Book review: 'The Future Arrived Yesterday'

June 30, 4:59 PMDallas Business Commentary ExaminerRobert Morris

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The Future Arrived Yesterday: The Rise pf the Protean Corporation and What It Means to You
Michael Malone
Crown Business (2009)

Malone’s focuses on what he describes as the “Protean Corporation,” explaining how and why it is “a new business model for a new world.” What are its dominant characteristics? Here is a composite of brief excerpts: It “will be a very dynamic place. Companies will complete the move from hierarchies and toward a model of highly interconnected craft guilds. With a workforce scattered around the planet, linked virtually, the last obstacles to inclusiveness will also fall, meaning virtual job shops, temporary help hired off the Web, more permanent part-time workers, and the hiring (in unusual new relationships) of the retired, the young, and the unlikely (illiterates, for example)…Protean Corporations will appear to be risk-takers with constant shifts and turns [when adapting to changing conditions], but they will, in fact, be risk-aversive, changing their form and direction to minimize risk. Being extremely stable at heart, Protean Corporations will also likely be more politically active (in support of their attitudes and values), an easier target for unions (if a new form of organized labor arises to meet their unique needs), and extremely innovative with regard to employee benefits, pay structures, services, and motivational tools.”

Malone concludes his brilliant book with an eminently sensible reminder: “But even as you build your Core and fill it with Core Employees, it is absolutely vital to circumscribe their powers. They are, in the end, people of the past, not the future, they represent stasis, not change. It is the rest of us who represent the future, who embody that change. And by giving those few others the task of preserving what is defining and enduring, they in turn free the rest of us to pursue out ever-changing, ever-shifting dreams. The Protean Society belongs to protean imaginations.”