John Howkins’s Invisible Work offers trailblazing, inspirational guidance for ways in which workers in today’s disparate labour environments can make the intangible tangible. More specifically, it answers the question: how can workers manage and manifest the hidden, important practices of thought and creativity?
“The power of the unseen” underpins the book’s fundamental ethos. “Invisible work cannot be observed and its meanings cannot be deduced. Cognition cannot be seen”, and yet it is key to many working contexts. Furthermore, how we manage how we are – or aren’t – able to make ourselves visible is central to how well we progress, how well we are remunerated and how much satisfaction we derive from work. Throughout Howkins provides thought-provoking examples and fresh insights that turn accepted thinking on its head, with a fabulously forward-looking analysis of the benefits of a four-day week and better balance between work and home. “Work as if people mattered” is the title of a section towards the end of the book, an honorable ethos that employers and employees alike would do well to heed.
Invisible work is the hidden ingredient for success in an AI-defined era. It is a mindset of deeply focused, value-added thinking and sharing. It is a process of creativity that combines emotional intelligence and collaboration. It is the key to the success of a growing army of self-employed workers. This is an emerging field of work in which new business domains and creative endeavours are based on personal interests and digital connections. It is also, crucially, the answer to the question of how we thrive in the AI era and raise a new generation capable of working with - rather than being replaced by - AI.
Howkins lays out a visionary framework for working practice and success. He focuses on the ways in which we think most innovatively, how we best share those private ideas, how we make unseen connections and remain authentic whilst staking out our domain in a virtual world. He considers the growing area of self-employment in a chapter entitled `The Incorporated Self', and he explores the tricky task of spotting and nurturing those best suited to invisible work.
John Howkins is a leading figure in the global understanding of work and creativity. He is the author of the seminal The Creative Economy (Penguin UK, 2002; new editions 2007 & 2013), which has been translated into 14 languages. John Howkins was chair of the London Film School and chief adviser to HBO and Time Warner for 15 years. In 2006, the Shanghai government set up the John Howkins Research Centre on the Creative Economy.
