Lead the Work

“The new world of work has new ways of working. Boudreau, Jesuthasan, and Creelman brilliantly capture the increasingly granular and customized work world where more employees will be free agents. This forward-thinking book offers creative and relevant insights for managing employees as agents. It has implications for leaders, human resources, rewards, and employees.”

– Dave Ulrich, Rensis Likert Professor of Business, University of Michigan, and Partner, The RBL Group

“Anyone leading an organization through the rapidly changing and challenging landscape of today's workplace will find Lead the Work tremendously valuable. Boudreau, Jesuthasan, and Creelman expertly chronicle how work has evolved into multiple methods of employment, focused less on managing employees and more on providing work-based leadership. They give concrete advice on how organizations can thrive in this environment. The concept of ‘beyond employment’ will soon be commonplace to business leaders.”

– Henry G. Jackson, President and Chief Executive Officer, Society for Human Resource Management

“Lead the Work invites business leaders to free their minds from the shackles of traditional regular full-time employment. The book provides a framework that enables us to embrace examples like Elance-oDesk, Tongal, and Khazanah not as anomalies but as potential solutions to getting the work done and sourcing the best talent. Lead the Work pushes the boundaries of flexibility in work arrangements to a future where we not only just build or buy talent but also borrow and share talent.”

– Johan Mahmood Merican, Chief Executive Officer, TalentCorp

“How leaders and organizations assemble the right teams of talent today is rapidly evolving to utilize teams of much more than just permanent employees, temporary help, and outsourcers. I have seen this to be true across the globe…a globe that has fewer and fewer borders when it comes to customers and talent. The focus on the ‘workers,’ the ‘client,’ and the ‘work’ in Lead the Work brings all the pieces together of how organizations need to deliver value to their customers, both today and tomorrow. Innovation of how to find and utilize talent is going to be a differentiator, both in professional services organizations and beyond. Lead the Work does an excellent job of describing what the trends are, brings them to life by showcasing real examples that expand your thinking, and helps to alleviate any fears about this new talent marketplace.”

– Jill Smart, President, National Academy of Human Resources, and retired Chief Human Resources Officer, Accenture

“The world of work is changing fast – creating more complexity and breeding disengagement. Boudreau, Jesuthasan, and Creelman take a comprehensive look at the changes happening outside our companies that are affecting how we get work done together inside our companies. After exploring the diverse ways in which we now connect people with the work we need done, they offer us a convincing framework for designing our enterprises, organizing work, and constructing deals to offer workers. Fortunately, this framework clearly shows leaders the few critical levers to pull to create new work arrangements that deliver on the value agenda. Wisely, the authors also engage with tough questions about the impact this new framework will have on society and the roles of leaders, HR departments, and government. Lead the Work enlightens us all – as leaders, workers, and citizens – about how we can still accomplish great things together in the midst of this turbulence.”

– Sandy Ogg, Operating Partner, Private Equity Group, Blackstone

“Lead the Work explores a seismic shift in the very concept of work. For anyone looking for a fresh way to think about competing, innovating and leading, Lead the Work will stimulate your creativity and give you new ideas on how to tap into an emerging “free agent world.” This new virtual workplace being built by a diverse, multi generation workforce hinges on individuals leveraging their skills to build portfolios of work that seamlessly integrate into the lives they want to lead.

The new book by Boudreau, Jesuthasan and Creelman makes an intriguing argument that traditional employment approaches are migrating to innovative and agile ways of tapping into new talent pools. The authors paint a compelling picture of workplace innovations that challenge convention to compete in an open, global and virtual talent marketplace. The challenge lies in how to lead in this new world.

The best managers in this new paradigm bring together flexible teams and distribute work to those best skilled to deliver, more quickly and cost effectively than traditional approaches. Convening and motivating a network of “followers” who you may never physically meet, requires new ways of leading, orchestrating and collaborating, along with new rules of engagement.

Lead the Work is a fresh, insightful way to think about work, how it is done and who does it. It challenges us to make potentially radical shifts in the way we need to lead and compete. The authors deliver a wake-up call with numerous real world business examples that make the case this is not a temporary trend, but rather a pivotal inflection point. The highest impact insight is that the basic concepts of work, employee and leader must be reinvented in a world where individuals seek to be the “CEO of me.”