It looks to me like the fundamental thesis is that work is either rules-based or not rules-based and that the former can in principle be replaced by robots or computers.

We shouldn’t forget that the best transformational and transactional workers are the ones who are able to bring a conmplementary non-rules-based approach to their rules-based work and thus see ways to improve upon the given rules.

The Wall Street Journal had an article yesterday on the continued struggle that companies face with trying to pass knowledge from one worker to another (requires subscription). The conundrum is that while people learn best from other people - a…

Following up on yesterday’s posts on the worker of the future and the comment that Graham Hill left there on whether we may finally be witnessing the end of hierarchies, I ran across this article at PSFK (via Johniie Moore)…

Do not expect the hierarchical model of organisation to disappear anytime soon. At least not in companies of any size.

Although as the McKinsey article points out, there is a big rise in the number of tacit workers, often, only a minority of their work is actually rules-free. Hierachies will continue to provide an effective way to organise the majority of their rules-based work. Other organisational forms, for example networks, will pick up the slack for rules-free work.

What we are likely to see instead is the rise of “hybrid-organisations” which combine elements of hierarchies for rules-based work and networks for rules-free work.

See Todd Zenger’s excellent working paper on Hybrid Organisations if you want to learn more. There is much more to this than meets the eye - http://esnie.u-paris10.fr/pdf/textes_2004/Chabaud_Zenger2002.pdf