The Human Cloud How Todays Changemakers Use Artificial Intelligence And The Freelance Economy To Transform Work

Empower yourself with the knowledge to keep up with the rapidly changing technical world of work, as two workforce productivity and technology experts lay out a clear picture of the?coming?revolution?in how work is done and how jobs are shaped. If you listen to the news, robots are coming for your job. Full-time employment will soon be a thing of the past as organizations opt more to hire employees on a contract basis.?With technological advances across email, video, project management, and instant messaging platforms, being tied to a desk working full time for one company is becoming obsolete. So, where does that leave you? The Human Cloud may be the most important book you read to prepare for how work is done in the future. In these pages, human cloud technologist Matthew Mottola and AI expert Matthew Coatney help you not only clearly understand the transition you see happening around you, but they will also help you take advantage of it. In The Human Cloud, Mottola and Coatney inform you about topics including: How employees and employers will be able to take advantage of the new automated and freelance-based workplace. How they will be able to take advantage of the new technology disruptions the machine cloud will create. Why the changes employees and employers are seeing aren’t the projection of doom that many are predicting. How to navigate the coming job marketplace. By replacing fear with knowledge, you will better understand how this shift in employment is a good thing, be equipped to embrace the positive?advantages new technology brings, and further secure how your own job is shaped so you are never left behind.

With the technical world of work changing rapidly, don't leave anything to chance. In The Human Cloud, two workforce productivity and technology experts lay out a clear picture of the coming revolution in how work is done and how jobs are shaped, empowering you with practical advice to take charge of your future. If you listen to the news, robots are coming for your job. Full-time employment will soon be a thing of the past as organizations opt more and more to hire employees on a contract basis. And thanks to technological advances across email, video, project management, and instant messaging platforms, being tied to a desk working full time for one company is becoming obsolete. These predictions have many of us asking, "Where does that leave me?" The Human Cloud just may be the most important book you read to prepare for the future of the way work is done. In these pages, a human cloud technologist and an AI expert help you not only clearly understand the transition you see happening around you, but they will also help you take advantage of it. By replacing fear with knowledge, you will better understand how this shift in employment is a good thing, be equipped to embrace the positive advantages new technology brings and use it all to your benefit, and further secure how your own job is shaped so you are never left behind. Topics unpacked in The Human Cloud include: How employees and employers will be able to take advantage of the new automated and freelance-based workplace. How they will be able to take advantage of the new technology disruptions the machine cloud will create. Why the changes employees and employers are seeing aren't the projection of doom that many are predicting; they can actually create many new career opportunities. How to navigate the coming job marketplace.

Organizations, managers and workers still have an Industrial Era mindset towards work. How can leaders guide individuals and organizations to solve the increasingly complex work challenges of tomorrow? As traditional jobs give way to new work roles and software and robots perform the repetitive tasks formerly done by humans, the work of today is no longer guaranteed to be here tomorrow. The Next Rules of Work helps leaders understand why traditional notions about work inhibit the organization's ability to address new problems and how they can successfully equip their organizations to manage constant change. By first developing a new mindset to help themselves and their teams become more agile, leaders can then co-create the organization's "next mindset" by answering five key questions that help them establish constantly adaptive strategies. Finally, leaders develop agile learning practices to ensure that workers will continually have the skillsets and toolsets they need to solve organizational problems today. By redefining the fundamental nature of work, teams and the organization, The Next Rules of Work goes beyond offering advice and predictions and provides organizational leaders with a guide to create truly agile organizations that can respond to perpetual change.

WINNER OF THE BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2022! Stay one step ahead of the competition with this expert review of the most impactful and disruptive business trends coming down the pike Far from slowing down, change and transformation in business seems to come only at a more and more furious rate. The last ten years alone have seen the introduction of groundbreaking new trends that pose new opportunities and challenges for leaders in all industries. In Business Trends in Practice: The 25+ Trends That Are Redefining Organizations, best-selling business author and strategist Bernard Marr breaks down the social and technological forces underlying these rapidly advancing changes and the impact of those changes on key industries. Critical consumer trends just emerging today—or poised to emerge tomorrow—are discussed, as are strategies for rethinking your organisation’s product and service delivery. The book also explores: Crucial business operations trends that are changing the way companies conduct themselves in the 21st century The practical insights and takeaways you can glean from technological and social innovation when you cut through the hype Disruptive new technologies, including AI, robotic and business process automation, remote work, as well as social and environmental sustainability trends Business Trends in Practice: The 25+ Trends That Are Redefining Organizations is a must-read resource for executives, business leaders and managers, and business development and innovation leads trying to get – and stay – on top of changes and disruptions that are right around the corner.

In the new world of hybrid work and AI, one thing is clear: the war for talent is over—and talent won. With sparsely populated offices and people working from wherever they are, and with AI emerging everywhere in business and dominating headlines, our work lives have undergone a remarkable transformation, seemingly overnight. But the reality is that for years the ever-growing digital wave has been breaking down organizational boundaries and increasing the adoption of open innovation, including the use of crowdsourcing platforms as a talent solution. Now the imperative is clear: adapt to and leverage this new, digitally enabled world of "open talent"—or get left behind. In this eye-opening, essential guidebook, John Winsor and Jin Paik, with their work at the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard, show how the massive reset of the pandemic allowed talented workers everywhere to exit their jobs without leaving the workforce. Now many are freelancing for multiple companies or are starting small businesses, challenging hiring managers as never before amidst a transformed workforce. What's more, talent has more power than ever using platforms such as Freelancer.com, Fiverr, and Upwork, setting their own terms for work: what, where, when, and at what price. How can companies adapt? The key, the authors argue, is shifting to a more distributed idea and structure of collaborative work. The authors call this a networked organization, where talent is culled from both inside and outside the organization and viewed through a single lens—as a global ecosystem that can be tapped as needed. With rich stories, keen insights, and an abundance of practical advice, Winsor and Paik provide a new framework and operating model for transforming your organization into a talent-orchestrating, problem-solving machine.

Technology advances are making tech more . . . human. This changes everything you thought you knew about innovation and strategy. In their groundbreaking book, Human + Machine, Accenture technology leaders Paul R. Daugherty and H. James Wilson showed how leading organizations use the power of human-machine collaboration to transform their processes and their bottom lines. Now, as new AI powered technologies like the metaverse, natural language processing, and digital twins begin to rapidly impact both life and work, those companies and other pioneers across industries are tipping the balance even more strikingly toward the human side with technology-led strategy that is reshaping the very nature of innovation. In Radically Human, Daugherty and Wilson show this profound shift, fast-forwarded by the pandemic, toward more human—and more humane—technology. Artificial intelligence is becoming less artificial and more intelligent. Instead of data-hungry approaches to AI, innovators are pursuing data-efficient approaches that enable machines to learn as humans do. Instead of replacing workers with machines, they're unleashing human expertise to create human-centered AI. In place of lumbering legacy IT systems, they're building cloud-first IT architectures able to continuously adapt to a world of billions of connected devices. And they're pursuing strategies that will take their place alongside classic, winning business formulas like disruptive innovation. These against-the-grain approaches to the basic building blocks of business—Intelligence, Data, Expertise, Architecture, and Strategy (IDEAS)—are transforming competition. Industrial giants and startups alike are drawing on this radically human IDEAS framework to create new business models, optimize post-pandemic approaches to work and talent, rebuild trust with their stakeholders, and show the way toward a sustainable future. With compelling insights and fresh examples from a variety of industries, Radically Human will forever change the way you think about, practice, and win with innovation.

From technologist and strategist Brian Evergreen, a bold new agenda for the role of organizational leaders in creating a more human future with technology Social good initiatives are incompatible with the current network of systems that make up and support the private and public sectors. Millions of dollars have been invested in bringing leaders together from organizations around the world to design solutions for global challenges such as the climate crisis, child labor, racism, war, and many more. Despite executive buy-in, alignment of core capabilities and resources, passionate leadership, and well-designed strategies, these initiatives inevitably fail (with a few, notable exceptions). The dawn of the Internet ignited a global redesign and rebuild of the interlocking systems that make up and support the private and public sectors today. The era of Digital Transformation extended this further through the adoption of cloud technologies and distributed computing. With a recent wave of technological advancements, organizations have arrived at another global redesign and rebuilding of the network of systems that make up society: Autonomous Transformation, revealing an opportunity for leaders to create Profitable Good through systemic design in combination with emerging autonomous technologies and surprising and remarkable partnerships. Autonomous Transformation provides a blueprint for leaders and managers who have aspired or attempted to harness artificial intelligence and its adjacent technologies for the betterment of their organization and the world, weaving strategy, business, economics, systemic design, and philosophy into four actionable steps with accompanying frameworks: Clear the Digital Fog See the Systems Choose a Problem Future Design Inevitability

An argument in favor of finding a place for humans (and humanness) in the future digital economy. In the digital economy, accountants, baristas, and cashiers can be automated out of employment; so can surgeons, airline pilots, and cab drivers. Machines will be able to do these jobs more efficiently, accurately, and inexpensively. But, Nicholas Agar warns in this provocative book, these developments could result in a radically disempowered humanity. The digital revolution has brought us new gadgets and new things to do with them. The digital revolution also brings the digital economy, with machines capable of doing humans' jobs. Agar explains that developments in artificial intelligence enable computers to take over not just routine tasks but also the kind of “mind work” that previously relied on human intellect, and that this threatens human agency. The solution, Agar argues, is a hybrid social-digital economy. The key value of the digital economy is efficiency. The key value of the social economy is humanness. A social economy would be centered on connections between human minds. We should reject some digital automation because machines will always be poor substitutes for humans in roles that involve direct contact with other humans. A machine can count out pills and pour out coffee, but we want our nurses and baristas to have minds like ours. In a hybrid social-digital economy, people do the jobs for which feelings matter and machines take on data-intensive work. But humans will have to insist on their relevance in a digital age.

Looking for ways to handle the transition to a digital economy Robots, artificial intelligence, and driverless cars are no longer things of the distant future. They are with us today and will become increasingly common in coming years, along with virtual reality and digital personal assistants. As these tools advance deeper into everyday use, they raise the question—how will they transform society, the economy, and politics? If companies need fewer workers due to automation and robotics, what happens to those who once held those jobs and don't have the skills for new jobs? And since many social benefits are delivered through jobs, how are people outside the workforce for a lengthy period of time going to earn a living and get health care and social benefits? Looking past today's headlines, political scientist and cultural observer Darrell M. West argues that society needs to rethink the concept of jobs, reconfigure the social contract, move toward a system of lifetime learning, and develop a new kind of politics that can deal with economic dislocations. With the U.S. governance system in shambles because of political polarization and hyper-partisanship, dealing creatively with the transition to a fully digital economy will vex political leaders and complicate the adoption of remedies that could ease the transition pain. It is imperative that we make major adjustments in how we think about work and the social contract in order to prevent society from spiraling out of control. This book presents a number of proposals to help people deal with the transition from an industrial to a digital economy. We must broaden the concept of employment to include volunteering and parenting and pay greater attention to the opportunities for leisure time. New forms of identity will be possible when the "job" no longer defines people's sense of personal meaning, and they engage in a broader range of activities. Workers will need help throughout their lifetimes to acquire new skills and develop new job capabilities. Political reforms will be necessary to reduce polarization and restore civility so there can be open and healthy debate about where responsibility lies for economic well-being. This book is an important contribution to a discussion about tomorrow—one that needs to take place today.

A public policy leader addresses how artificial intelligence is transforming the future of labor—and what we can do to protect the role of workers. As computer technology advances with dizzying speed, human workers face an ever-increasing threat of obsolescence. In Human Work In the Age of Smart Machines, Jamie Merisotis argues that we can—and must—rise to this challenge by preparing to work alongside smart machines doing that which only humans can: thinking critically, reasoning ethically, interacting interpersonally, and serving others with empathy. The president and CEO of Lumina Foundation, Merisotis offers a roadmap for the large-scale, radical changes we must make in order to find abundant and meaningful work for ourselves in the 21st century. His vision centers on developing our unique capabilities as humans through learning opportunities that deliver fair results and offer a broad range of credentials. By challenging long-held assumptions and expanding our concept of work, Merisotis argues that we can harness the population’s potential, encourage a deeper sense of community, and erase a centuries-long system of inequality.