Redesigning Work: How to Transform Your Organization and Make Hybrid Work for Everyone (Management on the Cutting Edge)
Lynda Gratton
The MIT Press (2023)

Transforming work in terms of WHAT, WHO, HOW, and WHERE

In Future Shock (1970), Alvin Toffler makes this prediction: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

I know of no other person who is better qualified than Lynda Gratton is to help leaders in almost any organization — no matter what its size and nature may be — to create a workplace culture within which the literacy to which Toffler refers is most likely to thrive. There are situations when the work to be done must be redesigned to accommodate those who must do it. However, given the frequency and speed of change — in a business world that is more volatile, more uncertain, more complex, and more ambiguous than at any prior time that I can recall — workers must be both willing and able to  “learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

Consider these observations, shared in her Introduction:

“We are experiencing what is undoubtedly the greatest global shift in work for a century. It’s come at a time when much was already transforming: automation was reshaping industries and changing our jobs; we were coming to terms with living longer than our parents and potentially working into our seventies; and many people were experiencing at first hand how traditional family and community structures had become more diverse. Our needs and what we wanted from  work and from companies had already dramatically shifted.” Quite true.

Gratton recommends a four-step process for redesigning work and devotes a separate chapter to each:

Step 1:  UNDERSTAND what matters
Step 2: REIMAGINE the future
Step 3: MODEL and TEST ideas
Step 4: ACT on your model and CREATE new ways of woring

Gratton thoroughly explains HOW to complete each of the four separate but interdependent steps.

As I worked my way through her lively as well as eloquent narrative, I was again reminded of several insights that are uniquely appropriate to the four-step process. Here are a few:

o Thomas Edison: “Vision without execution is hallucination.”
o Charles Kettering: “If you’ve always done it that way, it’s probably wrong.”
o Peter Drucker: “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”
o Benjamin Graham: “Price is what uou charge. Vaklue is what buyers think it’s worth.”
o Steven Wright: “The early bird may get the worm but the second mouse gets the cheese.”

If your workforce needs to embrace change and increase productivity,your senior management team must accelerate workers’ personal growth and professional development. HOW? Read Lynda Gratton’s book.

Here are two concluding suggestions: Highlight key passages, and, keep a lined notebook near at hand while reading Redesigning Work in which you record your comments, questions, action steps (preferably with deadlines), page references as well as your responses to the questions posed and to lessons you have learned. (Pay close attention to the “Action” exercises at the end of chapters.) These two simple tactics will facilitate, indeed expedite frequent reviews of key material later.