3 tips for leaders to get the future of work right | Debbie Lovich

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 22 October 2021

⏱️ 13 minutes

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Summary

Work that's dictated by a fixed schedule, place and job description doesn't make sense anymore, says leadership expert Debbie Lovich. In light of the cultural shift towards remote work sparked by the pandemic, Lovich gives three essential tips to leaders so employees can keep their autonomy (while remaining productive), companies can let go of rigid bureaucracy and we can all reshape work to better fit our lives.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	It's TED Talks Daily. I'm your host, Elise Hugh.
0:07.0	The tragedy of COVID-19 brought on tectonic shifts in the way we live, learn, and perhaps especially
0:14.2	in the way we work. Work futurist Debbie Lovitch says a lot of the changes in those early weeks
0:19.5	were amazing for worker agency,
0:22.2	autonomy, and accountability. In her 2021 talk at TED at BCG, she offers leaders some must-dos
0:29.7	to not go backwards and get the future of work right as we move forward.
0:37.3	When I moved from New York to Boston in 1989,
0:42.0	I completely lost my sense of direction.
0:45.2	It wasn't me, though.
0:46.4	It was those winding, nonsensical Boston roads.
0:51.2	Urban legend has it that in Boston,
0:52.9	they paved over cow paths to form the very roads we had
0:57.4	today. Now, if you're an urban planner designing a city from scratch, you would not base it on how
1:03.7	the cows wandered. And if you think about it, that's exactly what we've done with work.
1:12.2	Hundreds of years ago, in the Industrial Revolution, people left their homes to perform repetitive
1:17.4	tasks in the fixed time and place of the factory floor.
1:21.8	And when knowledge workers entered the scene, we kept the same model, this time with fixed
1:27.2	job descriptions in fields of cubicles
1:30.2	from 9 to 5. Even globalization and technology did little to change the dynamic.
1:39.1	Fix time, place, and job descriptions are the cow paths of work. And like cow paths for roads, it just doesn't make any
1:48.0	sense. I've been challenging and changing how companies work for the past 15 years, starting with
1:55.8	my own company, Boston Consulting Group, and then with dozens of other Fortune 500 organizations.
	...

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