Work: The Four Big Shifts.
Image by Midjourney
This week will mark one year since Rethinking Work was published globally by HarperCollins.
As of this date every prediction in the book on how work would transform has begun to happen.
And in every case faster and deeper than imagined.
Here are the four shifts underway and their implications:
1) Work and Jobs have uncoupled: In many parts of the world, 2025 will have marked the peak of full-time human jobs. Individuals have discovered that work can be done and incomes can be earned without holding a full time job. Companies continue to expand use of contractor or part-time workforces, or even avoid hiring a human worker and adopt use of agentic employees (AI-powered workers).
During the recent earnings call at Meta:
“We’re starting to see projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single, very talented person,” Zuckerberg said.
Meta CFO Susan Li said since the start of 2025, “output per engineer has risen 30%, driven largely by adopting AI coding agents, and “power users” have increased output 80% year over year.
Meta did increase employment by 6 percent but that pales in comparison to a nearly 24 percent rise in revenue. Most companies have telegraphed keeping the same number of employees or reducing them despite increased revenue.
The implications of this shift are significant both for society but also for companies which have tended to be organized around filling and managing jobs versus getting work done. As work can get done with fewer full time humans we will see today’s full time jobs being replaced by a mix of a smaller number of full time jobs and an explosion of freelance and fractionalized jobs plus agentic workers.
Just like how people compile playlists to customize music for mood and occasion rather than buying full compact discs or vinyl records, companies are going to compile and access skills and expertise to get work done. Hiring human workers for specific skills to use on term-fixed projects, instead of full-time employment.
This model is widely prevalent in fields such as entertainment where talent gets together around a project whether it be a play, a movie or a tv show and then move on to the next opportunity.
We will all feel the societal impact of the loss of so many full time jobs. In the US, the linkage between full-time employment and health care access will become a key election issue by 2028, if not earlier.
2) The majority of future company employees will be different from who they are now: At the start of this decade most companies’ employees were a mix of full-time employees, contract employees and free-lance employees. Well before the end of this decade the majority of most companies’ employees will be agentic employees and fractionalized employees (individuals with the equity and health benefits of full-time employees, but work for, and are compensated for, 50 to 80 percent of a full-time employee as AI requires less of them and aging populations causes people to work fewer hours).
McKinsey the consulting company today has 40,000 humans and 25,000 AI agents.
Fusing agentic and human work forces is going to be a significant challenge creating challenges when managing and aligning a combination of five types of employees (full time, free-lance, contract, fractionalized and agentic).
3) Leadership will be reinvented: Leadership will matter more than ever, but will have to become more resilient and relevant for the modern world due to three shifts.
Knowledge Implosion: Many managers have huge amounts of knowledge. Much of this knowledge is factual and data-driven. Some of it is crystalized intelligence of being able to recognize and match patterns. AI is making much of the knowledge and data corpus less relevant since it can be accessed and organized by anybody with access to an AI tool. The crystalized intelligence remains important, but can become a double-edged sword since in the new world of AI, old patterns may no longer hold true.
LQ/UQ: To succeed, every manager and leader will have to both learn the new skills and ways of working thus LQ or learning quotient will join EQ to help thrive in an AI Age while unlearning old ways will become important (UQ or unlearning quotient). Imagine spending thirty years learning an industry and its ways, then having to reimagine much of it! The future will definitely not fit in the mindsets of the past.
Workforce Shift: When a majority of employees are not human or full time, and in many cases the human employees are distributed around the world, new methods of inspiring and managing will be required.
Zone of influence will replace Zone of control.
Companies as “teams” will replace companies as “families “(which they almost never were).
It is for this reason that companies that believe the coming change in work is only about technology instead of both technology and upgrading human capability will likely fall behind.
4) Modern Organizational Design will reward AI first/Talent anywhere: A large number of the fast-growing successful companies have the following traits:
A) They begin with AI first: They do not ask how the human can be automated by AI, but rather how the Human can complement and aid the AI. AI allows for completely new ways of working including the fusion of specialties and the melting of silos. Human in the lead as Julie Sweet of Accenture does not mean planning human first.
B) They access and hire talent from anywhere: As AI enables billions around the world to now have amazing tools and also turbo charges highly talented people (note aforementioned Meta CFO Susan Li’s comments on power users delivering more than regular users ) finding and retaining the best talent wherever they can be found will be key.
Companies will access talent anywhere and not limit their search to geography . The current backward lurch to fixed locations and five-days-a-week work (though most companies already behind the scene excuse most of their top talent from this) will be seen as a failure of leadership to reimagine and as a guise to eliminate workers without severance versus a winning future strategy.
C) Most organizations will be smaller and far more agile and distributed: With AI enhancing productivity and hundreds of millions of people all over the world accessing AI tools on their mobile devices companies are likely to be less scaled, more distributed and as a result far more profitable. In addition because of agentic and fractionalized talent, most of the employees of a company will be outside of the company’s locations or be virtual only.
Implications for Companies and Talent.
While smart leaders are now starting to plan around these new themes, so are talent.
It is not just people who are coming out of school who experience challenges in finding jobs, but many mid-level and senior leaders are struggling to stay relevant and resilient.
A mindset that every person should adopt is thinking of themselves as a company of one and to actively begin career architecting. (These are the two most popular and possibly useful pieces of career advice you might read or pass on to your kids.).
This mindset is not that people will work for themselves, but that we all need to ensure we are honing our capabilities so that we can get hired or retain our jobs for ourselves and our skills. It will also be important to be known for collaboration and generosity so that we can maximize our options and build reputations and networks long before we are forced to need them.
A question all of us should ask ourselves as we manage our careers and our companies:
Why are we not rethinking every aspect of our work and career when it is highly likely that before the end of this decade: a) we will pursue and be paid for project-based work versus full-time jobs; b) organizations we work with or for will be completely re-architected; c) many existing leaders will fail to reinvent and unfortunately disappear into irrelevance while a new type of forever-iterating leader will rise and; d) much of our existing knowledge and experience will matter very little.
In tectonic times those who move early to reinvent are the ones who will thrive.
To access resources, cases and hear extra-ordinary pioneers (CEO’s, Talent Leaders, Technologists, Architects, and more ) as they reinvent work check out the Rethinking Work Platform and the Rethinking Work Show which are FREE or get the book in hardcover for only $10 at Amazon
