Chapter One

New Worlds of Work

There always comes a moment in time when
a door opens and lets the future in. —Graham Greene

Amazing things happen when work collides with the Web. Everything we have ever learned about work from watching TV or watching our parents turns out to be irrelevant. The most basic concepts of work—jobs, time, loyalty, compen-sation, and experiences—have been permanently redefined.

In a fundamentally new way, the Web offers the possibility of connecting us to our jobs. It reconnects jobs to what matters to people: creativity, meaning, re-sponsibility, and humanity. By bringing buyers and sellers together, by render-ing irrelevant the tyranny of time and space, the Web allows people to express their creativity, create wealth, and do it with a level of personal power, respon-sibility, and authority that has not been seen since humans invented the plow and domesticated beasts of burden.

In this process, well-accepted beliefs and assumptions about the nature of work and business have been turned topsy-turvy. Most of all, the Web has completely transformed the balance of power between employees and employers, buyers and sellers, organizations and individuals. In every case, the Web has shifted the balance of power. Today employees, buyers, and individuals call the shots.

MORE POWER TO EMPLOYEES

Concentrations of capital, raw materials, and transportation channels fuel the growth of industrial organizations. E-Businesses are fueled by one thing only: creative, talented people. E-Business leaders know that people can go anywhere, which means that their biggest challenge isn’t the competition for products. It’s the competition for human resources. The number one competency for compa-nies such as Microsoft or Computer Associates International is recruitment and retention.

Are you a talented, creative person? Guess what? That means the balance of power has shifted to your side. You may not know it, but it’s a fact. You get to exercise a degree of personal autonomy in your job search and career that is absolutely unprecedented. Let’s assume you have the right combination of tal-ent, competencies, and attitude. In a seller’s market for talent, you get to shop for the right boss, the right colleagues, and the right environment. In the old economy, it was a buyer’s market. Enterprises had more people than slots, and the question they asked was “Why should we hire you?” In the Net Economy, there are more opportunities searching for talented people, and there are no slots anymore. Now the question is, “What else can we tell you so you will lend us your allegiance?”

MORE POWER TO BUYERS

For a number of reasons, the Net Economy shifts the balance of power from sell-ers to buyers. Buyers are increasingly calling the shots, from telling sellers what their products are worth to dictating the way the sellers format their catalogs. Most of all, consumers expect to be presented with the highest levels of opera-tional excellence. They insist on being treated as valued partners and as dis-cerning members of a community in which they have a right to be well informed.

Companies soon saw that the Net catalyzed a change from the one-to-many relationships corporations knew to a new world of one-to-one customer man-agement. It suddenly became possible for companies such as Cisco Systems and Charles Schwab to manage unique relationships with each of its customers. That possibility, in turn, changed many transactional relationships into transforma-tional relationships, characterized by an aligning of interests that would have been thought impossible a few years earlier. Enterprises such as Onsale and eBay are representative of firms exploiting one-to-one transformative relationships.

At the same time, the Net Economy redefines every assumption about deal-ing with customers. Consider the strategy of customer relationship management (CRM). The Net Economy will throw this well-intentioned but unworkable man-agement discipline on its ears. That’s because with Net-ready customers having so many options to choose from in any product or service category, it is most cer-tainly not the customer who’s being managed. That’s way too passive. In the Net Economy, it’s the customer who gets to manage the relationship. Net-readiness requires organizations to let go of the arrogance of assuming that customers and clients can be manipulated. In the Net Economy, customers can only be served, listened to, and valued. Then, if the company does everything right, the customer may agree to be served.

The Web allows individuals to reclaim their power. Organizations and the economies of scale they commanded used to put individuals at a grave disad-vantage in any transaction. No longer. The Web does two main things. First it levels out the asymmetries of information that kept power in the hands of large enterprises. Second, it disembowels the notion of mass production and mass marketing, concepts that sucked power from individuals. Look for opportuni-ties that exploit one-to-one relationships and mass customization.

SHOW ME THE MONEY!

Money has always been important to employees and business. Yet in the tradi-tional economy, there is a stupefying level of pretense about money. Even though it’s the first thing on the mind of the candidates (“How much money can I get?”), and it’s the first thing on the minds of the executives doing the hiring (“How much money will I have to pay?”), money is the absolute last item on the agenda. Does that make sense?

The Web, happily, dismantles some of the pretense. Critics call the new gen-eration of workers greedy, selfish, and in it only for what they can get. Ab-solutely true, just as it’s always been. Only now we have the decency to acknowledge it. And the funny thing is, the more we acknowledge it, the less it is true. It turns out that once we have a frank conversation about money, are of-fered what we are worth, and get it out of the way, other things begin to take on as much or more importance. Learning opportunities. More training. Cool people to work with. Personal autonomy. All these can and do become more im-portant than money.

However, the conversation about money comes first. And for talented people with Web savvy, what a conversation it is. Money talks, and it’s on speaking terms with Web talent. The Net Economy is simply, or perhaps not so simply, awash in money. Venture capitalists are pouring funds into startups at a stu-pendous rate. In 1999, for example, venture-capital firms raised over $15 billion. More than 750 companies went public, with a total valuation of over $50 billion. The lion’s share of that money goes for one thing: talent to create intellectual property. In other words, it goes to software. And you are the software. Most of that money is designed to get you to create, maintain, market, and support the assets that create value for the investors.

For most Web wannabees, the name of the game is not salary but stock options. Chalk it up as another legacy of Microsoft and that company’s now-legendary cadre of millionaires. Across the landscape of the new economy, young, well-educated, talented businesspeople are joining up to get a piece of the action. They’re willing to forgo larger salaries at bigger and better-established firms in favor of stock options in upstarts that may be worth a great deal down the road. The result: Even small, little-known enterprises can compete for top talent. In fact, startups promising high risk and huge gain are winning.

CONTINUOUS LEARNING

If there’s anything more important to Web people than money, it’s the opportu-nity to learn new technologies, processes, and business skills. Technical people recognize they cannot advance without business skills. Business people acknowl-edge they need a better understanding of technology in order to be successful. Both camps strive for that crucial balance between technical and business skills and demand a variety of training and educational opportunities to meet that need.

The most successful Web companies have figured out what it takes to succeed in a knowledge-based economy. Learning becomes the coin of the realm. These companies know that talented people join up in order to learn. Of course, part of the attraction of learning is linked to money. Learn more today, earn more to-morrow. But many Web people, especially those focused on technology, seek out the intellectual challenge more than the money. They like being equipped with the latest tools as they explore the frontiers of the knowledge economy. They ap-preciate the opportunity to work with the coolest people, use the most advanced tools, empowered by the best training in the latest skills. Companies have heard the message. They want to hire people who maintain their hunger to learn and respond by creating an environment where such people are presented with op-portunities for continuous learning.

BRAND YOURSELF

We surround ourselves with brands. We love brands. Think Nike. Think Star-bucks. Think Martha Stewart. Think “Intel Inside.” Brands put us at ease be-cause we have confidence in them. And we are happy to pay for that confidence. A brand is something customers will pay extra for, even if it’s on a product or service identical to a competitor’s.

The implication is clear: brand yourself. Create a compelling value proposi-tion that unmistakably brands you in the exact way that will move your agenda forward. When you have a personal brand, employers will pay some-thing extra for you even if they have a lower-cost alternative. This is exactly what you want.

Businesses create wealth by transforming commodities into products and then into brands. Consider Nike. They took footwear from a commodity (sneak-ers) to a product (running shoes) and then a brand (Nike athletic shoes with the swoosh coordinated with every other imaginable product). If you have been to a Niketown store, you know that Nike is well on its way to transcending brand by turning Nike into an experience. People are willing to pay more for experi-ences than for products, even branded products The lesson is that you can in-crease your value to the extent that you can transform an employer’s perception of you into an experience.

If you are serious about taking yourself seriously, you should be reading a powerful new magazine called Fast Company (www.fastcompany.com). This pub-lication is Exhibit A of the branded, self-actualized, free agent of the Web Econ-omy. Fast Company’s major contribution to the employment theory is popularizing the argument that every member of the Net Economy should treat himself or her-self as a brand. And that means that career planning becomes brand management.

To build a brand, start by asking the same question the brand managers at Coke or McDonald’s ask themselves:

Before you answer that, it might be useful for you to consider a number of other questions brand managers have learned to ask themselves. In the context of promoting yourself as a candidate, much as Proctor & Gamble promotes one of its brands, ask yourself:

It’s not about degrees, credentials, job descriptions, or titles anymore. It’s about what you can deliver—or, by virtue of other things you have done, what you can demonstrate that you will deliver. What have you accomplished that you can unabashedly brag about? No one else is going to brag about it if you don’t. If you are going to be a brand, you’ve got to become relentlessly focused on what you do that adds value, that you’re proud of, and most important, that you can shamelessly take credit for.

So let’s have that question again.

This is such an important question that I invite you to take a minute to reflect on how you would answer it in fifteen words or less. You can’t assume you’ll get more than fifteen words out before they lose attention, so limit your answer to fifteen words or less, please. Take the time to write your answer in the fol-lowing space.

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There is only one way to know if the branding statement you settled on is good or not. You have to test it. If your answer does not light up the eyes of an interviewer or prospective supervisor, if it does not command a vote of confi-dence from a professor who knows your work, then you have a problem. It means you have to give some critical consideration to imagining and develop-ing yourself as a brand.

ROLES THAT ADD VALUE

Realize that your career is a function of your ability to add value to whatever team, project, or organization that happens to hold your allegiance. You will al-ways be measured by how much value you add. There are six roles in the Net Economy that will serve you. Make sure your personal mission statement ac-commodates as many of these roles as possible: