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The next revolution in interactions

Successful efforts to exploit the growing importance of complex interactions could well generate durable competitive advantages.

NOVEMBER 2005 • Bradford C. Johnson, James M. Manyika, and Lareina A. Yee

Organization, Strategic Organization article, corporate interactions

Like vinyl records and Volkswagen Beetles, sustainable competitive advantages are back in style—or will be as companies turn their attention to making their most talented, highly paid workers more productive. For the past 30 years, companies have boosted their labor productivity by reengineering, automating, or outsourcing production and clerical jobs. But any advantage in costs or distinctiveness that companies gained in this way was usually short lived, for their rivals adopted similar technologies and process improvements and thus quickly matched the leaders.

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	An introductory note Economists have long tended to describe the critical shifts in the European and North American labor markets over the past 200 years as movements between broad sectors—from agricultural to industrial jobs and from manufacturing to service ones. While this assessment is certainly true, the big picture obscures important nuances in what workers and professionals actually do. The finer details of the employment landscape hold important lessons for the way companies organize to manage their talent and technology, for competition within industries, and for public policy in developed nations. In today's developed economies, the significant nuances in employment concern interactions: the searching, monitoring, and coordinating required to manage the exchange...