Idea 9 for 2025: Employment is Dead, Long Live the Gig Worker!
- Nitin Deckha
- Mar 11
- 2 min read
Last week, I started my day attending an HBR webinar featuring the authors of Employment is Dead, Deborah Perry Piscione and Josh Drean.
In an always intriguing at times head-spinning presentation, Perry Piscione and Drean co-elaborated their thesis, exploring how various disruptive technologies, from artificial intelligence to web 3, the metaverse to the decentralized work models that the pandemic has made more omnipresent, are not only transforming, but effectively destroying the traditional employment model.
Perry Piscione and Drean vividly argued that a “portfolio” approach to career development and success is ascendant, where seemingly empowered gig workers craft relationships with various workplaces that are driven by a strong sense of agency, ownership, transparency, upskilling, and continual learning. They further a thesis that sees the further severing of the historic contract between employers and employees with the rise of alternate work arrangements.
Indeed, interestingly while observing the commentary of the chat, the international webinar audience was highly active, and concerned about this fraying social contract, and the very real vulnerabilities it exacerbates. While some gig workers can find ways to thrive and succeed in a portfolio approach, such a system of work eliminates the need for employee-paid pensions, benefits, sick pay, vacation and other elements of full-time work that, though withering in the last few decades, remain of significant value to workers.
Piscione and Drean did not address those concerns although they pointed out that “we can’t move people into unemployment” and that our (American) education system has “failed” to prepare for this emergent reality and effectively cultivate the “entrepreneurial mindset.”
Yet, intriguingly, enough to make me consider wanting to read the book, is their model for leaders to re-enchant work, what they call Work3. It involves 10 principles: partnership, transparency, autonomy, ownership, decision-making, flexibility, upskilling, incentives, interoperability, and community, as captured in the screenshot below:
Indeed, many of these concepts are familiar to other researchers and writers of employee engagement in our era of the Great Resignation, Quiet Quitting, and other upheavals that symbolize immense worker dissatisfaction with the way work has been thus far organized.
As such, their approach does signal a shift for potential democratization of work, and they further suggest, in their Work 3 Roadmap, pictured below, that their approach reaffirms the humanness of work in the age of technological disruption, with agentic AI, where AI can teach itself, on the horizon.
In their model, disruptive technologies, data analytics, communication channels and a culture of continuous learning and transformation, imagine work as simultaneously empowering as it is innovative and effective. Yet, as the participants in the chat noted, not all work may be able to be reimagined in this way, and not all workers are euphoric about trading some of the relative security of traditional work for this new frontier.
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