New Staff You'll Hire Are:

• Turned on by their work!

• Feel the work matters!

• Feel work is cool!

• Feel "in your face"!

• Adventurers.

• The CEO's of their lives.

• Not God. They are just determined to make a difference! (Dilbert would be appalled, no doubt.)

• Of course, they embrace and exploit the Web.

• They submit their resume on the Web and keep it perpetually active there.

• Recruited and negotiated with and hired on the Web.

• Trained on the Web.

• They create and conduct scintillating projects on the Web via a far-flung "virtual" stable of teammates (most of whom they've never met).

• They manage their careers and build reputations on the Web. And they have fab personal websites!

But what--exactly?--will they actually do?

Circa 2010. They will be at home. Working--for the next several months--for Ford on a fiendishly difficult engineering problem. They won't be on Ford's payroll, though they will be drawing full benefits, even as a contractor. (During President Hillary Rodham's second term, health care, pensions and retraining will no longer be tied to a company but to the individual.) Their 79-member project team, only one of whom they've met face-to-face (they consider face-to-face a quaint idea that their parents suffered), comes from 14 nations. Their fully wired home is their castle. After half a dozen virtual meetings this morning, they take a so-called RETRB (ReTRaining Break) and attend a virtual class in engineering (conducted from God knows where) as part of their virtual-online master's degree program.

They are deeply committed to their self-designed, do-it-from-anywhere-with-anybody "career" path. They are relieved, by the white-collar robots, of 95
% of the drudge work ... and are adding value by being on the tippy top of their intellectual game. Their only security is their personal commitment to constant growth and their global (virtual) rep for great work.

Adapted from Tom Peters' article in May 22, 2000, Time Magazine.

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