Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 15, 1993 TAG: 9310190240
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GILBERT A. LEWTHWAITE THE BALTIMORE SUN
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
As a high school graduate, she was hired by Zytec Corp. of Redwood Falls, Minn., 14 years ago to do a single job. She has become a one-woman production line, able to do all 15 tasks in the assembly, packaging and shipping of electrical transformers.
From putting terminals on wire ends to assembling parts, from operating machines to maintaining them, from training new employees to buying components, she can do it all.
She is, in a word, multi- functional.
And, as companies strive to meet the relentless demand for ever-increasing productivity, quality and instant marketplace response, her story will become commonplace.
The painfully slow recovery from the 1990-1991 recession has sensitized the nation to traumatic adjustments - unemployment, career changes, relocations - that are likely to become the norm as corporate America reinvents itself in the 21st century.
Beyond the sluggish recovery is a fundamental economic change: the replacement of industry's century-old electromechanical base by the new computer-based service infrastructure. In human terms: the replacement of the old- fashioned tradesperson by the newfangled technician.
Flattened management structures, telecommuting, outsourcing and many smaller work trends are, at second glance if not first, also products of the information age.
To Cornell University Professor Stephen R. Barley, we are living through a ``seismic'' shift in the nature of work, matching the 19th century's mass migration fro field to factory.
Some trends are already clear:
The constant advances in computer speed and power will change work patterns, with flexible hours and working from home becoming more common.
Workers will be expected to have several skills, be subjected to constant retraining and be self-directed.
Management will change, with new priorities of product quality and customer satisfaction transcending traditional concerns about worker attendance and mechanical job-performance measures.
Big corporations will shrink as technology enables work to flow to smaller units, especially outside contractors, who will flourish in an information- driven economy.
``The things we do with what in some sense is the new freedom provided by this technology will depend on what is important to us,'' said Thomas W. Malone, director of the Center for Coordination Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
``Is it more important for people to have more autonomy in their work, more important for them to spend less time working? Would we like to have work lives that interpenetrate our home lives more in the future, like some of us had in our agricultural past?
``What does it mean for people togrow personally through their work, and is it possible to design organizations that encourage that rather than inhibit that? I guess I don't think there are answers yet, but I think it is important to ask those questions.''
Malone sees corporate ``adhocracies'' replacing established hierarchies as more and more employees gain access to more and more information and are increasingly invited - directed - to join in the decision-making process. The lines of communication will not be just from the top down. They will also be horizontal, diagonal, upward, spiraled.
As computerization makes coordination easier, companies are turning to outside sources for many services they previously provided for themselves through departments such as accounting, legal and public relations, fostering creation of the contract-based economy.
Creation of well-paying jobs continues to be the central and most frustrating challenge of this final decade of a century when big became beautiful in the corporate world. No more.
Over the past 10 years the average size of U.S. companies has shrunk by 20 percent, reversing the overall growth trend of the previous 70 years, according to a study by Erik Brynjolfsson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management.
``It's a fundamental restructuring,'' says Brynjolfsson.
by CNB