La dernière industrie durable: nous-mêmes
Article de Sydney Finkelstein, un des blogueurs en économie de la BBC
it will just be a matter of time before the emergence of television available anywhere pushes cable and satellite companies to sell channels a la carte and not bundled. Time Warner Cable’s recent dust-up over transmission fees with the CBS network in the United States may well be the trigger for a fitful move in this direction. Surely one of the most despised of all business practices, it will be even harder to defend when mass-market customers become used to watching individual channels on the Internet via alternative broadband providers. An entire generation of twentysomethings access most of their TV this way already.
When this happens, cable and satellite companies will cease to exist in the manner they have become accustomed. They will have to create a new business model to survive, something opportunistic entrepreneurs at Netflix, Hulu, Google, Apple and Amazon have been working on for some time. Good luck with that.
I could go on with further examples of industries that will never provide the stability they once did, not just because of technological and customer changes, but also because of global competition that destroys the fat and lazy, because of the increasing importance of services over manufacturing to the economy (removing many high paying, steady union jobs in the process) and because so many of us have become accustomed to almost unlimited choice, making it difficult for any company to maintain steady market share, and hence, steady jobs.
In the end, this means that the only durable industry is yourself. We have no choice but to be durable, since the world around us has become so capricious. Job security is not only an unrealistic goal, it’s a foolish one. While we still need to dedicate ourselves to our jobs — there is no alternative to creating value while at work — we no longer need to dedicate ourselves to a single employer. Why? Because that company might not be there for us tomorrow.