Work Disrupted

CHAPTER 9Create Opportunity: As Business Leaders, Unlock Value by Reimagining Jobs and Partnering with Workers to Build Resilience and Dynamic Careers

Everyone is talking about the future of work. But few are asking the most fundamental question: What should that work be?

—John Hagel,¹ management consultant and author

If you have ever experienced whitewater rapids, you know the exhilarating sensation of making hairpin turns to avoid rocks; changing direction every few seconds; and trusting your team, your very wet, adrenaline-pumped team, as you cut through rushing currents. Few have navigated the treacherous Covid-19 rapids as deftly as Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom, the now ubiquitous video conferencing technology company. Zoom was founded in 2011 when the video conferencing market was already in full swing. That same year, Microsoft bought Skype for $8.5 billion.² Four years earlier, Cisco, the Internet networking giant, bought WebEx, another leading videoconferencing company, for $3.2 billion.³ Yet when the world went into quarantine, and businesses and schools relocated to living rooms, everyone learned to Zoom.

Though Yuan and his team had trained on responding to natural disasters in the run-up to going public in 2019, they never imagined they would face the size of the surge in demand. But they were prepared: Zoom's data centers were set up to handle traffic surges of 10 ...