Job Architecture

3How Jobs Transform

Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?

This question is surprisingly controversial. Depending on how you think about it, the answer can be either. A tomato can be a fruit or a vegetable. It depends.

Some of you reading this may now be screaming at your book. How can I even be asking this question? Of course a tomato is a fruit! It's science! Fruits have seeds, tomatoes have seeds, so tomatoes are fruit. End of story.

That is true. But here's how I classify the differences between fruits and vegetables: If it goes into a salad, it's a vegetable. Using this form of classification, then a tomato is definitely a vegetable.

Well, you may ask, what about blue cheese? Or croutons? Or the apple slices and cranberries I sometimes put in my green salad? Are those vegetables?

And to that I would say: Those don't count. They are very obviously not vegetables.

If you haven't yet thrown your book across the room in frustration, maybe this was the last straw. How can I, a person who wrote a whole book about taxonomies, dismiss classification categories this easily?

But here's the thing about classifications and taxonomies: We categorize things to help us make sense of them. If the categorization helps us achieve that goal, then it's useful. If it doesn't, then it's not.

This tomato example is important to keep in mind as we continue to explore how to classify jobs. Because jobs—and the work activities that are bundled to create those jobs—are not static things. They change ...