It's Not About Jobs

Forbes

20-05-2025

The ground beneath the world of work is shifting. As Rishad Tobaccowala insightfully argues in his latest piece, The Decline of Jobs. The Rise of Work, we are witnessing a profound transformation, not just in how people earn a living but also in how organizations create value. This is not a temporary blip on the post-pandemic radar. It's a structural reordering of the way we think about work, productivity, and ultimately, business resilience.
Let's be clear: jobs are a relic of the industrial age. They were never really designed to serve people. They were designed to serve factories. Jobs emerged in an era when the cost of coordination was high and the tools for distributing tasks were limited. So we bundled up a series of vaguely defined responsibilities, gave it a title, slapped on a salary, and called it a job.
But jobs aren't the work. And increasingly, they're standing in the way of it.
In the analog era, organizations put the burden of translating goals into outcomes on managers and employees. Now, thanks to the rise of generative AI and other enabling technologies, we can flip that model. We can define the outcomes first, then break down the work into discrete, task-level units, matching each task with the best available human or synthetic skill.
This taskification of work is not just a trend. It's an imperative. It allows organizations to evolve from a system optimized for headcount to one optimized for value creation. That means moving more fixed costs to variable ones. It means decoupling salaries from outcomes and deploying labor, whether full-time, freelance, or AI, in ways that are agile, efficient, and scalable.
Put simply, in the new world of work, organizations need stronger balance sheets, and the only way to get there is by transforming how they structure labor.
Let's borrow a page from the Open Talent playbook. Over the last decade, we've seen how companies that embrace open ecosystems, leveraging freelancers, crowdsourcing, and talent platforms, are more adaptive, more innovative, and more resilient. Why? Because they've traded the rigidity of headcount for the flexibility of outcome-based work.
This isn't about replacing people with AI. It's about making people more human by freeing them from the constraints of traditional job descriptions. It's about unleashing their creativity, their purpose, and their potential in service of clearly defined goals. AI doesn't eliminate the need for humans; it clarifies it.
The challenge and opportunity for leaders today is to build a new kind of organizational architecture: one that is modular, fluid, and outcome-driven. It's time to stop organizing around jobs and start organizing around work.
This transformation isn't just technical. It's deeply human. As I wrote in Open Talent and have continued to explore through my work with Harvard and Open Assembly, the future of work demands a new leadership mindset. One that is more emotionally intelligent, more adaptive, and more open.
If the old way was about control and compliance, the new way is about trust and transparency. It's about giving people the autonomy to plug into work when they are most capable and inspired. And it's about building cultures where human ingenuity is amplified by intelligent systems, not stifled by legacy structures.
For CEOs navigating this inflection point, the message is clear: it's time to rewire your organizations for resilience, not routine. That means moving beyond legacy job structures and investing in a modular, outcome-driven architecture that flexes with change. Build platforms that let people do their best work, whether human, freelance, or AI-powered, and design cultures where creativity, autonomy, and purpose are front and center. The winners won't be those with the biggest headcount, but those with the clearest outcomes and the most innovative systems to deliver them.