Andrew Jones > Quotes

“Using a well-worn metaphor, culture can be viewed as the software that runs the hardware of human society.”
― Andrew Jones, The Fifth Age of Work: How Companies Can Redesign Work to Become More Innovative in a Cloud Economy

“If you ask people what is characteristic of the best groups they have ever been members of, the same traits keep being mentioned: small, informal, egalitarian, inspired by shared goals, the knowledge that what they do is recognized and valued. They report that the group does its work in a spirit of energized sharing, with much constructive self-examination. … Groups fail in organizations mainly because they are in organizations. They reflect the surrounding cultures—rigid, formal, and highly political in many cases.”
― Andrew Jones, The Fifth Age of Work: How Companies Can Redesign Work to Become More Innovative in a Cloud Economy

“One thing is certain: An employee value proposition premised on a fifty-week-a-year schedule, where employees are expected to show up at a fixed location five days a week and work forty hours a week at a single workstation, will be a non-starter for creative, talented, and self-starting knowledge workers in the future. But if companies present them challenging work, opportunities to innovate, as well as choice, community, flexibility, and autonomy, their organizations might become much more desirable places to be.”
― Andrew Jones, The Fifth Age of Work: How Companies Can Redesign Work to Become More Innovative in a Cloud Economy

“Flexibility and choice for workers create higher levels of trust, ownership of work, and productivity among knowledge workers than work arrangements defined by constant monitoring and set hours and locations.”
― Andrew Jones, The Fifth Age of Work: How Companies Can Redesign Work to Become More Innovative in a Cloud Economy

“Management exists to keep the company on a steady course and provide reliability and predictability. Paradoxically, this can create blindspots that go beyond work processes and procedures, adversely affecting a company’s core strategy.”
― Andrew Jones, The Fifth Age of Work: How Companies Can Redesign Work to Become More Innovative in a Cloud Economy

“This polymath thinker is what IDEO’s Tim Brown has called a “T-Shaped Person.” T-shaped people have innate technical skills, along with empathy, curiosity, and great observational skills. “They have a principle skill that describes the vertical leg of the ‘T’—they’re mechanical engineers or industrial designers. But they are so empathetic that they can branch out into other skills, such as anthropology, and do them as well.”
― Andrew Jones, The Fifth Age of Work: How Companies Can Redesign Work to Become More Innovative in a Cloud Economy