Keywords

FormalPara Interviewees

  • Samuel Alemayehu

  • Gina Badenoch

  • Maurizio Bussi

  • Sarah Chen

  • Özlem Denizmen

  • Rajeev Dey

  • Lars Flottrong

  • Eyal Gura

  • Caroline Müller-Möhl

  • Jacques-Philippe Piverger

  • Lucian Tarnowski

Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.—Theodore Roosevelt

1 Introduction

When we are crystal gazing at the future of humanity, understanding where our work and professional world is heading toward to is an important question. The role that is played by professional work in the modern society is more than just providing an income for an individual. It is a means of providing a sense of fulfillment, productivity, and purpose. It also plays an important role in boosting self-esteem, confidence, and overall health of individuals. From a social point of view, work and the professional world promote community cohesion and civic participation, eventually forming an important pillar of our social organization. Needless to say, our professional lives are tightly integrated to the overall future of humanity on several dynamics including family, social identity, physical and mental health, and economy.

In this chapter, we capture several glimpses of the future of work and businesses, some of them macro developments, whereas some of them micro developments. They include:

  • Europe and the United States will face a decline in population and a shortage of manpower, whereas the population in Africa and Asia would continue to grow and act as a source of manpower for these regions.

  • Africa and South Asia would continue to be plagued by the absence of infrastructure and capital. Labor force from these regions would migrate to the developed regions in search of better opportunities and improved livelihood.

  • The unemployment among the youth would increase multifold.

  • Millions of youth would go through severe psychological, financial, and health trauma.

  • Youth unemployment would lead to severe political and social unrests, resulting in disintegration and implosion of many nation states.

  • Organizational democracy where all members are equally involved in the decision-making and working of the organization would become more prevalent.

  • Organizations would revert to social capital—trust and goodwill between individuals and their communities—to coordinate business activities compared to the current formal systems like business contracts, management policies, hierarchies, and bureaucratic rules.

  • All businesses would just be digital platforms, with no physical offices or infrastructure. Nothing would be permanent, but businesses would on board staff, resources, and infrastructure on demand.

  • No individual will be rooted to a single job or location but would choose what they need, when they need on demand.

  • Large multinationals would be replaced with micro-multinationals with no fixed assets.

  • Business reputation would emerge as a key factor to reaching and retaining customers in the future world.

  • Every business decision would be driven by real-time data analysis and predictive and actionable data.

  • Robots would work alongside humans, improving productivity substantially for both humans and robots.

2 Change in Demographics

Two important variables that determine the demand and supply for future jobs are population and demographics. To develop clear insights and to extrapolate how population and demographics would evolve and shape up the future of jobs with a certain amount of accuracy, it is important for us to look backward and learn from the past trends. This would enable us to figure out how many of these patterns would hold up to the pressures of time and how many of those will wilt.

According to Max Roser, Hannah Ritchie, and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, who are founders of Our World in Data, the world population of 10,000 BCE was under one million. It then grew at a crawling pace of around 0.04% annually to reach around 1 billion people in 1803. However, from the1800s, we witness a fundamental change in the way population started to grow. By 1930 or so, it doubled to 2 billion. The first billion that took almost 12,000 years now took only 120 years. However, what happened from 1800 onward, and how is it relevant to the future of jobs?

During the early 1800s, the human society and the way we worked and arranged ourselves underwent a great transformation because of the Industrial Revolution. Before the world industrialized, through several thousands of years, people across the world led a predominantly agrarian lifestyle based in rural villages. They worked as families in their farms as subsistence farmers, where they grew their crops to feed themselves. They rarely traveled out of these villages for anything. Hence, their personal and professional lives were intertwined and rooted to their native place and families. However, the Industrial Revolution changed all this.

The dawn of industrialization in the early 1800s came alongside inventions such as the steam engine and several other mechanizations. As factories started to get bigger and produced more goods, the earlier forms of subsistence like farming started to disappear. Men left their families and moved into cities in search of jobs. It was almost a sweeping transformation from what was there until then to what is new. The Industrial Revolution also brought about economies of scale, which increased the efficiency and production of goods, including food. Our world suddenly discovered more resources that could sustain more people. These resulted in an overall growth of population—where billions were getting added to the world population in a span of just 12 to 15 years.

The world population quadrupled in the last 100 years or so. The engine that started this spurt in population might have been industrialization, but then an increase in population in turn led to an increased demand of goods and services, which led to further deepening of industrialization. Population and industrialization reiterated each other leading to a virtuous cycle. Hence, it is reasonable to assume that population and the future of work are intricately interconnected, in the past, present, and future.

However, the world population growth has been slowing down during the recent years. The growth of the world population peaked around 1970, where it grew at 2%, whereas currently it declined to 1% a year. According to the UN projections, this growth would continue to slow down and would fall to 0.1% by the end of this century, almost bringing the population growth to a standstill. Some studies even predict that instead of growing the population shall start declining by the end of the century. According to a study from Lancet, the world population shall peak in 2064 at 9.7 billion, which then shall start declining to 8.8 billion in 2100. An analysis from the Wittgenstein Center International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IISA) corroborates with Lancet and predicts that the global population would peak in 2070 and then start to decline.

The bigger question is what would be the implication of this demographic change to the future of work. Hans Rosling, the famous Swedish physician and public speaker, came to a conclusion based on what he refers to as “peak child”—a period when the number of children born reaches the highest peak. The significance of peak child is that the countries that reach this stage would be followed by a demographic dividend, when the proportion of dependent young children falls compared to the share of the working population.

During the wake of Industrial Revolution, Europe and the United States benefitted out of peak child, as their working population swelled. This gave them a leverage of demographic dividend, where a larger working population supported a smaller dependent population, eventually leading to centuries of unprecedented growth. However, now the case is reversed, and these countries are facing a demographic problem of a smaller number of working people supporting a larger population of dependents. However, countries that lagged behind during the demographic surge of industrialized nations are coming to life now. For example, Asia has been witnessing a demographic dividend during the last few decades. Their births are projected to increase from 63 million in 1950 to 73 million in 2050, a relative change of 17%, whereas in Africa, it is projected to grow from 11 million in 1950 to 44 million in 2050, a relative change of 295%. Comparably in Europe, during the same time, in 1950, while the births were 12 million, in 2050, it shall be 7.5 million, a negative 36% relative change. While Europe ages, Asia and Africa would be ready to go to work and be productive.

According to a Lancet study, by 2100, more than 8 out of 10 people are expected to live in Asia or Africa. Though, Africa is just 17% of the global population, by 2100, this is projected to increase to 40%, during the same period; Asia would also have a comparable 40% share of the world population. Now, when we specifically look at the working age population, by 2100, India is estimated to have the largest working age proportion followed by Nigeria and China. Hence, the first prediction for 2050 regarding the future of work would be that Africa along with Asia would be a source of manpower and workforce for the world. The regions of the world that are richer, productive, and powerful now, like Western Europe and the United States, would have to depend on these regions, unless they figure out technologies that completely overcome the need and intervention required by manpower in the production of goods and services.

3 Migration Toward Labor Opportunities

According to the International Migration Institute of Oxford University, around 50 years back, the number of migrants in the world was just around 100 million; it increased to 190 million by 2010. Though by sheer absolute numbers, they look as if migration has doubled, if we look at the proportion to the world population, it has actually remained constant during the entire period of the last 50 years, at less than 3%. Currently, about 260 million people live outside their native country, again constituting about 3% of the world population. There could be many reasons for this migration, like instability, war and conflict in native countries, and poverty. However, less than 8% of migrants are incidentally fleeing their homelands because of these reasons, whereas a large majority are attracted to the strong labor markets in the source country.

Jobs and labor are the single most reason why people migrate from their native countries to source countries, especially from the last century. The globalization process has accelerated this, where strong labor markets of Western Europe and the United States emerged as major host regions attracting large volumes of the global workforce. In fact, the United States stands out for attracting the highest number of immigrants, more than 40 million accounting for more than a tenth of the US population. So, our larger questions are how would the migration of workforce continue to evolve in the next few decades, what would be the impact of this migration to the future of work, and how would this phenomenon shape up the world?

To understand the future of workforce migration and its future impact better, we need to correlate this with the population dynamics. As we have seen earlier from the Lancet study, the world population shall peak in 2064 at 9.7 billion, which then shall start declining to 8.8 billion in 2100. During this period, the population in South Asia would grow at a sustained pace, where it would reach 31% of the world population in 2050, as against 28% in year 2000. Comparatively, population in Africa would grow at the highest pace in the world, where it would climb up by 170% between 2000 and 2050. However, as we have already seen, during the same time, the population in Europe would shrink to abysmal levels. Western Europe would decrease from 6.4% to a mere 3.5% of the world population in 2050. In Eastern Europe too, this decline in population would be noticed, in fact at more pronouncing levels even compared to Western Europe.

According to the United Nations Population report, beyond 2020, migration is projected to be the only driver of population growth in the developed regions. Without migration, the report says that North America and Oceania would record 13% smaller population, whereas it would be 6% smaller in Europe by 2050. In the working age population, between 20 and 64 years, the fall would be steeper at 15% in North America and Oceania, whereas in Europe it would be 8% without migration.

In one way, this demographic dividend in the developing regions of the world—South Asia and Africa—could have been their greatest opportunity, if they were able to leverage on them. However, taking advantage of an increasing number of people requires more than just them being in the right productive age band. It also requires large amount of working capital, resources, organization skills, and technology to ensure that opportunities are created. Unfortunately, all of which are absent in these regions, unlike the developed regions, which have progressively laid the foundations and built on it starting from the time of the Industrial Revolution. It is predicted that capital, resources, organization, and technology would continue to be concentrated in the developed world. The developing world even in 2050 would be plagued by the absence of infrastructure and capital. Hence, labor force from the demography surplus regions, facing the prospects of poor living standards and lack of adequate employment opportunities, would migrate to the developed regions in search of better opportunities and improved livelihood.

So, migration from the demography surplus regions like South Asia and Africa to regions like North America, Oceania, and Europe shall compensate for their demography deficit, especially in the working age bands. According to UN projections, the total number of migrants globally is expected to increase to 334 million in 2050, an increase of almost one third in absolute numbers compared to the current scenario. In relative terms, it means that 2.9% of the world population migrants would increase to 3.5% in 2050. According to the projection, the United States would continue to attract the largest number of immigrants even in 2050, compensating for their demographic deficit. From 40 million immigrants currently, it would increase to almost 60 million in 2050. Meanwhile, in continental Europe, the four largest economies, Germany, Spain, France, and Italy, would also attract close to 60 million by 2050.

Hence, the second prediction regarding the future of work and employment is that though there would be a deficit of working age population in the developed regions of the United States and Europe, in 2050, it would be compensated from South Asia and Africa as these regions would continue to remain underdeveloped. The impact of this migratory flows would add to the GDP of these developed nations. It is projected that the arrival of young workers would progressively increase the GDP growth rate in Western Europe by 0.2% in 2035. A mirror image of this would be felt as a deteriorating effect on the source regions—Africa and South Asia—of this migration.

4 Looming Youth Unemployment

According to the United Nations estimate, there are 1.2 billion youth between 15 and 24 years currently in the world accounting for 15.5% of the global population. They project the youth numbers to reach 1.3 billion in 2030 and 1.34 billion by 2050. In this, Asia had a largest share with over 700 million, whereas Africa had around 300 million. Asia would continue to have more youth than any other region until around 2080, when it could be surpassed by Africa. The UN estimates that in the 47 least developed countries, the youth population would increase by 62%, rising from 207 million to 336 million in 2050.

A higher proportion of youth in the population is a demographic blessing, since they could be gainfully employed. Youth can be a driving force for development when provided with adequate knowledge and opportunities. However, in the absence of suitable productive opportunities, they could emerge as the greatest challenge to a nation. As the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres commented, “The frustration generated in young people that have no hope in the future is a major source of insecurity in today’s world. And it is essential that when Governments plan their economic activities, when the international community develops forms of cooperation, they put youth employment, youth skills at the centre of all priorities…”

So, what are the main challenges regarding youth employment in the present, and how would they play out in the near and distant future? First, adversely affecting the productive intent of the youth, there has been a large-scale churn in the family psychographics, from the turn of this new century. Across social demographics, families are now comparatively smaller, and hence, average parents spend more time and resources for their children, providing them better handpicked opportunities and protecting them from harsh externalities. Prima facie, this appears to be positive but has altered our expectations from future generations. Parents of today presume that their children would earn and do considerably better than them and hence are willing to provide a safety net and long rope until they land those jobs they think they deserve. This has caused many youth to enter employment with a sense of warped entitlement toward the money that they should be earning and the type of work that they should be doing. Unfortunately, this has resulted in a negative unintended scenario. The Economist magazine says that our newer generation, though have consumed more resources and are more educated than ever, are twice as likely to be unemployed.

Meanwhile, there is another interesting dimension to this increasing case of missing productive intent. The earlier cohorts of young working age generations had the demon of boredom to fight with, as they sat at home or at the nearest public library. There was nothing that could engage or entertain them, and hence many a time, they would slip into the abyss laden with worries about their future. Parents again, devoid of any real distractions, would nag and egg them on to get working. Nowadays, technology has managed to jostle out that boredom almost permanently from our lives. Information, communication, and entertainment are at our beck and call. Youth are now relying on social media as an alternative therapy keeping them away from all real-life situations—a job being one of them.

Both these scenarios have deep repercussions on the future of employment, since the graduates of today would continue building the foundation of the world economy for at least the next four decades—until 2060. So, the future that we shall inherit depends on the productive edge and intent of the current youth.

According to the United Nations World Youth Report, the rates of young people’s participation in the labor force have been continuously falling over the last few decades. Unfortunately, the youth find themselves at a disadvantage and hence are three times as likely as adults to be unemployed. Hence, youth unemployment is always significantly higher than the adult rates across the regions of the world. According to the World Bank, in Africa, where this situation is stark, youth represent 60% of the unemployed people.

According to an African Development Bank Report, for the 12 million people that join the African labor force each year, only 3.7 million jobs are created. This means a huge deficit of 8.3 million jobs currently. Now, consider the fact that the African youth population is growing at a rapid pace and is expected to double to over 850 million by 2050. Even if Africa manages to add many millions of jobs, the unrest would be severe. In the case of India, it would need to generate a staggering 280 million jobs between 2020 and 2050.

Among the youth, even those who find employment, quality remains a major concern, where a majority of them would be in informal economy. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), globally more than three-quarters of working youth are in informal jobs compared to adults where informality is much lesser at 58%. When we look at developing countries, the proportion of informal employment is staggeringly high among the youth at 97%, where just 3% is employed in any formal career pursuits. Informality of their jobs also means that several millions of the world’s youth are living on incomes below extreme poverty levels.

According to Maurizio Buzzi, Director at ILO, current unemployment among the world youth has deep social and economic impacts on our future. First of all, if nations are not able to create high-quality employment for its youth, this would lead to serious social unrests and forced mobility, resulting in instability of regions across the globe. Second, if youth of today are experiencing a delayed start of suboptimal start, they would continue to lag behind in terms of earnings and income growth throughout their lives. This in turn drags down national and then global economies, with lower productivity, lower consumption rates, and lower savings.

Hence, the next prediction on future of the jobs in 2050 is that there would be severe employment shortage among the youth of the world. This shortage of jobs shall be concentrated mostly in the African and South Asian regions. At an individual level, this would mean that many millions of youth would go through severe psychological, financial, and health trauma. At a macro level, this alarming situation would eventually lead to severe political and social unrests in the region, resulting in disintegration and implosion of many nation states.

5 Disruption of Organizational Hierarchies

Our current organizations and workplaces are a result of the Industrial Revolution—when we evolved from agrarian rural tightly knit communities into urban factory-dominated communities. In factories, mainly into labor-dominated domains like manufacturing and mining, the need of the hour was a mechanism to control and streamline the overall process. Hence, when Frederick W. Taylor came up with management principles for efficient logistics, management, and productivity, the industry lapped it up. Through his scientific management, he firmly established a rigid hierarchy with his theory of “brains at the top,” “hands at the bottom.” Organizations kept people as well as their performances under check by imposing controls through obvious as well as not so obvious mechanisms like log-in and log-out times, hierarchical structures, direct and indirect supervision, management quotas, and even through stereotyping methods like dress codes and designations. Even namesake empowerment was usually responsibility without any authority. Authority always rested only with the “brains on top.”

Books and thinkers on organizational behavior and management literature reiterated this thinking. They somehow picked up and celebrated a belief that tight hierarchies are important for defining better productivity. This ensured that the same processes and beliefs were carried forward to all types and sizes of organizations across geographies and ages. Noam Chomsky, the American linguist and philosopher, said that “A corporation is about the closest thing to a totalitarian institution that humans have ever contrived. There is a convergence of total power at the top. All the decision-making lies with either the CEO or the board of directors or both, while orders are transmitted down to the lower levels, from where complete subservience is expected. The people at the top not only assert themselves, but also constantly forbid and suppress any criticism and opposition that might be directed against their agenda.”

According to Open Source Leader, written by Varghese (2010), there is an evolution in the organizational processes and structures happening, and future organizations would be completely different in their looks and feel by the time we reach 2050. So, what could be the reasons that would drive this change? And how are these changes affecting the business organizations? First, the culture and environment are getting complex by the day. Dynamics of the future will be so complicated that predictability of events and results would be almost impossible. As Soulaima Gourani suggests, unlike in other times, the world is moving toward high complexity, and the contexts that you operate in are becoming more and more difficult to process. Hence, power is concentrated on the top, like in today’s organizations, and then decisions could incline toward one extreme. Extremities in decision-making can lead to disasters easily, as one person at the top would never be open to all possibilities and probabilities into consideration. Hence, systemwide shocks would have deeper impacts, leading to many organizations and systems imploding. In the future, organizations would be forced to engage in open staff consultations within a framework of checks and balances. This would help to regulate one-man centric closed decisions, enabling the overall system to be more resilient and adaptable to the complex and varying environment.

Second, until recently, business information was a closed and confidential commodity, which was accessible only to the leaders of organizations. Information was used by corporate leaders to build their influence, by assessing situations in ways that fitted their agenda. Without relevant information, even if staff would like to be involved in decision-making, they would not be able to. Lack of information access also made sure that the other staff would find it difficult to judge the results and performance of the leaders. But now with the advent of social media or several other modes, information has become more democratic. This has driven the power down the ladder, where more staff could get involved in decision-making, and more staff could judge the efficiency and effectiveness of the leader better.

Future organizations compared to the current ones would be less hierarchical and more open. Organizations would develop in such a fashion that every individual and every staff member have a stake and hence would be able to add his perspective. According to Binta Brown, in the next 50 years, we will have completely disrupted hierarchical, top-down institutions and corporate structures, in favor of flatter, highly responsive, dynamic structures that are resilient and responsive. Compared to today’s closed organizational setups, the open organizational setups would be defined by absence of hierarchies and rules, shared power between the CEO and the staff members, transparent and meritocratic workplaces, organizations with shared visions, and lower silos where staff members could easily shift between departments and competencies. So, the next prediction for the future of businesses 2050 would be that in the future, organizational democracy where all members are equally involved in the decision-making and working of the organization would become more prevalent.

6 Return of Social Capital

According to Open Source Leader (2010), the main objective of any organization is the coordination of actions of a set of individuals to engage them toward a certain agreed goal. However, coordination does not happen de facto but requires some coordinate efforts, since individuals do not collaborate on their own without any external push or incentives. Before the arrival of the Industrial Revolution and the scientific management principles proposed by Frederick W. Taylor, this coordination was achieved through an abundant stock of “social capital”—the level of trust and goodwill between individuals and their communities, established through the informal social interactions between them. People were able to easily work together because they knew each other in their personal spheres.

However, once management became a formal science, businesses replaced social capital with formal systems like management policies, hierarchies, and bureaucratic rules. As businesses started becoming enormously complex, they insisted that the relationship between the organization and its people was purely contractual. In the shorter term, this contractual arrangement worked very well, especially in industrial environments, where it added more predictability to the business operations. Planning, organizing, staffing, reviewing, and budgeting, everything was possible with a greater level of control for the top management. However, it would not be without its own challenges. Primary among them was a phenomenon called “transaction cost”—a term that became most widely known through economist Oliver E. Williamson's work. Often known as coordination cost, it is the cost of all the information processing and monitoring necessary to coordinate the work of people in an organization, primarily because in the absence of social capital, people started considering their professional conduct as nothing but a contract and hence cooperated only when the organization was willing to bear the cost. For the business, this meant increased transaction costs, which came in several shades—information costs to locate the right resources to carry out tasks, reward costs to incentivize people to work toward specified actions, monitoring costs to make sure that people are not shirking the responsibilities, and enforcement costs to take appropriate action, if anyone defects.

Rigidity and unresponsiveness of contracts were yet another challenge of formal coordination mechanisms. Contracts, how much ever elaborate they could be, would not be able to predict every situation and every contingency and hence would have to consider goodwill and social capital to make it run smoothly between the parties. Hence, many a time, this would assume people to bring in their own assumptions and manage it through their already established relationships, that just by the word go in a contract.

Industrial Revolution era Taylorian management techniques intended for easier coordination and faster response have been producing just the opposite result—by imposing various forms of transaction costs and rigid and unresponsive structures. Hence, though we assume that in the complex and technologically sophisticated future, social capital might not be of much use, in truth it remains as relevant as in pre-Taylorian times. So, how will future organizations move toward greater social capital-based coordination?

First, Mancur Olson in his book “Logic of Collective Action” says collective action becomes an easier process once the number of individuals involved in a task are smaller. Since, future organizations compared to todays would be nimbler and hierarchy-free, social capital would be easier to be relied upon for coordination purposes. Even the larger organizations would follow what Robert Putnam, political scientist from Harvard, would calls as a honeycomb structure, where the organization offers its people many opportunities to interact at deeper levels, mostly through online media like social networks. A honeycomb structure is essentially a conglomeration of several small groups, within a larger organization, not necessarily connected with the core business of the company but which helps its people to connect with each other and develop trust in each other. These smaller groups have low entry barriers—anyone who is interested can associate as well as contribute. It is easy to enter, and it is easy to leave.

Secondly, withholding of information by the upper level hierarchies has made coordination difficult until now. However, as access to business information becomes even more ubiquitous in the future, organizations become more flexible and fluid. Organizations would then imbibe the value of transparency—where nothing is hidden, but everything is open for everyone to see. The transparency that pervades everything helps peer pressure to work smoothly to a great extent. People know why someone is getting a promotion, why someone is claiming a higher salary, or why someone is opting out of a meeting. It also helps them to keep a finger on the pulse of the company. They know exactly how much are the revenues, how much are the expenses, what is justified, and what is not, organizationally as well as individually. This would again enable better trust coordinated processes.

By 2050, organizations would have reverted to social capital—trust and goodwill between individuals and their communities, established through the informal social interactions to coordinate their activities. They would rely less on formal systems like management policies, hierarchies, and bureaucratic rules.

7 End of All Rigidities

Until recently, the efficiencies and competencies of businesses were anchored to certain fixed assets and things. For example, the biggest corporations had their offices in the most central locations in the biggest metro cities, which gave them access to labor, materials, and logistics to leverage mass production of goods and services. Each staff member worked with a set of fixed resources around—fixed location, office space, office timing, resources, and even colleagues. In the technology era, businesses broke out of this fixed mindset, where they choose to move certain functions offshore. However, there are still constraints on certain factors like location and staff, where businesses, though offshore, still choose to be in strategic areas, for example, metro cities, where there is abundance of talent and resources.

In the future, there would be no constraints at all of location, staff, technology, or resources. Everything would be flexible and available “on demand,” “just in time.” This 100% flexibility shall be mutually reiterated by the demand side, which is the businesses, and by the supply side, which is the resources. Richard Florida, the University Professor at the University of Toronto, suggests that with the rise of remote work, many families would move to less crowded suburbs and small towns. They would choose to work out of their homes rather than at the constraint of a central location. Hence, for businesses, it no longer makes sense to be rooted in a metro city or for that matter in any fixed location, because their resources are spread out everywhere. This gives the businesses a flexibility to exist in a digital space without any physical presence. People would also choose not to be constrained by working for a single organization however large or prestigious that corporation is but rather be flexible and pick and choose work as they please. Hence, for businesses, it no longer makes sense to have fixed staff and employees, but rather they can build a customized team for each project and each business for a limited amount of time.

So, in 2050, businesses would not have anything fixed. Everything would be 100% flexible and available off the shelf on demand and “just-in-time.” In fact, businesses would just be digital platforms, with no physical offices or infrastructure. They would go ahead and choose their staff, resources, and infrastructure, as and when they require. People in the same fashion again will not be rooted to a single job or a location but would choose what they need, when they need.

8 Rise of Micro Corporations

Industrial era and the future that followed it with technology corporations were all about large corporations. Corporations that employed several thousands of people to monopolize size and reach. Being large was the biggest competitive advantage and merit, since large players were able to build moats to sustain their market. However, in the future, nimbleness and agility will be the most coveted qualities.

According to the Yell Future Gazers Report, there used to be two simple ways to think about business size and reach. A firm was either big and global or small and local. According to Yell, the future will be about a new paradigm—small and global. Individual entrepreneurs and small companies will be able to unbundle and outsource functions to others, crowdsource R&D, and exchange employees and contractors to become what they refer to as the micro-multinationals of the future. These micro-multinationals, would be stripped down and nimble, with near zero employees, but still projects quickly flourish, evolve, and resolve. People would be employed on a pay-per-project norm, where specialists move from project to project.

In 2050, being a large corporation would be a weakness rather than a strength. While larger corporations have fixed assets and resources to be taken care and paid for, micro-multinationals have no fixed assets and have a shorter go-to-the-market time spans. Small and faster corporations take lesser time to go international and win the race.

In the future, as access to information becomes more ubiquitous, it becomes easier for customers and clients to judge a business. Future would be an era of transparency, where there would be heightened concerns about ethics, the environment, and the values of the businesses that people and organizations buy from. According to Binta Brown, business of the future shall evolve to a truly human-centered movement, where there is less emphasis on short-termism and profits and a greater emphasis on making markets work for the broader needs of humanity. Hence, as Yell Future Gazers Report suggests, there would be an increased focus on corporate reputation than a single-minded focus on profits. Business priority would not just be business but also people, planet, and purpose. As Rupert Younger, Director of the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation at Oxford Saïd Business School, suggests, it would be no longer about what you say about yourself, but it would be about what the public space talks about you. No corporation will be in any position to hide any information that pertains to them. As everything will be out in the open, corporate reputation would be judged on an hour-to-hour basis.

In 2050, business reputation would be the currency that sells. Business reputation and managing it effectively would emerge as a key factor to reaching and retaining customers in the future world.

9 Age of Machines

Until now, machines and artificial intelligence have been playing in the background—mostly used by the innovative companies at the forefront of technology and bigger corporations. Though every business, big and small, produces reams and reams of data, from each process and each customer interaction, finding meaning in these barrage of data has been possible only for those corporations with deep pockets. In 2050, every business will be a data-driven business.

As 2050 would be the age of micro-multinationals, these companies would leverage big data to create unique competencies for themselves. As Soulaima Gourani suggests that knowledge would become the cornerstone, it would be the most important means of handling the increasing complexity and the rapid changes. However, usage of data itself would have become much more powerful and all pervasive in the future. According to Sandra Khvoynitskaya, an expert in Internet of Things, “in the future, computers ability to learn from data will improve considerably due to more advanced unsupervised algorithms, deeper personalization and cognitive services.” The emergence of fast data will allow processing real time—where users would have insights as the event unfolds, sometimes as little as a fraction of milliseconds. Our future might not be just about fast data but also would be about actionable data, where data would not just be real time but also be predictive, strategic, and actionable. Analytical platforms would enable accurate, standardized, and actionable information availability everywhere.

One of the common predictions about the future is the fear of robots replacing humans completely or even overtaking humans in intelligence. According to the Economist magazine, by 2037 itself, almost half of the work done by human beings would be replaced by robots. However, the Yell Future Gazers Report suggests the possibility that in the future, humans would actually move up the value chain, where we will continue doing those jobs that machines don’t do well, which require subjectivity, creativity, and empathy. Machines and robots would work alongside humans, collaboratively, rather than competitively, which the report calls as Cobots. Collaborative working between humans and cobots, according to researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, would have exponential impact on productivity of both humans and cobots. According to them, almost three fourths of the tasks that are currently performed by humans in service industries would be replaced by cobots, improving the productivity by leaps and bounds. Lucian Tarnowski suggests that by 2050, the world shall see hyperefficiency of human capital, which will be augmented by machines. Machines will be doing everything other than creative work, and hence, people will clearly know their own strengths and shall compete for value than for price. In fact, according to Daniela Rus, head of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “in the future, robots would be everywhere and everybody would have a robot, and robots are pervasively integrated in the fabric of life.”

By 2050, data analytics would be all pervasive. Everything that we do and are driven to do and every business decision would be driven by real-time data analysis and predictive and actionable data. By 2050, robots would work alongside humans, improving productivity substantially for both humans and robots.

10 Input from Interviewees

Samuel Alemayehu

Serial entrepreneur and investor

As a venture capitalist at C1 Ventures, my focus is on creating solutions that decrease carbon emissions in the production of food and materials. Our analysis leads us to believe that precision fermentation, which involves the domestication of microbes, will become the primary method for producing vital nutrients such as carbohydrates, proteins, and fats within the next two decades. We forecast that the adoption of precision fermentation will significantly boost the output of current agricultural methods, decrease carbon emissions by over 85%, conserve land and water resources, and significantly reduce total cost. These outcomes would be a major step forward in the sustainability and efficiency of food production.

Gina Badenoch

Social entrepreneur and photographer and founder of Ojos que Sienten AC and Capaxia UK

Development will bring third world to second, and environmental consciousness will increase around 2040. London is very diverse; I picture the world as the Olympics, truly diverse global workforce; you will walk into a company and see a small London.

Maurizio Bussi

UN diplomat and director at the International Labour Organization

How will the workplace may look in 30 to 50 years. 4–5 generations are coexisting today at the workplace. They are quite complicated to handle. I see the end of cheap labor and complications on the world. China was producing everything 10 years ago, but now they don’t do that anymore, as, e.g., Burma is cheaper. It may not be possible in the future to buy a TV for 200 dollars any more.

Technology today allows us not to commute. Life quality and more efficiency are at stake. An unproductive time can be transformed by technology. We will thrive for work-life flexibility instead of work-life balance.

The new generation can access the labor market, growing up with new technology around them. How do we integrate them in the labor market? That can be destabilizing.

In the future, companies may look at your social profile on Facebook or ask how many followers you have on twitter, and how many people read your blog. When a young person goes for a mortgage, the bank will check how many of your friends have credit problems. If it is many, you are likely to default.

Digital reputation may require your perpetual CV. How do you build your reputation capital? How do companies discover talent? They may come to you by data mining your social profile. Simulations and video games that could be done at corporate level are growing in importance; frontal lectures are passé.

Teams will be matched together by technology, finding the best possible matches. Wearable computers and micro devices are built in your clothes, helping you professionally and personally.

Sahar Chen

Cofounder and managing partner, Beyond the Billion Dollar Fund

Venture capital holds immense power to influence the ideas that shape the way we live, work, and lead. So what happens in 2050 starts with us seeding what we envision for our future. The exponential rise of technology continues to disrupt all industries and will continue to do so: Recall five of the largest companies by market cap today—Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook—were venture-backed technology companies that have shaped significantly how we interact with each other and by that our relationships. It’s cliche, but talent is universal, and yet, opportunities are not. The future needs all our best talents at hand, and of course, this means we cannot be excluding half the population. Women are already leading us forward by their great innovations, and by 2050, this will hardly be a topic of discussion!

Õzlem Denizemen

Opinion leader in women empowerment and founder of Para Durum

We will be able to connect with different sources of life…like the matrix or an avatar (the first time the Internet was used, they could not believe how it will change life 50 years ago).

Conscious capitalism with sharing economy is nw becoming strong. I am a social entrepreneur. In the future, everyone will be more like me. People will not want to be doing everything for themselves anymore. Like in 50 years I will ask you “What do you do? Aha, and so what do you do for others?”… this will be common.

7 billion people are coming to the realization that I cannot just live wanting more and more; sharing will become common. I want to elevate other people’s life. Life is a coin; I want women to solve their financial problems. Feeling strong, they can be at peace with themselves. Women will be more courageous and powerful, and more positions will be theirs, whereas men will be a bit scared of this; relationships will change. The world needs nurturing and care; hence, women will get into world leadership positions and social positions on a large scale. Capacity of giving birth, innovation is important for women, contributing with different thinking.

Rajeev Dey

Founder and chief executive officer of Learnerbly

Working on start-ups and following a more entrepreneurial path would be second nature to people in the future, leaving behind the sort of Victorian education where you would work in a factory where things are mass produced.

With great crisis, as we have seen, comes a big shake-up of attitudes and mentalities. It will also force people to think out of the box, more creative, and change their approach towards work as well. Attitudes are improving—in 50 years coming out of university and setting up your own business might become more commonplace.

We see a rise of portfolio careers already, but we will see more so, people becoming specialist workers and people selling their own services as individuals in niche fields.

Education will be radically reformed and experiential, and an Internet-based learning will change the class room model, collaborating with people across the world. As social awareness and consciousness improves, doing something about the world improves. More people will want to come up with solutions.

The entrepreneur of future will be about more diversity and global outlook, and borders will be less important, not limited by border but collaborate more on finding solutions to local issues. If political will is there, people’s horizon will expand. SMEs will have a larger piece of the pie than today, resulting in more innovation and creativity.

Lars Flottrong

Business Advisor of MoB

Strategy and risk management

What does the ideal future of humankind look like to me? Humankind managed to solve the main part of the environmental problems, limited the population growth, and established an earth-wide democratic republic where wars, conflicts, and racism disappeared.

Production of food, air, and water is managed with the help of technology and science; spaceships and orbital flights allow exploring other galaxies.

How do I imagine the year 2050? The world population is concentrated in megacities, whereas urban territories are under strict control and fully dedicated to air, water, and food production. Airspace usage is as common as breathing fresh air. Robots, machines, and AI are integrated and used everywhere, however, under strict control.

Eyal Gura

Serial entrepreneur and angel investor

In 2050, we will still see lots of inequality in the workforce as millions of factory employees will still be employed in harsh conditions, working alongside robots, and on the other extreme, we will see creative workers (art and entrepreneurial) leveraging AI to produce their goods more efficiently. By 2050, numerous mundane legal, medical, and accounting tasks will be replaced by AI, whereas many lawyers and accountants will find themselves unemployed. Doctors and nurses will have more time to treat the increasingly larger aging population in 2050.

Caroline Mühler-Möhl

Founder, investor, philanthropist, and president of Müller-Möhl Group and Foundation

It is challenging enough to predict the state of the world in 3–5 years, business just being one part of it. But my hope is that humankind will keep on interacting physically: eye to eye, breath to breath, body to body…in full consciousness. I believe that if we stop to think, see, feel, taste, and smell… it will be difficult to do business.

Jaques-Philippe Piverger

Investor; entrepreneur; and founder, chairman, and CEO of GoodLight Capital

If we want to actually change the world, the first step is to change the way it is financed.

Lucian Tarnowski

Hindsight futurist and founding curator of United Planet Game

We are entering the human age or the age of empathy. Technology has allowed people to progress the human potential movement, which started in the 1960s. In the next 50 years, we will see hyperefficiency of human capital rather than financial capital. People will begin to realize where their stregths are and start to compete for value rather than price, because machines will be doing anything that is not creative. Work will be a completely different concept, taking your unique set DNA of talent and applying it much more effectively. Human capital is the greatest opportunity and greatest waste. Conservatively, today we are only using 10% of the world’s labor force; the rest, the majority is not utilized effectively. Technology will become an enabler for people to use themselves more effectively, maximizing their potential. This trend started in the 1960s, and probably, there will be a century of further evolution.

So, there were a lot of rough diamonds with great potential, but they never realized their potential due to circumstance (where they are born, education system, and lack of opportunities). As we get more sophisticated, our ability to map human potential will improve how to apply human capital. This will be the biggest game changer because every innovation will need human capacity. If one can increase the capacity and effectiveness of the world’s labor market, one can increase the effectiveness of just about everything else. Moore’s law will be applicable to the human potential curve as well.

As more and more people are innovating, the growth will be exponential. Whereas financial markets and other markets are zero-sum games, this is not. Adding more people to the playing field who have not been competing in the past will create a completely new world of work. By aligning personal and professional potential, people will do much more on what they are good and what they love. The world is becoming way more competitive for human capital and talent, so you better be bloody good at what you do. We will see a human potential exponential curve.

In the future, everything you learn will be accredited informally and stored. Like the social web, all of the worlds’ knowledge will be accessible online; all the knowledge in your head will be accessible and able to be indexed in such a way to apply knowledge in a more effective way.

If we know what you know and what dots you connected and what your specialties are, you can apply them more effectively, i.e., talent graph, a map of the world's human capital based on what they learn in real time. Google talks about mapping the world's information. I talk about how we can search the world's knowledge, understanding the flow of knowledge more effectively.