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Adam Davidson on Work: Old Rules Don't Apply, and New Ones Aren't Yet Known

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People used to work at large corporations for decades, and had a set of rules. That no longer applies.

Work isn't what it used to be as organizations make a cultural shift. We can't count on jobs for life, and it can even be hard to tell what the rules are for making a living.

That’s something Adam Davidson has been thinking about for while. He's the co-founder of NPR's Planet Money. There's a new way of operating in many workplaces where instructions aren't delivered from the top, and it presents a challenge for a lot of workers. Davidson thinks some are worse off because of it.

Davidson writes about economics for The New York Times and hosts a podcast for Gimlet Media called Surprisingly Awesome. He spoke to WNPR’s Harriet Jones.

Adam Davidson: What we are going through is a fundamental transformation in how work works; how organizations, companies work, how money is made. It’s sort of on the scale and size of the shift from agriculture to industry. And what that means is, the old rules don’t apply anymore and we don’t yet know the new rules, and so it feels very scary. It feels terrifying, understandably, but I do think we’re seeing just the beginning of a sign of how this new system is going to work and why, at least for a lot of people, I think, it’s going to be a better system.

WNPR’s Harriet Jones: What was the moment for you when you realized what the new model might be?

I had a very intense experience about a year-and-a-half ago. I worked on the movie “The Big Short.” I was the technical advisor, and I had never been on a movie set before. And I show up on the first day at dawn, like six in the morning, and there’s hundreds of people running around. They’ve never worked together as a group. There was no official, “Hey, you do this, you do that,” order from above. Everybody just knew what to do.

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It was sort of the best version of the gig economy. These were people who were at the top of their game, coming together, clearly understanding each other’s roles, able to add value. They were paid well; the value they added to the production was very clear to everybody. And I thought, you know, I’m not saying that’s going to work for everybody in the world, but it gave me a sense that, you know, right now we see Uber drivers or TaskRabbit -- we see this one-off, kind of lone people, instead of doing their gig economy work.

But I think as we move more towards a nation of assembling the right group at the right time, measuring and paying for the value that they add in particular, I think that can be a system that’s viable. That’ll be very different from the America that existed in the 20th century, where people worked at large corporations for decades and had a boss and just had to fulfill a particular set of rules.

I’d also say, by the way, this system isn’t going to apply for everybody. I mean, I do believe in a strong social safety net, I do think that there are people in America who are made worse off by this new system. I just think it’s fewer than people think. I think maybe 30 percent of the country, something like that, might be made permanently worse off.

It sounds like you feel there’s a challenge there for workforce professionals, for those who think about policy around training and workforce.

I think it’s a huge challenge for workforce professionals, yes. I think we historically have had this kind of smokestack mentality, that we have factories that define jobs, and we need to mold you to that job. We need to take everything that’s unique about you, everything that makes you weird and interesting, and get rid of it, and focus instead on the things that make you compatible to this system.

And I think right now, it’s exactly the opposite. We need to find out what’s unique about you, what makes you weird and interesting. We need to build on that, enhance that, because I think doing the same thing as lots of other people, following a set career path, that is over for a lot of people. You know, it might still continue for some people for a while, but it’s over for a lot of people.

Is there maybe more Hollywood in your future?

I’m not sure. It was a lot of fun to work on a movie, but as one of my friends who’s worked in Hollywood a lot longer…  you know, usually the first movie you work on doesn’t get an Academy Award, you don’t get to hang out with Brad Pitt and Ryan Gosling, you don’t get to operate on the level I did.

So, like you, I’m a public radio guy, and it was a lot of fun, but it felt more like a vacation from the real world. 

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