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This book is dedicated to the memory of my parents, Arlene and Ira, who gave me the wings to live a life of adventure and find work I love, including writing this book, and to my daughters, Rachel and Biz, who now get to be the explorers as they navigate the future of work, along with all of you.
Foreword
A journey like the future of work requires more than a roadmap; it requires a trusted guide. A guide who doesn't jump to answers that don't really exist, but rather frames the questions that must be asked. A guide who has the sensibility—the combination of wisdom, humor, and curiosity—to give you confidence that although the mountain is steep, the ascent will be completely worth it. A guide whose love of exploration reminds us at every turn what is possible. For me, and for so many of our clients in the world of Human Capital, that guide is Jeff Schwartz.
As the leader of Deloitte's Global Human Capital practice, the largest human capital consultancy in the world, I'm proud to have Jeff help spearhead our future of work efforts. And as a new mother, I'm comforted to have Jeff help me ask the right questions to prepare my son for the future—a future that elicits hope, fear, and excitement all wrapped into one. I met Jeff about 15 years ago, when we first worked together, launching a forum on the evolving Chief Human Resources Officer agenda. The discussions that emerged were dynamic investigations of the developing role of HR leaders as future-of-work strategists, risk advisors, cultural stewards, and business partners. My first impression of Jeff was that he fully leaned into “what's next.” This has continued to be true, whether he was establishing one of the first international management consultancies in Moscow or building a technology adoption practice for global SAP projects in Brussels. Jeff's curiosity and explorer temperament have made him especially well-suited to identify and illuminate promising paths and opportunities. He also enjoys sharing new ideas, as he has done for a decade as founder and global editor of Deloitte's influential Global Human Trends Report, a leading longitudinal survey on insights and trends for workforce, organization, talent, and HR issues.
For those of you who have not met Jeff or read his musings on the future of work, this book is the perfect opportunity to gain an introduction to a man who didn't just jump on the future-of-work bandwagon, but rather helped put it in motion. For those of you who know Jeff, sit back and enjoy his famous stories and anecdotes that draw you in and bring to life concepts and theories that may have seemed too academic or conceptual to be put into organizational reality. This is what Jeff knows how to do so incredibly well and what has made him one of my personal guides as I have navigated a long, productive career in the Human Capital space.
Throughout Work Disrupted, Jeff becomes a twenty-first-century Sherpa, presenting us with the maps we need to thrive in the future of work. Like any great guide, he not only presents us with a view of the destination, but with the guideposts we need to follow along the way. He keeps us intrigued about the opportunities ahead, and by sharing the history of how we got here, he increases our own understanding of the future, giving us the gift of resilience by using his knowledge and experience to prepare us for what's coming. That's because, at his core, Jeff is a teacher—someone who has an unparalleled thirst for knowledge, and an even a stronger desire to share that knowledge. I'm just honored to have been one of many he encountered and stopped to educate along the way.
As the future of work has turned from an idea discussed amongst futurists to a reality now accepted by even the most change-resistant organizational leaders, we need teachers and guides more than ever. It now feels as though there are more questions than answers, more unknowns than certainties, and more opportunities to shape the future in completely new directions without the constraints that we find so often in the world of work. I feel an urgency to make sense of our fast-changing world and discern the opportunities that lie ahead, especially for my son Robbie, almost two as I write this. I can imagine no one better to guide us through the disruption at our doorsteps than Jeff, teacher, Sherpa, knowledge seeker, and pathfinder. The future is uncertain, but that's no longer something to fear. With Jeff's guidance, it's something to embrace. There is no doubt that the future of work is here, and no better time to let the journey begin than with Jeff as our guide.
Erica Volini
Global Human Capital Leader
Deloitte Consulting
Introduction
The difficulty is not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.
—John Maynard Keynes
I've been traveling somewhere in the world for my work every month—often every week—for the past 20 years; that is, until Covid-19 stopped me in my tracks. Suddenly, I had to pause. All at once, the packing, the rushing, and the business travel ended. I had no idea that my trip to Israel in early March, leading a global panel on the future of work, would be the last time I would board an international flight in 2020. A few days after returning home to New York City from Tel Aviv on March 3, my workplace relocated from the Deloitte Consulting offices at Rockefeller Center to my small home office on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. As I sheltered in place, along with the rest of the world, tracking the sobering devastation wrought by the pandemic, I had the chance—perhaps for the first time in my career—to stay in one place for longer than a few weeks and reflect on the changes underfoot and ahead.
My work on this book had been well underway before the global pandemic took hold in early 2020. However, there's no doubt that it brought a new sense of urgency to my exploration of the future of work that had begun seven years earlier. The need to shift to new ways of working, new frames, new expectations, and new possibilities was accelerated by the pandemic. At a time that technologies, including artificial intelligence, are ubiquitous, and, to some, represent a threat to jobs and livelihoods, we have also witnessed our fundamental vulnerability as humans exposed by a virus that has already killed more people in the United States than all wars since World War II. What I have discovered about the future of work, as a global and U.S. pioneer and leader for the Future of Work practice with Deloitte Consulting, in interviews with dozens of leading experts in the field, and in my conversations with business leaders across the globe, is that, above all else, it celebrates our essential human capabilities—innovation, creation, ingenuity, entrepreneurship, empathy, caring,
