An introductory note

Scott C. Beardsley, James M. Manyika, and Roger P. Roberts

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 of goods and services. Since 1997, extensive McKinsey research on jobs in many industries has revealed that globalization, specialization, and new technologies are making interactions far more pervasive in developed economies. Currently, jobs that involve participating in interactions rather than extracting raw materials or making finished goods account for more than 80 percent of all employment in the United States. And jobs involving the most complex type of interactions—those requiring employees to analyze information, grapple with ambiguity, and...