[MUSIC] Another dimension of the company of the future is how it's organized. The first one is around ownership, the second is how it's organized. And of course, we've talked quite a lot in this course about this, in fact. If you go back, this slide you see in front of you go back to week number two, we talked about decentralized, networked, virtual types of organizational models where we're moving away from a classic, kind of bureaucratic sort of inner dimensional organization to one where the pieces are much more laterally organized. Much more fragmented where individual units are doing more of their own things. And so that's some sort of hybrid if you like between a classic, kind of corporate model, and more of a kind of a free market model. The third dimension of the company of the future is the relationship between the company and the employee. And if you think about it, the kind of the classical model is that we were all employees, salaried employees of companies, and we're paid a salary, and in return for that, the company essentially takes care of us. The company gives us a pension. The company takes care of our future development and learning. They take care to some degree of our career. The alternative model, which has really started to take off I would say over the last 20 years, is this notion of the employee, of the individual rather, as a contractor to the company. And this manifests itself in many forms. You know, many individuals for example who work in the information technology industry work as, as freelancers. They have their own little company, they are the only employee of that company, and they sell their services to the contracts, contractor for a fee. And obviously, that individual then has to take care of his or her own pension and their own learning and development, and they can be kicked out at any time, if you see what I mean. So, there are lots of pros and cons to this which we're going to get to in a second, but one, one of the big trends we're seeing as we say to ourself what does the company of the future look like, is we're seeing, you know, a real, real growth in the number of people who are saying, I don't want to work the rest of my life as a salaried employee. I want some freedom. I want to be able to sell my services to a company and leave that company of, of my own volition, perhaps take a long holiday and come back later. I want to pack for work for multiple companies. I want to sell my services to a number of different companies. Now, obviously, there is challenges there, not every company wants to do this. Obviously, there's issues around exclusivity and, and so forth. But, undoubtedly, this thing is on the rise, and what we're going to do a, a little exercise or a little case study as part of the course just to illustrate this point. So the company that we're going to look at is a company called Eden McCallum. It's a London-based strategy consulting company. It's been around for about 15 years now. The core team is only about 30 people, 12 partners and another 20 or so employees who run a consulting business. And of course, a consulting business has clients on the one hand, and it has consultants on the other. And their job, essentially, is to find interesting clients who need their services and then to use their consultants' abilities to solve those clients' problems. The key pint, point of the model is that the consultants are not employees of Eden McCallum. The consultants are all freelancers, and they have a pool of about 500 freelancers in the London area who are all working to more or lesser degrees for Eden McCallum. And some of those consultants work almost full-time for Eden McCallum, and some of them do almost nothing for Eden McCallum. Now, it's a long story, so I'm going to cut it there. What I'm going to suggest we do, as the, as the kind of the as the assignment for this particular module, is that we actually read the case study on Eden McCallum and spend some time in the course-room and in discussion, actually working on this very specific question, to say essentially, what are the pros and cons to Eden McCallum in having its consultants as freelancers rather than as salaried employees? Now there's some pros and cons for the employees, we're going to set those aside for the moment, but the big question is why would Eden McCallum choose to organize itself as a consultancy where it didn't have any salaried consultants on its books? That's the discussion question we're going to spend some time on. And I'll give you my thoughts on it after you've had the discussion through the course-room. So, to finish this module, all I've said is, what is the company of the future looking like? Well, as I've said throughout this course, there's going to be lots of traditional, big companies still out there. It's not like these companies are going to disappear, but what we are seeing is lots of experimentation with slightly different models. Different models of ownership, different ways of organizing, and different approaches to the employment relationship between individuals and between companies. And we're going to see a, shall we say, a coexistence of a number of different models, and I think increasingly large numbers of small companies, and indeed, individual freelancers selling their services back to, to companies. The British management guru Charles Handy, he wrote a book once called The Elephant and the Flea. And for him, the elephant was the large company, and the flea was the individual who was selling his or her services back to the elephant and his, his point was these things coexist. We will need both of them for many, many years to come. So the company in the future will have some distinctive qualities but it will also still have some significant sort of resemblance to the model that we've known in the past.
