are We Today?
CIRCA 1980 CIRCA 2010
The hall erupted in a sea of applause. James Cecilia rubbed her eyes. Getting up at three in the made his way to the front of the ballroom. morning for a conference call halfway around the world Waiting to shake his hand and give him the was never in her job description. It had been days esteemed Outstanding Corporate Citizen since she had actually seen or talked in person with Award for 37 years of service was the CEO of any of the fifty people on her staff. As she typed in the Typical Enterprises. web address of the virtual meeting she saw an instant message pop up. James Gander was proud to be a third-generation employee. His father and Tony who had just joined her team six months ago was grandfather had worked in the same facility. texting her his official two-weeks notice. Since he was He would have never guessed that a high based in Australia and Cecilia worked in Palo Alto, he school summer job filling bins on a production had notified Human Resources on Monday (Sunday for line would have turned into his current position Cecilia) that he would be leaving. Cecilia thought it was as an Account Services Manager. Sure, he considerate of Tony to text her before the meeting so had seen changes. Assembly had replaced she would not be blind-sided. She was excited Tony manufacturing, and quality and service had would get a chance to try his hand at a new career. become the cornerstone of the company's At least she had thirty seconds to collect her thoughts competitive advantage, but for the most part before announcing the information to her team. Days James had worked with the same group of like this made Cecilia wish she could just crawl back people. Typical Enterprises was as much a part into bed. Then she remembered that today she was of James' family as his six grandchildren. telecommuting, so at least she could surround herself with the comforts of her home as she prepared to tackle whatever onslaught of fires was sure to come her way.
However disorienting and maddening the pace and rules of our contemporary work life may be, let's understand a few things: there's no turning back, it doesn't have to be a bad thing, and there are things you can do to set yourself up for success even in the face of all the challenges.
Our approach in this white paper will be to tackle the challenges head on. This is not a Pollyanna attempt to convince you of things you already know. Life in organizations is different.
Background
As the authors Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger pointed out in their classic book Clue Train Manifesto, the boundaries of an organization have become porous. Today's organizations are part of elaborate interdependent networks of suppliers, partners, vendors, and migrant employees. Forget about the gentle notion of touch points with customers; organizations are bombarded with meteoritic impacts of a social and economic variety. There are no institutional walls to protect the inner sanctity of organizational practices. According to the authors, this has led to an acceleration of emergent and "smart" markets that in many cases have outpaced the adaptive capacity of organizations. In other words, the speed of information and the number of interactions between people has made many of our old organizational sense and respond tactics obsolete. By the time we measure or capture the information we need to inform organizational strategy, things have
2The Top Ten Strategies For Managers Of Mobile Workers
already changed. Our organizational identities are fragile. Even chameleons and camouflaging octopi are not this sensitive.
Examining factors leading to competitive advantage over time provides insights into some of the major drivers of organizational transformations.
FIGURE 1
Relationships
Knowledge
Information
Quality And Service
Manufacturing
Each step on this pyramid represents a major shift in the competitive advantage of an organization. Going back to the turn of the century, economies of... [download for more]