BL
The end of the job
Bruce Lloyd interviews
William Bridges
The authors
Bruce Lloyd (Head of Strategic and International
Management, South Bank University, London), in
discussion with William Bridges, author of Jobshift: How
to Prosper in a Workplace without Jobs.
Abstract
Presents the transcript of an interview with William
Bridges, author of Jobshift: How to Prosper in a Workplace
without Jobs. Argues that the whole, traditional concept of
the job is now becoming a historical artefact. As well as
discussing challenges for the future, touches upon bench-
marking and re-engineering, leadership and strategy, and
the high priority for learning. The transcript is followed by
a review of the book.
The International Journal of Career Management
Volume 7 · Number 2 · 1995 · pp. 29–33
© MCB University Press · ISSN 0955-6214
29
What do you consider to be the core mes-
sage of your new book Jobshift?
WB
Essentially it is that the whole, traditional,
concept of the Job is now rapidly becoming a
historical artefact. It was a product of the first
industrial revolution; jobs as we know them
did not exist until there were factories and
offices. The Job was designed to do the work
of the factory and the office; where the activity
could be subdivided, where neither products
nor policies changed very often or very quick-
ly. It worked best in high volume, mass pro-
duction situations where people were required
to undertake simple tasks that were repeated
again and again. Those jobs met the needs of
the industrial revolution very well. But now,
jumping ahead 175 years, the communica-
tion/information age does not require every-
one to be at the same place at the same time,
because much of the added value of work is
being increasingly done on information,
rather than through physical effort on a pro-
duction line. The production line and other
relatively unchanging activities can be, and
are being, automated. The Job, surrounded
by its job description, is no longer a good way
to get work done today. As a result a number
of other developments appear on the scene:
temporary work, outsourcing, re-engineering
and empowerment programmes. All these
trends, in my view, represent a single underly-
ing development, which reflects a fundamen-
tal change in what we mean by work, how it is
organized and undertaken.
BL
You consider that we are moving into a
radical new situation, rather than finding the
old organizational life-cycle patterns being
repeated in a new context?
WB
Yes, that’s right. Much of the conversation
in the press, and elsewhere, has assumed that
all that was happening was that the old cycles
were repeating themselves; then, as soon as we
were out of the recession, all the old jobs
would return.
BL
But what is it that is really different this
time?
WB
The thing that is different this time is that,
with the help of information technology, there
is a wide range of new ways to get traditional
 The end of the job
Bruce Lloyd interviews William Bridges
work done and new work can use completely
new structures.
BL
Some people would argue that information
technology is having a similar impact on
white-collar workers to that which
mechanization has already had on the blue-
collar workers/industry.
WB
There is a lot of truth to that. Those people
who argue that there is nothing really new in
these changes, that we’ve been doing away
with jobs and labour by replacing them with
machines for years and years, have a good
point. One key difference is that the old
process changes tended to concentrate work
into one place – a factory, even an office. But
information-related activities, which are now
being increasingly automated, can be done
almost anywhere, and almost at any time.
That comment applies to virtually all the new
added value activities that we now call jobs.
Challenges for the future
BL
What do you see as the key developments
and challenges for the future?
WB
The first challenge is for the individual who
has been, and still is, pretty comfortable with
the idea of being an employee. And the chal-
lenge here is how can you learn to take the
skills and experience that you have, and turn
them into something that the marketplace
needs, as an independent business person, or
professional, without the support of what we
have traditionally called a Job? Essentially that
means being paid for the work you do, rather
than because you are on the payroll of some
organization. The second challenge is for the
organization; if many people are providing
work from this “outsourcing”, how is the
organization itself going to manage these
people and the overall process? This requires
the organization to rethink a wide range of its
activities from the very practical, like health
and safety insurance cover, to the broader
questions of strategy. All these questions
produce major challenges for the remaining
managers who have the responsibility for the
organization’s future. The third challenge is
for society as a whole. Society has found the
Job a very convenient vehicle for certain social
support services and many financial transac-
tions between the individual and the state,
30
The International Journal of Career Management
Volume 7 · Number 2 · 1995 · 29–33
including a large number of taxes and ben-
efits. What happens if people no longer have
jobs in the traditional sense? The Government
has to start dealing directly with many more
individuals over these issues.
BL
One pressure that is causing this process to
impact on an increasing number of white-
collar workers is the need to measure the
value added of the activities of those workers.
This has been done extensively for decades on
the factory floor, but it is only just starting to
be done with the same rigour in the office and
the white-collar industries.
WB
That’s right. Another way of putting that is
an administrative culture has built up, which
is primarly concerned with the administration
of the rules. That administrative mentality is
the classical status quo mentality. What hap-
pens if that world has to change rapidly, as is
the case today? That administrative mentality
is not adequate; it is going to have to become
efficient, to provide good service and above all
be willing and able to change.
BL
For many managers, and white-collar
workers, that requires them to switch from a
rule-bound, status quo environment to a
managing change culture. How can manage-
ment respond to this challenge? Or will the
new patterns, after a short time, also produce
their own new administrative rule-bound,
status quo pressures?
WB
I am not willing to wait until we see if these
new patterns actually emerge in that way,
because we can easily rip ourselves apart on
the journey, if we do not take action now. The
challenge is to find some measures, or bench-
marks, for what we are now doing, so that we
know whether or not we are doing better or
worse, both over time and between our and
other similar organizations. This is the sort of
question that the administrative culture does
not ask itself. One interesting technique that
is being increasingly used in the USA in this
context is activity-based costing (ABC),
which allows everyone to assess more effec-
tively what individuals and groups do.
BL
This trend is reflected in the increasing use
of devolved budgets.
WB
So you push profit and loss responsibility
further down?
 The end of the job
Bruce Lloyd interviews William Bridges
BL
Yes. But what organizations need to recog-
nize, and it is too often missing, is that this
trend usually makes people more short-term
in their operating decisions. Hence a key issue
for management is to ensure that somehow
the longer-term strategic issues are not lost in
all this devolution.
Benchmarking and re-engineering
WB
Yes. Devolution across the board rarely
makes sense. Organizations are complex
systems and there are functions that essential-
ly have a service role within the overall organi-
zation. But it is essential that these functions
have appropriate performance measures to
determine their role and size within the
organization. Benchmarking and re-engineer-
ing are two invaluable techniques that can be
used to assist this process of performance
improvement. Benchmarking helps to ensure
that the activities are competitive with those of
other organizations, while re-engineering
makes you ask questions about whether par-
ticular activities should be done at all.
BL
But is there not a paradox here? Bench-
marking tends to be much easier when there is
relatively little change going on, and where
you can have reasonable confidence that you
are comparing like-with-like, while re-engi-
neering invariably is about producing even
more change, and that often makes it harder
to establish reliable benchmarks.
WB
This views the process the wrong way
round. Typically the solution to this dilemma
is to ensure that you benchmark the right
activities in the right way. For example, I work
with a pharmaceutical company in the USA
which benchmarks the time it takes to get a
drug to market and the time it takes to get
formal approval for its use. They found it took
twice as long, compared with their competi-
tors, and that information identified the need
to re-engineer the process. That is how the
two techniques can be usefully integrated and
using them in this way enables one technique
to provide valuable support to the other. It is
critical that benchmarking is applied to the
appropriate factors and, just as in the case of
performance indicators, if they are not right,
the answers can easily make the situation
worse.
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The International Journal of Career Management
Volume 7 · Number 2 · 1995 · 29–33
Leadership and strategy
BL
One of the points I found surprising was
that the index in your book did not mention
either the word leadership or the word strategy.
Where do you put leadership and strategy into
your analysis?
WB
I made a deliberate strategic decision not to
deal specifically with the issues of strategy. My
objective was simply to challenge what I
considered to be the accepted view of the Job.
I wanted this basic point to be accepted and I
deliberately decided not to cover many of the
social issues, as well as avoiding digressions
into questions of strategy and a discussion of
the organizational implications. If I wrote a
sequel to this book, those are the subjects that
would be covered. One of the points I would
make is that strategy has traditionally been
focused on market strategy, but I would argue
that what is needed is a greater focus on
resource strategy. How are we going to get the
work done? We know about the customer and
the product but how are we going to organize
ourselves to exploit that link? Do we use our
own employees? Do we “outsource” and, if
so, what? Do we joint venture? That is a whole
area of strategy that in the past has usually
been a secondary focus, almost coming into
the area of tactics rather than strategy. My
argument is that market strategy is becoming
more the area of tactics, while these human
resources and fundamental organizational
issues are becoming the key strategy decision
areas.
BL
Is this going to make it even more difficult
for the traditional large organizations to
change and compete with the new organiza-
tions that are taking all these ideas on board
from the start? Will these large, historically-
driven companies have to run exceptionally
fast in making changes, only to find that they
are not making any real progress?
WB
I think the short answer to that question is:
Yes. But that is an inadequate answer because
there are things that large companies can do
in the way of breaking themselves up and
refocusing their activities, in a way that makes
them act more like small companies, in an
attempt to compensate for those differences.
But many large companies will find they are
not successful at this process.
 The end of the job
Bruce Lloyd interviews William Bridges
BL
And even if they do it successfully they will
find themselves as prime targets breaking
themselves up, or for other people to do it for
them.
WB
I think we are in a period where the idea
that economic resources should be clustered
into large organizations is being increasingly
challenged in one way or another. This can be
done in an orderly way, by unbundling
resources or using outsourcing, etc. Or it can
be done in a more disorderly way, via
takeovers.
Higher priority for learning
BL
A final theme. How do you see these
changes impacting on organizational learning,
individual learning, and the structures that
society has developed to support these learn-
ing processes?
WB
At an individual level, the organization is
going to have to intensify greatly its support
for individual learning, because staff are going
to have to learn many new ways of doing
things. But what support is that going to take?
Will it be provided internally? Or externally?
Probably the answer is both, because of the
need for so much more of it than has normally
been provided in the past. Organizations
should benefit from their employees having
both the necessary technical skills, and self-
management skills and marketing skills, that
provide, or develop, the ability to make the
transition to a change-focused organization.
The organizational learning challenge is going
to be to avoid losing key elements of its his-
toric knowledge base in this new, more fluid
and mobile workforce. It may be the price that
has to be paid, but it could prove to be a very
expensive price for some companies.
BL
This is also the price society pays for not
learning the lessons of history.
WB
That’s right. As a species we don’t have a
good record in learning from our past mis-
takes.
BL
In essence, effective learning is the only
weapon that we have to ensure our survival
and success over the longer term. It is the
most challenging frontier to operate on.
32
The International Journal of Career Management
Volume 7 · Number 2 · 1995 · 29–33
WB
I think that is right and that frontier has a
number of very sharp lines of demarcation.
Yet we are moving into completely new terri-
tory.
BL
With some very new challenges. One study
recently showed that children preferred to
play with their computers than with other
children; yet what organizations need in
periods of rapid change is more aware, and
more developed, people skills.
WB
Yes. The traditional people and social skills
are now getting a new lease of life; they are
usually more critical to organizational success
than pure technical skills. Today these techni-
cal skills need to be integrated into a much
wider organizational perspective, if they are
going to be effectively used.
BL
These issues are likely to be increasingly
important for us all in the years ahead. Thank
you for stimulating our thoughts on them.
Our Centre Section Editor, Lyn Hedges,
has penned a short review of William
Bridges’ book to complement this inter-
view.
Jobshift: How to Prosper in a Workplace
without Jobs
William Bridges, Nicholas Brealey Publishing, ISBN 1-
85788-061-7, 1995, £16.99, hardback, 262 pages. Tel:
0171 430 0224; Fax: 0171 404 8311
According to William Bridges, all jobs in
today’s economy are temporary. In this
ground-breaking new book, he shows how the
job as we know it is an endangered species,
with work being repackaged to meet new
economic realities. The vision of a job that we
grew up with – 9-to-5 workdays, 12 months a
year, promotions, and a pension at age 65 –
seems to be vanishing. The good news is that
a job is not the only way people work to earn a
good living. In fact, it is no longer the best
way.
Bridges explains that the job is a historical
artefact, created for the work needs of the
industrial revolution. Before that, people did
jobs – tasks. They did not have jobs or define
themselves in terms of that job. And today a
new revolution is going on. This time the job
is disappearing and work is being repackaged,
 The end of the job
Bruce Lloyd interviews William Bridges
with companies restructuring and “de-job-
bing” to find new and better ways to use
people’s abilities to get work done. Bridges
shows that we are all going to develop com-
posite careers as traditional career tracks
vanish and the project or temporary worker
becomes king. Instead there will be a contin-
gent or “just-in-time” workforce fuelled by
self-sufficient “vendor” employees who have
changed themselves into “microbusinesses”
by continually re-evaluating and marketing
their skills.
The USA is the first country to enter this
transition to a workplace without jobs. It is
also William Bridges’ own country and where
most of his clients are located. Therefore,
most of the examples in his book are Ameri-
can. He quotes a US News & World Report
cover story called “Where did my career go?”
which appeared in June 1993 [1]. It showed
that the current annual rate of employment
recovery is only 20 per cent of the average rate
of recovery in US recessions since 1950. The
article pointed out that white-collar unem-
ployment is higher today than during the
recession’s trough, and that 85 per cent of
Americans who have lost white-collar jobs will
never get them back – an all-time high for any
recession.
“It’s not surprising”, says Bridges, “that a
recent Yankelovitch survey found that two out
of three Americans believe that job security is
worse today than it was in the recession’s
trough. More than half of them believe that
the condition will ‘last for many years’. And
this from one of the most optimistic nations in
the world!”
Bridges’ approach is to take the bull by the
horns and succeed: “Today’s workers need to
forget jobs completely and look instead for
work that needs doing – and then set them-
selves up as the best way to get that work
done.” He says that governments all over the
world are missing the point as they seek to
calm the electorate with “job creation”
schemes instead of helping them and their
current employers make the transition to a
society in which they will have to work for
themselves and can no longer rely on either a
paternalistic employer or the State. “The job
is not going to be part of tomorrow’s econom-
ic reality”, he says.
William Bridges himself left his conven-
tional career (as a professor of English) in the
mid-1970s to become a freelance consultant.
33
The International Journal of Career Management
Volume 7 · Number 2 · 1995 · 29–33
A recent article in The Guardian quotes him as
saying, “I remember my children asking me
what my job was. It was a painful thing
because all their friends knew what their
fathers did and therefore who they were. I
didn’t have that kind of job, so they didn’t
know who I was”[2].
Nowadays neither Bridges nor his children
have any problem with his identity. In 1993
The Wall Street Journal listed him among the
ten most popular executive development
consultants in the USA. His several hundred
clients include Pacific Bell, Intel, Apple,
Procter & Gamble, and Chevron.
Nevertheless, many people are concerned
about surviving in a workplace without jobs.
Alec Reed, chairman of Reed Personnel
Services in the UK, says: “If this new struc-
ture of working continues, with companies
maintaining a smaller core of permanent staff
supplemented by the planned ongoing use of
temporary personnel, the knock-on effect
within the UK will be enormous. It certainly
brings into question many current structures
of mortgage, insurance and pension provi-
sion.”
Bridges’ new book tackles these concerns
head-on, with practical ways of thriving in the
new de-jobbed organization for the individual
and for companies. He shows the need for
new personnel and training policies, the
impact of de-jobbing on compensations and
benefits, and he reveals the end of manage-
ment and the disappearance of the manager.
There are lessons for society too, with impli-
cations for health care and the role of the
unions.
The future is here. The job is dead and
according to Bridges: “Organizations won’t
have better results until they do things. First,
get rid of jobs. Second, redesign the organiza-
tion to get the best out of a de-jobbed worker.
A big task, sure, but, like any evolutionary
challenge, it will separate the survivors from
the extinct.”
References
1 Hage, D., Grant, L. and Impoco, J., “Where did my
career go?”, US News & World Report, 28 June
1993, pp. 42-52.
2 Kent, S., “Old job, new job – no job”, The Guardian
(“Careers” supplement), 4 March 1995 pp. 2-3.
Lyn Hedges