Thomas H. Davenport When Jobs Become Commodities

Thomas H. Davenport is the President's Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College and a Fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. We don't typically think of the jobs that we perform as commodities. The Merriam-Webster entry on commodity describes it as "a mass-produced unspecialized product." But most of us view our jobs as specialized or somehow differentiated. We typically believe that we do them differently, and often better, than anyone else with the same job.