Reinventing Jobs

In the face of dramatic advances in technology and automation, companies are faced with an increasing number of choices on how best to execute the work of the organisation. Typically, the decisions to use technology are driven by the need to do "something" strategic (cut costs, improve quality, increase customer value, etc). Those decisions are made after considering broad factors such as market forces, operational processes/constraints, financial forecasts, customer inputs, etc. Now, leaders must execute that strategy. They face new dilemmas. Execution requires deciding which work and workers will be replaced or changed, and what types of automation are best. The available tools are often too generic, like "jobs", "competencies", "robots", "AI", "big data", "IoT", etc. If you do a quick web search, you can easily find predictions such as the January 2017 Fast Company article listing "the 10 jobs that will be replaced by robots", including bank tellers, journalists and movie stars. What leaders need is a