I haven’t heard of the phrase “The Creative Class” but I think I will have to read the book. This BusinessWeek article – The Easiest Commute of All – ties in to the previous post regarding telecommuters. This is fascinating:
Mesa del Sol, designed by New Urbanism guru Peter Calthorpe, will be the first place of its kind built from scratch and targeted at the creative class. A big marketing push will be made to coastal knowledge workers looking to cash out of their million-dollar split levels, move inland, and work remotely for their companies. Mansionettes will carry price tags of up to $400,000, about the same as the average Manhattan studio. They’ll feature home offices sequestered from family foot traffic and fully wired for transnational connections. Business centers strewn throughout the community — all within a short walk or electric-cart ride — will offer rent-by-the-hour support staff plus state-of-the-art meeting rooms and seamless videoconference hookups to China and India.
Apparently the guy behind this community, Albert Ratner, is quite the future-oriented developer of this communities. His comment about the future workforce is prescient:
Ratner believes that the future of work belongs to those who will log their hours when they want, how they want, and, most important, where they want. Companies will hire brains, not bodies.
I think he is absolutely correct. Specialization is already rampant. It seems more than plausible that skill-based workers will sell their services on contract in the future (much like what is already occurring in the IT world).
If you are skeptical about telecommuting, check out some of these facts from the article:
Currently, about 12% of the U.S. workforce qualifies as distributed, estimates Charles Grantham and James Ware, executive producers of Work Design Collaborative LLC in Prescott, Ariz. But in urban areas, they figure the number is closer to 15%. “Anytime 15% of any population is doing new behavior, you know it’s going to take off,” says Grantham, who predicts that 40% of the workforce will be distributed by 2012. “We’re at a tipping point.”
Many technology companies are already there. At IBM, 40% of the workforce has no office at the company; at AT&T, a third of managers are now post-geographic.
At Sun Microsystems Inc., nearly 50% of employees can work from home, cafes, drop-in centers, a company office, or some combination thereof…
Today, 70% of Agilent’s workforce is connected remotely either some or all of the time. The company estimates that these virtual workers cost 60% less.
I could keep going but you get the picture. This is more than passing fancy, telecommuting, or distributed workforces, are the rising trend of the near future.
Please read the entire article – it is well worth the time.