When the future of work is discussed, we usually talk about it in a very specific and fragmented way.

The BYOD trend will mean that people bring their own laptop to work — but we assume they will still work for a company and still have a fixed workplace.

When we talk about transparency, we think about transparency into giant corporations like Nike, Apple and Microsoft and their internal processes. But why would these giants still exist, or be structured in the same way that they are today?

When we talk about sustainability, we likewise think about corporations getting their act together and somehow, as if by magic, internalize what are today external costs. Why would they?

Problems of unsustainable or shady business practices, poor working conditions and wage-fixing, and poorly designed products with little market fit or planned obsolescence are all problems that stem from the organizational and financial nature of these corporations.

But many of the reasons why mega-corps have been successful and have had competitive advantage — like high capital costs, regulatory barriers to entry, transaction costs — won’t be around anymore, and therefore corporations might not either.

Converting fixed costs to variable costs

Manufacturing, distribution, commercial property and administrative overhead have traditionally been associated with high fixed costs which worked as a barrier to entry. A result of the on-going digitization of all processes in society is that increasingly, we are able to access these things as services and scale up and down as demand changes.

Today, you can use fulfillment services to create your own online, direct distribution channel without having to ship the product yourself; you can rent office space by day and seat, and you can use new types of software and virtual assistants to handle your back office stuff.

Advanced manufacturing

We are also going to see Digital Manufacturing or Advanced Manufacturing develop to a point where we can design the product digitally, order a sample, re-design the product, order a new sample and so on. And when it’s finished, we can order a batch and have it sent to the fulfillment center or to retailers and distributors.

3d-printing will also help with the design and development process, but it won’t do much for production as quality and finish won’t be good enough for commercial purposes. Think about it: we already have 2d printers at home, but we don’t use them to make and sell books, because they unit price would be too high and the books would look awful.

Instead, it is the digitization of manufacturing that will make it possible to more easily re-configure production lines to create new types of products, and through this make start up costs and minimum quantities much lower. It is the physical equivalent of cloud storage, Software-as-a-Service, and similar to print-on-demand services that already exist in publishing.

Increased differentiation

When the cost of starting a project that may or may not have commercial goals is $0, the increased competition this brings means that it will

a) be possible to bring more niche ideas to life

b) it will be necessary to become more niche and differentiated to get noticed

It will be just like the app stores today, or the self-publishing industry: anyone can publish and app or a book, but it will be very difficult to capture people’s attention so they’ll buy and read the book or use the app.

Interactions and community

For this reason, we’re going to see products and services grow out of the needs of communities. Perhaps the tumblr pastel goth crowd comes up with a new type of … shoe? … hairspray? that takes off in that community. The further development will then depend on input from the same community to stay relevant.

Therefore, product development will be directly tied to interactions between people within different types of communities. GoPro and WordPress are successful not just because the communities around their product create a larger customer base, but also because its interactions around the product feed back into the development process — it makes the product better.

Digital currencies and smart contracts

When the designers and developers come straight from the community and initial costs are $0, there needs to be a new way of handling the business side. Digital currencies are important because the accounting can be fully automated according to rules set up in smart contracts.

Imagine a group of three friends who decide to write a book or make a record together. They could simply set up the smart contract so that they will all get 1/3 each of whatever profit there is from the project. The payments are then directed to this platform and paid out according to this, automatically. The tax code will eventually be included in the contract.

This will greatly increase the number of new ‘companies’ and spur the development of new forms of ownership — I would guess co-ops are going to become a big thing.

Multi-disciplinary skillsets

Consider this group of three friends again. Perhaps this is the first time they use InDesign or Traktor. Perhaps one of them learns how to design a website while working on this project. Another one might get really good at copywriting and coming up with marketing campaigns.

The thing is that when all you need to learn is the right software and a goal that motivates you, anyone will be able to learn anything. Literally. It is not difficult to become an engineer or a designer or a writer, if that’s what you’re interested in. It’s only difficult to learn things you’re not interested in.

Furthermore, these three people will be part of the project during its entire life-cycle. Maybe at first they all write, then they switch to web development/design and then marketing. What’s going to come out of the project is not only a potentially unique product but also three people with unique skillsets — they may learn three or four different skills.

Because there is no start up cost and no investments made other than the individuals’ time and effort, it will be possible to move between projects and have different roles in each of them, because stakes will be lower. If your contribution is isn’t good enough, it can be thrown out. Some time will be lost, but the loss will be much smaller than in a conventional company as compensation only comes after launch.

The death of corporations

These people are not going to fit within existing organizations because they only hire monomaths. They also won’t be interested in working at traditional companies because they will see them as lifeless and limiting.

Moreover, corporations have no soul and will not be able to keep up with the rapid innovation of these micro-projects. As such, corporations will either go bankrupt or be transformed into loose network organizations instead of hierarchies.

Sustainability

Sustainability comes from eliminating unsustainable practices. It means negating negative side-effects of a process or business.

The waste and negative external effects of corporate organizations are due to the fact that they don’t care because they can’t care — corporations are managed by numbers and see no other values than maximizing profits. A manager in a corporation literally cannot comprehend any other value than increased profits or reduced costs due to the nature of the organization he’s in.

Corporations have significant overhead and external costs that they can’t therefore can’t reduce. It wouldn’t take much for Wal-Mart and H&M to increase the wages of the people who work in their factories and retail outlets but they never do because it goes counter to their superficial cost-cutting logic.

These new micro-companies will be able to work more sustainably simply because they are emotionally and personally invested in the work and because the work is done for the community around the product — any externalities are going to be noticed and so will need to be fixed.

BYOD / Work from home

These both stem from the fact that the future organizations will not be comprised of professionals but persons. BYOD will become a thing because an individual will be able to use the same device for work and personal use as mobile devices become more powerful and software more user-friendly. He’ll probably prefer to use his own, familiar device too, and be more productive thanks to it.

If you can work from home, then why would you work for a corporation in a narrowly defined role with people not of your choosing, instead of with other likeminded individuals in an equal partnership?

The function of community

Communities that form around products will be both the customer base, the source of new ideas that develop the product, and a way to recruit new employees. The company that does the work to bring the ideas to life will still be for-profit because we all need to pay rent, but it will be much more closely connected with its community, and more or less be of service to it.

As such, the future of work is closely related to new forms of social interactions and community building, online and offline.

A first sign of this is Assembly. It is a platform that organizes (open source) software development, then monetizes the work and shares the income with contributors according to the work they’ve put into the project.