I’ve been on vacation this past week in Japan, which continues to be an exceptionally nice place to visit. One of the many things that strikes me as unusual is the number of older people, mostly men, doing certain kinds of work - things like waving a flag to direct traffic around construction, which led me to a quick look at the Japanese labor market. 

For an individual or organization, working out what you are really good at, what you can do that delivers the most value, unlocks a lot of good things. 

I’ve been catching up on season two of The Intersection podcast, which focuses on the corner of Shoreline and Space park way in Mountain View, right in the heart of Google. 

One of the other ideas from Transaction Cost Economics I liked was the remidiableness criterion, due to Williamson. The core question in TCE is why do firms staff certain work internally while sourcing other work from the market?

Transaction Cost Economics and Organization Theory is a somewhat dense, but interesting, paper on the overlap between those two fields.

Some of my thoughts from the post yesterday were around the value of flexibility in resource allocation that training gives an organization: if you can teach people practical skills rapidly you can more easily flex to respond to new needs. 

Two interesting pieces on Clocking In. Their deep dive title piece is around how companies are investing in training due to tight labor markets. The other is a piece on Bloomberg about how millennial males (25-34) are less likely to be working than for other age and gender cohorts. 

A number of my conversations yesterday turned around the idea of taking action towards a larger goal while being overwhelmed with day-to-day work. This kind of “everything is on fire” operating is demoralizing - the team only achieves a proportion of the work they know needs to be done, and they will rarely do the surprising work which wins plaudits. 

Interesting conversation this morning on the changing nature of work at the bottom end of earnings, and education. 

Following on from the last post - are there choices that can improve your personal or corporate situation under impending automation?