How the Future Works

Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, and USA Today Bestseller

Unlock the power of flexible work with this practical “how-to” guide from the leadership of Slack and Future Forum

The way we work has changed. The era of toiling from nine-to-five, five-days-a-week in the office is now a relic of the past, and is being replaced by a better way—flexible work. But flexibility means a lot more than a day or two a week to “work from home”: 93% of your employees want more flexibility in when, not just where, they work. They want choice and they are leaving their roles to find it. The most successful leaders will go much further than offering occasional remote workdays—they will redesign every aspect of how work gets done, from defining how they measure organizational success to training their managers to make it happen.

How the Future Works: Leading Flexible Teams to Do The Best Work of Their Lives offers a blueprint for using flexible work to unlock the potential of your people. The book offers the steps necessary to building the new principles and guardrails to empower flexible, high-performing teams. And it teaches readers to lead with purpose, to manage and measure differently, and to believe that by letting go, they’ll get more back than they thought possible.

How the Future Works explains how to:

• Establish leadership principles, commitments, and outcomes for truly flexible teamwork
• Measure and assess productivity in a flexible workplace
• Reskill managers to ensure a level playing field for all employees
• Implement the infrastructure necessary to make flexible work successful

Using original research from Future Forum, a consortium by Slack, and global case studies from leading companies such as Levi Strauss & Co., Genentech, Royal Bank of Canada, and IBM, How the Future Works offers concrete solutions and practical steps for building high functioning teams of talented, engaged people by providing them with the flexibility and choice they need to do their best work.

About the Authors

Brian Elliott (San Francisco, CA) is a VP at Slack and the Executive leader of Future Forum, the thought leadership institute of Slack. Brian has spent over 20 years leading companies and teams, from startup CEO to Google to Slack, with a starting point in consulting (Boston Consulting Group) and case writing (Harvard Business School). Brian received his BA from Northwestern University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Sheela Subramanian (San Francisco, CA) is Senior Director of the Future Forum and has spent the past five years as a senior leader at Slack. Prior to Slack, she was an executive at global startups, leading international growth and business development. Sheela joined Google in 2004, where she drove marketing and strategy for a range of products and co-founded the Global Market Development team. She received a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. She is on the Board of Stanford’s Center for Race and Ethnicity.

Helen Kupp (San Francisco, CA) Helen has authored many of Future Forum’s playbooks and led many of Slack’s largest cross-functional initiatives in the last 5 years.