Storyteller. Ninja. Scrum Master. Brand Champion. Evangelist. The modern commercial world has created many new genres of work, but sometimes it is hard to know what they mean. As the London School of Economics’ headline-grabbing anthropologist David Graeber once wrote: ‘It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working.’
But, argues Nathan Furr, professor of strategy and innovation at INSEAD in Paris, the phenomenon of ‘bullshit jobs’, as they are increasingly derided in popular culture, is not a simple tale of corporate indulgence, but one of confusion and insecurity afflicting some of the world’s most established businesses. ‘A lot of chief executives are wrestling with a very basic question: what do we do? It just isn’t that obvious what many established businesses’ core activities are anymore. The knock-on effect of this uncertainty is a large amount of internal reorganisation and new roles to “deliver end-to-end customer journeys” and “communicate across silos”. The senior executives I work with are wrestling with the question of how they can respond to the challenge of disruption and continue working profitably.’
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