Tom Peters - The Project 50 (Reinventing Work): Fifty Ways to Transform Every Task into a Project That Matters!

The White Collar Revolution is here. (Finally.) The White Collar Revolution will embraceready or not!90+ percent of workers in the next 10 or so years.

Its elementary, my dear Watson. Most white collar jobsas we know themwill disappear as we get the ERP/Enterprise Resource Planningetc.stuff right. You read that correctly, colleagues: 90+ percent. Gone. As in: Sayonara. White collar world circa 2004 is going to make re-engineering circa 1994 look like very small change indeed.

Ive wrestled with this issue for years. Hunting for an answer to the question: How do todays white collar workersyou and me!transform ourselves, much as yesterdays factory workers and longshoremen did?

There is a class of organization which has long turned white collar work into something scintillating and damn profitable. Namely, the professional service firm or PSF, as I call it. Lawyers. Architects. Graphic designers. Industrial designers. Engineering service firms. Management consultancies. Accountancies. Ad agencies. Once at the peripheryand seen, frankly, as parasites of the manufacturing-based economythese outfits are now front and center and role definers in the so-called knowledge economy.

(Funny thing: We know so little about these firms. About how and why they work. We havent studied them. I can only guess thats because we didnt take them seriously. We really did see them as parasitic.)

Some are huge an Andersen (as in Arthur Andersen and Andersen Consulting) or EDS. They book billions upon billions of dollars a year in revenue. And can employ upwards of 100,000 people. Then there are the one-person professional service firmsthe local accountant, say, working from his spare bedroom. But theyre all dedicated to the same thing: providing services and making money by leveraging knowledge. Period.

My (inexorable?) conclusion? Those who surviveon or off the corporate payrollwill assume the attributes of real professional service firm members. And they will behaveagain, regardless of their current official statusas independent contractors.

Which leads me naturally and inevitably and finally to The Work Itself. Namely, to p-r-o-j-e-c-t-s.

The professional service firmwhether it has 2 or 22,222 employeeshas an invariant common denominator: the project. Projectswith beginnings and ends and clients and deliverablesare what professional service firms do. Period. Join one, and youll find yourself on a project team by noon of your first day at work. (That was my experience at McKinsey & Co. in December 1974. I arrived at work at 9:00 a.m. By 10 a.m. I was on a project team evaluating a quarter-billion-dollar agrochemical facility. By 1:00 p.m. I was flying to Clinton, Iowa, to visit the Client.) And youll be on a project team until an hour before you turn in your front-door key and leave for good. (Again, thats the way it went for me at McKinsey in December of 1981. In fact, even after I left I did some contract work on my final project.)