Redefining work means shifting all workers from executing routine, tightly defined tasks to identifying and addressing unseen problems and opportunities. That means reimagining the entire scope of work, for everyone at all levels, at all times, including and especially those on the front lines. It means enabling every worker to be a value-creating hero at all times, whether they are seeing their daughter’s first steps, launching their own side businesses, or helping customers get what they need. It also means cultivating and drawing on intrinsic human capabilities to pursue work for fundamentally different purposes. It requires rethinking what it means to be an employee, not just adding more employees or reskilling them for new tasks or technologies.
The scientific definition of work reveals its deep connection to energy. In order for work to occur, there must be a force exerted on an object and the object must be displaced. The relative directions of the force and displacement determine whether the work done is positive, negative, or zero. The more perpendicular the direction of the force is to the direction that the object moves, the less work will be done. This is why pushing an object straight down on the ground does no work—it’s not the same force (a coolie lifting a load) or the same distance displaced (from a body to Earth).
A more general way to think of work is in terms of energy: work equals the change in the kinetic energy of an object multiplied by the constant of proportionality. This is called the work-energy principle. For a free (no fields) and rigid (no internal degrees of freedom) object that is merely displaced in a conservative force field, without changing its linear velocity or angular velocity, the work it does is equal to the force it applies times the change in its kinetic energy, W = F
It turns out that the same formula applies to an object in motion on a curve C, which can be evaluated by taking a line integral over all the points of displacement C, resulting in W = -F
Another important point is that in order for a force to do work, it must not only be applied but also have a component in the direction of the displacement. This is why we often feel exhausted after holding something heavy, as when we lift a briefcase full of books on level ground. It is the effort to move our arms against the resistance of the book pages that causes us to feel tired. This is why we call it hard work. It is the same reason why multitasking ruins your performance. Doing more than one thing at the same time makes you slower, more stressed, and more prone to making mistakes—it is hard on your brain. If you want to be more productive, focus on doing fewer things at once and make sure each is done well.
