A New Workforce Era? Or back to the Future?

I’ve been fortunate to spend some time with Wharton Professor of Management Peter Cappelli on a variety of projects, including the recent Talent Supply Chain Management Forum. If you haven’t already read Peter’s landmark book ‘Talent on Demand: Managing Talent in an Age of Uncertainty’, then I cannot recommend it highly enough.

When we sat down with Peter after the Summit, the first question we put to him was one that he had mentioned earlier in the day. In a world of constant high-change, is what we’re seeing in talent supply chains really so new? You can see the response to this question in the video below, but here’s an interesting snippet:

“If you went back 100 years in the U.S., you saw that most of the economy was actually pretty virtual: A typical company outsourced almost everything inside its company. The reason you still buy cars from a car dealer, who is independent from the manufacturer, goes back to that earlier period 100 years ago when companies outsourced everything, including sales. So I think it is worth recognizing that the period of lifetime employment in the U.S. was probably the anomaly in historical context.”