One need only observe one's own company's changing policies and those of one's peers to see that corporations today are recognizing that the majority of tasks once handled by full-time staff can now be outsourced to consultants, freelancers, interim managers, and smaller companies at greatly reduced costs. Production barriers are plowed under as corporations realize that the ability to retain a flexible workforce offers them both greatly reduced cycle time and increased cost control. Legal work, accounting, copy-writing, market research, sales, product design, and even project management itself can be purchased on an as-needed basis, leaving corporations to require only a skeletal core of full-time employees to supervise the increasingly limited sphere of activities that can be accomplished inside the house.
Corporations increasingly refuse to commit to anything on a long-term basis in order to increase the speed of "retooling" on every organizational level and not, as in decades past, simply in their factories. They will lease rather than buy, or, at the very least, make sure that what they're buying is modular. The big difference today is that this new philosophy applies as much to the executives a corporation retains as it does to the equipment in use on its factory floors.
All Jobs Are Portable
Even though "flexibility" is the watchword of the 1990s in all aspects of business, it is still hard for both corporations and individuals to accept the idea that all jobs are temporary in nature. A job may last two months or two years, but what is important is that it will only last as long as there is a need to be fulfilled. The elimination of long-term job security has not only made every executive portable, but most work is now portable as well. For example, a newly formed drug company recently engaged an executive on an interim basis to negotiate licensing agreements with major pharmaceutical firms. The process took nine months, and once the agreements were signed, the job disappeared and so did the executive.
Numerous executives have come to the moment of truth that Mike Robertson reached as he sat on the steps outside the library- that any job within an organization might only last for a couple of years given that, as real-estate executive Richard Scott and many other executives like him have put it, "corporate loyalty today exists, but only as long as it's convenient for the company."
Adopting a portable-executive lifestyle today, as Stuart Litt pointed out earlier, no longer carries any more risk than trying to return to another large organization. "Many are fearful of change," says Ken Heimberg of AT&T's Resource Link, an innovative, in-house cadre of portable executives who move from business unit to business unit as the need arises, "but contract work is the wave of the future. And for those people who are interested in change and in excitement, it can afford a person the opportunity to experience a lot of different things in life."
Many, like Heimberg, who himself was initially fearful of the changes involved in becoming a contract worker, have come to the recognition that the valuable executives of today are not those sitting in what's left of our largely decimated organizational middle-management ranks, but those who recognize the ever-increasing demand for a flexible workforce and are prepared to bring their portable skills to any task within an organization, get the job done, and move on.
While it is clear today that the movement toward flexible workforces is gaining rapid momentum, there are still some elements of adjusting to it that will be with us for a while to come. Though they've long since recognized the cost benefits of portable executives, most organizations are still struggling with the issues raised by utilizing talent available on a portable basis and the need to maintain continuity and culture within the organization to achieve its goals and missions. New policies, procedures, and approaches to work will need to be clearly defined as we move into an era in which, as William Davidson, a professor of management at the University of Southern California, puts it, "we'll have extraordinarily sophisticated employer-worker relationships, so that almost everyone will be a contract worker."
A New Definition of Career
Where continuity of employment once meant remaining with one corporation for the majority of one's career-if not for life- continuity in the newly emerging employment paradigm will be dependent on portable executives' growth both in the ability to increase the value of their core skills and in the ability to effectively market them within and outside of large organizations. As executives increasingly take responsibility and credit for the core skills they bring to each new assignment, they will accordingly assess for themselves which assignments will bring them the optimal combination of job satisfaction, personal challenge, and opportunities for growth. Thus, portable executives' career paths will be guided by a self-directed and passionate drive to maximize their unique potential and establish their particular skills as the source of job continuity.
In terms of intellectual stimulation and career satisfaction. In a recent article quoting employees who had taken IBM's Individual Transition Option- IBM's version of the golden handshake-Dallas-based sales representative Tomima Edmark remarked, "It was depressing at IBM, so it actually felt great leaving. I had always wanted to fulfill my entrepreneurial urges." Indeed, given the rewards and excitement of being appropriately challenged, a "lifetime employment commitment" begins to pale in comparison. Whether the choice to become a portable executive is forced upon an individual through no-fault termination or is the result of an individual's own restlessness to accomplish more in the world than any one alliance with an organization can support, increased job satisfaction and greater freedom to achieve one's potential are but two of the many benefits that newly portable executives are realizing. "When I left, I didn't look back for a nanosecond," says a nineteen-year veteran of IBM, Darrell Balmer. "I felt that I had never spread my wings and tried to fly."
While the hierarchical system of organizational management with its implied lifetime employment contracts was logical and appropriate for its time, it's quite possible that the rewards of such a system were steadily losing their attraction for self-directed employees. The United States was, after all, built on the bedrock of entrepreneurial vision, and for many executives, both within and outside of the organization, the reinfusion of entrepreneurial spirit in the United States economy through a flexible, portable executive workforce couldn't come a moment too soon. For the individual executive in the 1990s who is capable of adopting a "portable" mind-set to match the spiraling market demand for his or her talents, the stage is set and waiting. One cannot, however, make the transition to being portable without willingly undergoing deep changes in both one's attitude and approach to work.
