IntroductionAccording to Peter Drucker:[1]
"The purpose of an organization is to enable ordinary human
beings to do extraordinary things"
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 WorkBut even more importantly, it is
resilient to robots, artificial intelligence and many of the technological
advances that aim at eradicating our right to work.
1.
This article was first published on Linkedin.
2. Photo by:
Julien Eichinger/fotolia.com
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Editor's
Note
