Service Thinking

Chapter 9

The Individualization of Opportunity and Your Career

Make a job or take a job!

—James C. Spohrer

Since the 19th century, industrialization has been the enemy of individualization. Scale was the great arbiter of efficiency and it required uniformity. Scale required firms to make large quantities of the same goods, and it often required lots of people doing the same job, repetitively. Companies measured their success based on their size, and on their market share in uniformly defined categories of commodity products.

As business progressed toward the latter half of the 20th century, we became less dependent on scale manufacturing, and a greater percentage of GDP in all economies was generated by services. But many of us were still ...