The Tools Changed. The Operating Model Didn’t.

By: Joe Lazar, Co-Founder & Principal

Something strange and to many people, obvious, is happening in the modern economy.

We have dramatically changed the tools people use to work without changing many of the assumptions about how work itself should operate.

A single employee now has access to capabilities that would have been difficult to imagine a generation ago. High-speed internet is nearly ubiquitous. Cloud applications make information accessible from almost anywhere. Laptops are extraordinarily capable. Automation can eliminate repetitive work. AI can help research, analyze, write, summarize, troubleshoot and create. Teams can collaborate across continents almost instantly.

The amount of leverage available to an individual worker has increased enormously.

Yet much of the structure surrounding that worker still looks remarkably familiar.

We still organize work around fixed hours, recurring meetings, layers of approvals, geographic hiring boundaries and physical offices. We still frequently measure capacity by adding people rather than improving systems. And in some organizations, physical presence continues to serve as a proxy for productivity.

The modern office provides a particularly visible example of this disconnect. Someone can commute to a building, open a laptop, spend much of the day on video calls with people who are not in that building, and then put on noise-canceling headphones to create enough isolation to actually get work done.

The irony is difficult to miss.

That does not mean offices no longer matter. Being together can be extremely valuable for building relationships, solving difficult problems, mentoring people and creating shared experiences. But those are specific activities with specific benefits. They are different from assuming that work should happen in a particular place simply because that was historically how organizations operated.

And the same question applies far beyond the office.

If AI and automation allow one person to accomplish significantly more, should organizations automatically replace every departing employee? If information is available asynchronously, does every decision require a meeting? If teams can collaborate globally, should hiring still be restricted by commuting distance? If technology gives employees more visibility and capability, do they still need the same layers of oversight?

These are not primarily technology questions. They are operating-model questions.

The next stage of the changing economy may not be defined by which organizations adopt AI fastest. Most organizations eventually will. The larger advantage may go to those willing to reconsider the structures surrounding the technology.

Because installing new tools inside an old operating model only gets you so far.

At some point, the way we work has to catch up with what our tools now allow us to do.