MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Work Without Jobs

Leaders need a new operating system for work — one that better supports the high degree of organizational agility required to thrive amid increasingly rapid change and disruption, and that better reflects the fluidity of modern work and working arrangements.

In our last two books, we’ve argued that this new system must enable leaders and workers to increasingly — and continually — deconstruct jobs into more granular units such as tasks, and that it must identify and deploy workers based on their skills and capabilities, not their job descriptions.1 Deconstructing work is essential to implementing new options for sourcing, rewarding, and engaging workers, and to understanding and anticipating how automation might replace, augment, or reinvent human work.

About the Author

Ravin Jesuthasan (@ravinjesuthasan) is a globally recognized futurist, consultant, and author on the future of work and human capital.

John Boudreau (@johnwboudreau) is professor emeritus at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business and a senior research scientist at its Center for Effective Organizations. The authors’ upcoming book, Work Without Jobs, will be published by MIT Press in early 2021.

Learn more about MIT SMR.