Product Description

From the best-selling author of Simplicity-how the workplace is being turned inside out and upside down, and what to do about it.

Throw out the old playbook; the rules of the workplace are changing-and the push is coming from below. In Work 2.0, best-selling author Bill Jensen delivers a powerful and practical guide for managers and other leaders to make sense of the new covenant that is evolving between individuals and the organizations for which they work.

Based on hundreds of interviews with managers, entrepreneurs, and front-line employees, Work 2.0 captures the pulse and the power of the people who are changing the workplace by raising their expectations of what it will offer to them. Work 2.0 introduces us to Belgian "work simplifiers," the CEO of Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History, Cisco's rule-breaking head of eLearning, the founder of Google, and many other pioneers who are creating workplaces that operate from the employee's point of view. They are meeting the needs of a new workforce, who want to be exceptionally productive, intellectually stimulated, and highly valued. In short, these new workers are demanding a maximum return on their investment in the company. Work 2.0 is guaranteed to change forever the way you think about workers, the workplace, and the very nature of work.

In Work 2.0 Jensen reveals how:

Productivity gets personal

Most likely, your company still thinks about productivity in terms of producing more at less cost. Your employees believe that it's about how efficiently and effectively your company helps them get stuff done. They want more control over their own destiny, and your company is a tool to help them succeed.

Working capital will be spent differently

The workforce knows that your company uses their capital-time, ideas, knowledge, passion, and energy-to make profits. Your key talent is only interested in spending this capital on high-impact projects, learning something new, or doing what they find interesting. This is true in boom times, and really true in bear times.

The work force wants a better return on their investment

If an hour invested in your firm could be invested in a competitor for greater return to the employee, your most valuable people will leave.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1814406 in Books
• Published on: 2002-01
• Released on: 2002-01-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

Amazon.com Review
Now that the economy has tanked, it's time for corporate execs to remind their employees of who's who and what's what, right? Wrong, warns Bill Jensen in Work 2.0, his rousing but practical blueprint for creating the productive workplace of the future. Employees are any company's most important investors, Jensen reminds the forward-thinking leader; how their contributions of time, attention, ideas, knowledge, passion, energy, and social networks are respected and rewarded will determine the success or failure of the company. Think of Work 2.0 as the new contract these employees are wielding, their sophisticated manifesto for how to get a better return on their investment. It's no longer merely about healthy compensation, good benefits, and a foosball table in the corporate café; today's workers care about how easy it is to make a big impact, how much and how fast they can learn, and how efficiently what they provide is utilized. Jensen aims this motivational guide at leaders who want to attract and keep these savvy employee-investors, and teaches them how to embrace the asset revolution, give their employees better control over their own destinies, create and deliver peer-to-peer value, and become the type of extreme leaders capable of excelling in extreme times. The book is peppered with great quotes, useful checklists, and tips from leaders already succeeding under the new contract. --S. Ketchum

From Publishers Weekly
An opening query, expressed almost as a throwaway, shows what this book could have been. Consultant Jensen (Simplicity: The New Competitive Advantage in a World of More, Better, Faster), reflecting on what managers must do today, writes: "Work 2.0 places before you a simple self-assessment question: `As a leader, am I changing enough to demonstrate that I respect and trust the people around me?'" Unfortunately, Jensen never comes close to explaining what a manager needs to do to answer that question affirmatively. Instead, in tilling over ground broken long ago by Warren Bennis, he tells readers that today's workers want meaning as well as money. Then, as the McKinsey consulting firm has already maintained, he explains that there is a war for the best talent. Faintly echoing the writings of Thomas Stewart, he underscores what's now considered a basic truth that intellectual capital is a firm's most important asset and then repeats what Tom Peters has argued since the mid-1990s: if companies don't provide the best environment for employees to thrive, they won't attract the best employees. Managers today want to know what they have to do to be effective, and how they have to do it. Instead, Jensen gives them entire chapters revolving around such statements as "great workplaces respect life's precious assets" and "great workplaces get better results by giving people better control over their own destiny." Agent, Lisa Adams.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
If Jensen's first book, Simplicity: The New Competitive Advantage in a World of More, Better, Faster (2000), didn't break through the business best-seller list, then his number two should. Toned down to reflect 9-11 ramifications, this book, nonetheless, reads like a cross between Tom Peters and an Internet missionary. His thesis is that there's a new work contract between employer and employee based on four new accountabilities: collaboration, respect from leadership, personal productivity, and employees as assets. Interview stories from the likes of Blue Cross, Cisco, and Motorola, among others, buttress key points--and act as extremely persuasive harbingers of work to come. Actual surveys, checklists, and tool kits become fodder for believers. And, yes, there's even a section or two for doubting Thomases and Tonis, the cynics who say, "It can't happen here." The jury's still out, but Jensen marshals major facts, figures, and evidence. Barbara Jacobs
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Work, Life, Control: Condensed and Clarified
Bill Jensen has researched how we all work for more than a decade. I know: I participated in part of his study ten years ago.

Here's what I've learned both from his two books and his research...

* HIS SKILL is as an aggregator, simplifier, and clarifier.
I laugh at reviews that are obviously searching for the next big thing:

("Nothing new here. So-and-so said that back in...") He openly covers ideas that others cover. But he integrates them all together, and finds the patterns and overlaps between dots that we couldn't otherwise connect.

* HE IS PASSIONATE about respect for the individual.
Work 2.0 and Simplicity are not about *business* success. They are about people issues, and finding more ways for each individual to succeed.

He's holding leaders accountable for employees' time, energy, and
passion that they waste. When he wrote "It is no longer acceptable to say that there's *work* and there's *life* and it's up to employees to balance the two," he was taking a stand for all the thousands of people he's heard from during his research. Again, I was one of those he stood up for.

* HE ASKS tough questions.
Do not buy his books unless you're willing to look in the mirror. While he includes checklists and writes in a very accessible way, he is definitely not about mice-moving-cheese, or fish-throwing, or Five Steps to Eternal Bliss. He's seen our personal foibles and the stupidity in our workplaces, and he tells the truth.

* HE POKES a finger in the eye of those in power, then winks at us.

* HE RESPECTS his readers.
Sure, he gets some things wrong. I don't agree with all his findings or recommendations. But at the end of the day, he respects us to think more deeply and come up with better solutions because he played truth-teller and dots-connector. He sees his role as witness, reporter, clarifier, and provocateur. He figures we're smart enough to figure out the rest.

For me, that's more than good enough.

Manifesto for More Effective Workplaces
Jensen has done an excellent job of redefining the notion of a "Best Place to Work." Instead of focusing on perqs, he talks about what people really need to do their jobs well. And he does it with the characteristic Jensen writing style: concise, candid, and humorous.

What I particularly like about the book is that Jensen forces people at all levels in a hierarchy to take responsibility for creating effective workplaces. It's not just up to leaders and it's not just up to the people who work with them to recreate a better work environment. He gives advice and concrete tools to both groups. The quick quizzes and mini case-studies in this book are particularly useful. The work on social networks is simplified, but very accessible and practical.

Full disclosure: I had a review copy and I am a colleague of Bill's.

Great Buy! A new map for uncertain times...
The dust will settle soon. Wrenching uncertainty may not go away, but we will have progressed. Or will we?

Jensen wants us to stop first, and ask new questions. Like: What returns should we expect for all that we invest into an employer? He states flat out that "for most employees, the more they invest in their company, the more they lose control of their own destiny." He details a new and different covenant. And tells the stories of a few companies who have started.

Just one page (77), his SimplerWork Index, and the instructions on how to use it, are worth the price of the book. When the Index asks us to respond to statements like, "My company is respectful of my time and attention, and is focused on using it wisely and effectively" -- Wow! It stops the platitudes, and energizes new debates about what it means to be in a "great place to work."

What makes Work 2.0 so useful and important is not that Jensen gets everything right. (I'd quibble with a few of his points.) It's that he's taken the conversation about work/life balance and the war for talent to excitingly new places. Get this book! Get lots, and give the other copies to people who need to "get it."