tackle a variety of coronavirus-related shortages, including not only vital medical equipment but personal protective equipment (PPE) and hand sanitizer. In New York City, many doctors and nurses improvised, using trash bags to replace medical scrubs and protective gowns. The Gap Inc., parent company of Banana Republic and Old Navy, shifted its factories to create protective cloth masks, gowns, and scrubs. Fanatics, an online seller of Major League Baseball gear, also started producing masks and gowns.10 Meanwhile, Pernod Ricard, the alcohol brand, donated pure alcohol for hand sanitizer. French luxury powerhouse LVMH, which owns Louis Vuitton, Bulgari, and other high-end brands, also entered the hand-sanitizer business, using its perfume and make-up factories to produce hydroalcoholic gels.11
To keep their doors open and their employees on the payroll, many companies changed direction, navigated red tape, and devised innovative approaches. The ability to pivot rather than panic allowed some people to apply their capabilities in new ways.12 Small mom-and-pop shops like Essations, started by Stephanie Luster's parents almost 40 years ago, could not stay in the business of shipping hair products to salons. When salons shut their doors, after city after city ordered businesses to close and social distancing rules to take effect, Luster had an idea. She would sell directly to customers who were sheltering but still wanted their hair to look styled for Zoom video calls for work. What if the stylists created home-hair-care videos that featured Essations hair products and then posted them on Facebook? At the end of the tutorial, the stylist could provide a code customers could use to get a discount on the Essations website. Essations would know from the code which stylist had sent the customer, and the stylist could get a cut of the sale. Many stylists liked the idea and made videos featuring Essations' products, allowing online product sales to increase by 20 percent.13
Some businesses soared during the pandemic. Instacart, the grocery pick-up and delivery service, hired more than 300,000 full-time employees in one month to meet the increased demand at the start of the pandemic, with plans to hire 250,000 more.14 However, a far greater number of businesses and individuals had to change direction to survive. Furloughed hotel call center operators found themselves subcontracted to operate state and city call centers. Uber launched a courier service so that drivers who could no longer transport passengers could continue to work by delivering packages, medicine, and pet supplies.15 Spiffy, the U.S. on-demand car cleaning company, rolled-out a service to sanitize and disinfect facilities and properties.16
Innovation and experimentation will continue to be lifelines as we transition to a very different world. Author William Gibson reminded us more than 15 years ago that, “The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.”17 An important corollary is that the future comes at us in accelerated bursts. The coronavirus is one such accelerator to the future. We have witnessed similar accelerators in recent years, with the great financial crisis of 2008–2009 and Y2K. The challenge is how we navigate and take advantage of these sudden shifts.
Racing with the Machines
“Are robots really coming for our jobs?” a longtime client asked me in hushed tones, his brow furrowed, his voice filled with anxiety.
His business partner leaned in, reframing his question with another. “Won't new technologies relieve us of all the boring, repetitive tasks so we can focus on more meaningful work?” she suggested in a hopeful tone that quickly grew impatient. “Well, which is it?”
In conversations over the past decade with friends, colleagues, and business leaders about how automation, advanced technologies, and new employment models are transforming the American workplace, the worry has been palpable: “How can we keep up with machines?” they wonder. “What skills do I need to prepare for jobs in 2030?” they ask. “We're going to have a dozen careers, not just one—how's that even possible?” they demand. “I still haven't paid off my student loans for one career.”
The pervasive feeling is that we're standing on the threshold of something powerful, unstoppable, and unknown, much like a giant tidal wave that is going to wash over everything and transform us—how we work, where we work, the work we do, if we work at all. These conversations, more often than not, are characterized by fear. The dizzying advances in robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), digital technology, and new ways of working have created haunting images of a dystopic future world where machines and software can perform most jobs, and human workers are largely unnecessary. Even the acronym FANG, coined in 2013 for the four high-performing tech stocks (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google), contributes to this conflation of technology and monsters.18
People are most concerned about whether AI will complement human capabilities or act as a substitute. While some predict nothing short of a job apocalypse, other forecasters focus on the vast potential of new technologies to create greater value for workers and to liberate us so we can leverage our uniquely human capabilities—those enduring human skills that smart machines have not yet mastered, such as problem-solving, creative thinking, complex decision-making, empathy, and managing teams. In this scenario, groups of remote and diverse teams work together, people and machines collaborate, and workers continue to be employed because they explore and master new skills and capabilities throughout their lives.
“In medicine, law, finance, retailing, manufacturing, and even scientific discovery, the key to winning the race is not to compete against the machines, but to compete with machines,” observed authors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in 2012.19 MIT's Thomas Malone calls the remarkable power of people and computers working together “superminds.”20 From finding new cures for diseases to designing new tools and systems that will create new products and new lines of business, the promise of AI and humans working together may be the future.
In the midst of these dramatically different depictions of the future of work—a robot apocalypse versus humanity unleashed—many seek to understand what is different from other periods of great technological advances, where do they fit in, and how can they navigate this landscape without signposts so they can continue to work. For all the hype and headlines about the future of work, guidance on how people can find their way is in short supply. My aim is to provide that guidance.
Innovation and experimentation will continue to be lifelines as we transition to a very different world.
We Have Choices
While portions of many jobs will change, and some jobs will likely be eliminated entirely, many more jobs will evolve. When agricultural processes were mechanized in the nineteenth century, some farmworkers lost their jobs, but they ultimately earned more money working in factories. The automation of industrial production displaced factory workers in the twentieth century but they moved into service jobs. What we tend to forget is that rising productivity creates new jobs. Indeed, technological innovation has historically
