This is more than a technology conversation – this is about fractional workers (senior people working for more than one company at the same time) and top talent being confident to say that their personal brand is more important than the brand of the company they work for (we do that already on LinkedIn, by the way).
Now… if only we could actually get rid of email. Am I right?
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TRANSCRIPT
Come with me to the future, where there will be no company emails. Now, don’t get too excited it’s not quite what you think. I’m Graeme Codrington. This is ThrowForward Thursday and before we go to the future, let’s just quickly go to the past.
If we go back to the 1970s and 1970s, we find companies giving their top people company cars, and the company decided which car you would get, and you even got a different car depending on your status in the business. And then we began to say, No, I don’t want your car, just give me the money, I’ll buy my own car. End of company cars.
Then we get to the 1990s, and the IT departments of big companies are saying, We will give you a cell phone or a smartphone and a laptop. The company decides which brand you get. I know there are still some companies that issue the laptops for security reasons and other things, but mainly, I think most companies these days allow you to BYD, bring your own device, which was the big argument in the 1990s and in 99% of companies, companies stopped providing those smartphones, and then they stop providing the actual numbers themselves. You don’t have a phone number for your smartphone, or your cell phone, issued by a company. You just get your own contract. Give me the money, I’ll sort myself out.
So why can’t we do that with emails? If you work at a company, you’ve got a company email that is controlled by the company, which the company can read and then when you leave the company, you lose that email. Then suddenly, all of your history is gone, you’ve got to send everybody a message and tell them you’ve got a new email address. Why can’t we arrive at a company and say, I’ve got an email address, this is my email address, this is how people contact me?
I know the branding people will say, but Graeme, it’s a brand and the at and then the rest of the domain name is the company name, and that indicates you part of that company. Yes, we know that but nobody needs that with phones anymore, nobody has the company branding on the side of their car anymore, and we’re all fine with that. The world didn’t end.
And maybe what my future forward thought takes us to today is a world in which we are no longer, I’m going to use the word handcuffed and shackled to our companies in the future. The best talent that’s available might be fractional talent. You only have this person for a few days of their week. They’re not full-time connected to you. Fractional talent is one of the next big things coming in the rest of the 2020s and 2030s. And maybe they don’t want to have three different email addresses for different companies, maybe they just want their own email address.
Hi, I am Graeme, and my email address is [email protected], or whatever it happens to be. And so maybe fractional talent pushes us in this direction of the person saying, “No, I will tell you what my email address is, and then you put that on my business card and tell people how to contact me that way”.
And maybe it even goes further. Even if somebody is working full-time come for you, maybe they still say, “Do you know what? It’s more important that I am me than that I am an employee of you”, if you see what I mean. And this is what we do on our LinkedIn profiles. When you search for somebody’s name, these days, because of the way the algorithms work, the first thing that comes up is their LinkedIn profile. You don’t connect with them via their company. In fact, on most company websites, you don’t have individual contact details, and if you want to connect with the person, you connect with them directly via LinkedIn.
It’s not that much of a bigger step forward to say, “Bring your own email address, you are who you are”. And the people who want to find you can contact you via an email address, that doesn’t change when your employment changes, that doesn’t change when you do something else, that you don’t lose when you change employment, an email address which you can use for your whole life.
That’s why I think in the future, corporate email addresses might be dead. Now, if only we could kill email, well, then we’d be talking.
As always, thank you for joining me in the future. Thank you for thinking about what it means to live in the future and to imagine different scenarios. Thank you for thinking like a futurist. I’ll see you next week in the future again.
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For the past two decades, Graeme has worked with some of the world’s most recognised brands, travelling to over 80 countries in total, and speaking to around 100,000 people every year. He is the author of 5 best-selling books, and on faculty at 5 top global business schools.