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Executive Overview
While the new paradigm of the "intelligent enterprise" has captivated the imagination of managers and management scholars alike, few have considered its impact on people's careers.(1) Thus, as a point of departure, we take up that challenge.
By exploring the competency-based, learning-centered view of the intelligent enterprise, we suggest its complement, the "intelligent career." The intelligent career involves the development of "knowing why" "knowing how," and "knowing whom" competencies, and, as we will show, promotes a new set of principles to underlie intelligent enterprise employment arrangements. Finally, we suggest how career actors, managers, and human resource professionals can rethink popular employment practices and prepare for the new career world.
In a recent award-winning book, James Brian Quinn extolled the virtues of the "intelligent enterprise." The intelligent enterprise, a new paradigm in our thinking about organization, focuses on the development and deployment of intellectual resources rather than on the management of physical assets. It promotes the virtues of "infinitely flat" forms of organization, of destroying existing hierarchies, and of outsourcing all but the few key activities in which a firm can identify and maintain "best in world" capability. This view carries a strong invitation to re-think our traditional ideas about work and careers, centered in assumptions of employment security, promotion opportunity, and--we submit--employee dependence on the firm for both the worth and marketability of their services.
Central to Quinn's approach and that of other recent writers is the idea of a firm's "core competencies." Core competencies are those limited activities the firm can presently do, and continue to learn to do, better than its competitors. However, few writers are as candid as Quinn about the need for disruption, or "disaggregation" of long-standing employment arrangements, and even fewer see any necessary tension between the learning goals of employer firms and their individual employees. The implication is that employment arrangements are to be largely retained, or at least restored after necessary disruption and restructuring have taken place. Again Quinn is more provocative, reflecting on the "wage slaves" of the past, and arguing that the best people now "don't have to work for a particular company." For him, "the corporation has become a voluntary organization to be joined because it can let them achieve more of their...