The Good Employee Paradigm: an Inertia of Centuries

Obedience, diligence and expertise can no longer be the attributes that define a good employee in the digital era. Companies need to be made of a different breed of professionals, armed with a different set of capacities, if they aspire to achieve success in an economy of knowledge and creativity. But first, business leaders, along with many employees, need to question their beliefs about the qualities a good employee needs to possess. And to do that they need to break with a well-established paradigm which has delivered good results up to very recent times. We can roll back the origin of our beliefs of what makes a good employee to the idea, prevalent in many ancient civilisations, that work is a divine punishment. In those civilisations most of the work was relegated to a caste of slaves who made up