Last Rush Hour

At the peak of the Industrial Age in the mid-twentieth century, the “knowledge worker” came of age. The workplace: an office building located downtown or in an adjacent suburb. Knowledge workers typically led a split life, working in one community while living in another and commuting daily between them. Then as the century drew to a close, personal computing and later the Internet emerged as a powerful force of change. Now as a new century gets underway, information and communications technology aided by the explosion of the Internet has freed knowledge work from the constraints of time and distance. It gets done at the speed of the human mind – and at any time and place. The fixed 8-5 work schedules and brick, mortar and steel office towers of the twentieth century are fast becoming obsolete. This mega shift from the Industrial Age to the Information Age has profound implications for how knowledge work is done, where and how people will live as the century progresses as well as their organizations and communities.