tl;dr: The employers of the future who ask for you “full-time” are probably going to lose.
I was catching up on my blog feeds the other day and came across this one from Fred Wilson, Working Multiple Jobs, where he told the story of an engineer who had a “full-time” job at BOTH Google and Facebook.
It reminded me of my post from back in July 2020, Elon, Jack, and Multiple Jobs in a Knowledge Economy for obvious reasons.
At Gtmhub, one of core beliefs is that the world (for knowledge workers) is moving from an “output” to an “outcome”oriented mentality.
In an “output” mentality, the output is a function of time. That’s how factories operate. It’s the Demings/Taylor model for ‘scientific management.”
It’s also, sadly, how many knowledge/digital companies work, even though you don’t measure value in terms of “widgets per hour” the way you do on an assembly line.
In an “outcome” company, you pay people for the end value they deliver, or are responsible for delivering.
The primary input in an “output” company is time. The primary input in an “outcome” company is knowledge.
And, in fact, the LESS time (not the MORE time) that a knowledge worker spends on delivering an outcome, the more valuable that person is.
So, if you have 2 managers, who both deliver $1 million worth of value, but the first one takes 40 hours per week and the second one gets it done in 10 hours per week, please tell me why the first one is “worth more” because of the fact that they are less effective?
They aren’t.
The challenge isn’t in realizing that, of course.
The challenge is architecting an organization (or any kind) that can visualize the desired outcomes for each person, align the rest of the organization with and around those outcomes, and effectively measure them in real-time to assess progress towards those outcomes.
Once you do that (and it’s not an easy task), you’re creating a culture in which people are focused on the result, not on the process output.
And once you do that, and it will happen, fewer and fewer companies will say or care “oh, but I need them full-time” as Fred wrote.
Instead, they will say, as Fred suggested, “go ahead, do whatever else you want to go do since you’re delivering to us what we need and thank you for building your knowledge skills.”
