The Wow Project
In the new economy, all work is project work. And you are your projects! Here’s how to make them all go Wow!
First appeared: FC24, p.116

BY TOM PETERS

I learned about the future of work by living in the projects — the kind of projects you routinely do at a professional-services firm. More years ago than I care to remember, I reported to the offices of McKinsey & Co. in San Francisco for my first day as a professional management consultant. At 9 a.m., I started to work. At 3 p.m. that afternoon, I was on an airplane to Clinton, Iowa to work on a project that involved an investment in a $150 million petrochemical plant, and even if you’d spotted me four letters, I couldn’t have spelled “petrochemical.” But that was life — in the projects. Fast-forward 25 years. All white-collar work is project work. The single salient fact that touches all of our lives is that work is being reinvented. The workplace revolution that transformed the lives of blue-collar workers in the 1970s and 1980s is finally reaching the offices and cubicles of the white-collar workers. For the blue-collar worker, the driving force behind change was factory automation using programmable machine tools. For the office worker, it’s office automation using computer technology: enterprise-resource-planning systems, groupware, intranets, extranets, expert systems, the Web, and e-commerce. After decades of wholesale neglect, companies are finally facing the fact of pathetic white-collar productivity and realizing that they need to organize work in a fundamentally new way. The old ways of working are too slow, too convoluted, too hard to grab hold of — and the value is too hard to capture. At the same time, white-collar workers themselves are catching on: They need to rethink the very nature of work. If they’re going to have work in the future, they must be able to demonstrate clearly,