In three major waves of change over the past 30 years, employers and workers have converged on new arrangements for getting knowledge work done. First, home computers and e-mail spawned an army of freelancers, offering both workers and employers new flexibility. Next, mobile technology and global teamwork gave the same kind of work-anywhere, work-anytime flexibility to full-time employees, without asking them to forsake career progress and development within their companies. Now, in a third wave, new ways of providing community and shared space are curing a side effect of virtualization--worker isolation--and driving increased collaboration. The authors write that to make the most of this third wave of change, employers should rethink the compact they forge with workers. Five fundamental aspects of knowledge work require fresh thinking: the value of the relationship with a larger enterprise; the settings in which work is done; the organization of workflows and how individual contributors add value; the technologies used to support higher achievement; and the degree to which employment arrangements are tailored to individuals. The three waves of transformation surge forward at differing velocities across sectors and geographies and mix together in societies. Understanding how your business participates in each wave will help you make wise decisions about technology, work models, talent sources, and people practices.

Since 1776, when Adam Smith described how the division of labor could spur economic progress, work has increasingly been broken into ever smaller tasks performed by ever more specialized workers. Now, however, as knowledge work expands and technology advances, we've entered a new era of hyperspecialization: Work previously done by one person is divided into more-specialized pieces done by multiple people, achieving improvements in quality, speed, and cost. For example, the start-up software firm TopCoder chops its clients' IT projects into bite-size chunks and offers them to its worldwide community of developers in the form of competitive challenges. The developers aspire to be ranked among the company's top coders, virtually guaranteeing quality in the winning end products. A company called CastingWords produces transcripts of audio files by farming out segments to remote workers for simultaneous transcription: Many hands make (extremely) fast work. The nonprofit Samasource sends data-entry work to marginalized individuals in the developing world, where tiny jobs lasting just minutes and paying just pennies give workers an economic boost while creating substantial savings for clients. Managers who want to capitalize on hyperspecialization's possibilities need to learn how best to divide knowledge work into discrete tasks, recruit specialized workers, ensure the quality of the work, and integrate the pieces into a final whole. Meanwhile, companies and governments must be aware of the potential perils of this new age: "digital sweatshops" and other forms of worker exploitation; nefarious schemes hidden behind task atomization; work that becomes dull and meaningless; increased electronic surveillance of workers. All these, the authors believe, could be ameliorated by global rules and practices and a new form of "guilds" to provide workers with a sense of community and support for professional development.