Flexibility In the New Economy

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Comment: This posting was initiated based on the Flexjobs© query "Why is flexibility important to you?" After reviewing a few responses from others I saw that most people thought in terms of themselves viewing flexibility as a means to convenience. I wanted to respond in a way that was thought provoking and not too self-centered. After pondering the question a short while in search of a meaningful response, I crafted this answer.

Retrospective

During the 1990's numerous futurists were writing books predicated on the notion that there was a major transition coming. In developing their vision, those futurist back then looked to historical patterns then those authors speculated on all kinds of futures. One of the earlier books on this topic was Samuel Huntington's book "Clash of the Civilizations" in which the West faced off with the rest of the World. Other authors centered on adaptability and flexibility in twenty-four operations as well as leveraging chaos as strategy. Many authors saw a dispersion of workers from major cities into small towns and rural areas. Nonetheless, all these future visions had a few things in common.

1. There was a major economic, political, and/or social renaissance on the event horizon that predicated the vision.
2. A compression of time causing chaos or rapid change that was managed by adaptability and flexibility.
3. A new economy that would be based on networks; social, information, communication, logistical, etc...
4. There would be a turbulent transition period that some authors indicated would consist of a boom, bust, war, and a new way of living consistent with super cycles.

Decades now from Huntington's original vision, various elements of most of these visions seemed to have come into fruition. We find ourselves in a turbulent world of rapid change and what seems to be chaotic, hectic, frustrating, and even frightening at times. Many people observe a clash of world views in their workplace as political correctness has become deep set and ethics vary from person-to-person. On point, Flexjobs© posed the question, "Why is flexibility important to you?"

True Flexibility

True flexibility is not so much about being there to change your kid's diapers, spending time with one's spouse, or improving time utilization to get the honey-do list completed. Those activities are of convenience and somewhat important to many people. Flexibility in the real sense is about agility in the job market without disrupting the homestead. If we look back to the time period when the steel mills left, people stayed, and there were no jobs then we observe people living on governmental subsistence in blighted cities for over a decade as happened in Youngstown, OH. In order to turn those cities around, politicians and communities had to attract industry in the old way of thinking. They had to rezone then infuse cash in order to create new infrastructure in order attract business for those residents to find productive work. This was costly and took long periods of time.

Flexjobs leverages information technology as the futurist foresaw and virtualizes employment disruptions while compressing the duration of the disruption. Through the flexibility that services like Flexjobs offers, a professional can establish a homestead, raise a family, and enjoy their community without disruptions as in the past that required families to pick up and move to a new location where there are jobs or live a diminished lifestyle on subsistence or in a lesser job. Thus, today the disruption is now absorbed into the virtual realm. The jobs and the professionals meet up without geographic limitations. There are temporal constraints but the individual has the flexibility to absorb time constraints if willing to work off shifts and odd hours. Temporal constraints can also be overcome by piece work and reasonable delivery times offering expanded flexibility.

Combining flexibility with adaptability can lead to imaginative new entrepreneurial opportunities through a virtualized online architecture that embraces complex adaptive systems. While sounding fancy this is nothing more than a twist on outsourcing under which a company’s operation is composed of outsourced departments interconnected over the Internet. Interdisciplinary artisans come together virtually leveraging the various networks to form a business.

Answering the Question

Flexibility is much more than personal convenience to me. Flexibility truly is a key quality of a new economy that ultimately embraces democracy and capitalistic mechanisms of innovation, creative destruction, just compensation, and creativity in service of humanity. We see networks emerge out of a democratization of design. The old being replaced with the new as world class innovation leverages networks in service of humanity reducing lifestyle disruptions and opening new opportunities not previously possible.  These new opportunities are new jobs in the cloud and new entrepreneurial possibilities. Flexibility reverses the status quo in which work was a lifestyle to work that supports a lifestyle.

Bibliography:

Dent, H. (1998). The Roaring 2000's: : Building The Wealth And Lifestyle You Desire In The Greatest Boom In History. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Godin, G. (2002). Survival Is Not Enough: Zooming, Evolution, and the Future of Your Company. USA: Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Huntington, S. P. (1996). The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Touchstone .

Liotta, P. H. (2002). Chaos as Strategy. Parameters.

Palmer, T. G. (2011). The Morality of Capitalism: Introduction. United States of America: Jameson Books, Inc.

NOTE: Many other references are available on the topic of the future vision. These are some that quickly wrap up the view.