Book Excerpt August 28, 2008, 5:00PM EST

Book Excerpt: The Numerati by Stephen Baker

(page 4 of 4)

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Takriti headed the IBM team Aleksandra Mojsilovic

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Big jobs are parsed into thousands of tasks and divided among many workers. But the work Haren is discussing is not done by hand, hydraulic presses, or even robots. It flows from the brain. The labor is defined by knowledge and ideas. As he sees it, that expertise will be tapped minute by minute across the world. This job sharing is already starting to happen, as companies break up projects and move big pieces of them offshore. But once the workers are represented as mathematical models, it will be far easier to break down their days into billable minutes and send their smarts to fulfill jobs all over the world.

Consider IBM's superstar consultant. He's roused off the bench, whether he's on a ski lift at St. Moritz or leading a seminar at Armonk, N.Y. He reaches into his pocket and sees a message asking for 10 minutes of his precious time. He might know just the right algorithm, or perhaps a contact or a customer. Maybe he sends back word that he's busy. (He's a star, after all.) But if he takes part, he assumes his place in what Haren calls a virtual assembly line. "This is the equivalent of the industrial revolution for white-collar workers," Haren says.

It's getting late in Takriti's office. I can see that he's concerned about my line of questioning. This virtual assembly line sounds menacing. The surveillance has more than a whiff of Big Brother. For those of us who aren't $1,000-per-hour consultants, life bound to a mathematical model is sounding like abject data serfdom.

Here's Takriti's counterargument. As the tools he's building make workers more productive, the market will reward them. We already use math programs to plot our trips and look for dates. Why not use them to map our careers—and negotiate for better pay? (Takriti, it turns out months later, masters these market dynamics: He was able to shop his gilded Numerati credentials to several Web companies and banks, and finally leaves IBM in late 2007 for a post as a top mathematician at Goldman Sachs. Work on the modeling project continues apace, says IBM.) All sorts of workers will be able to calculate their own worth with more precision. Let's say analytical tools show that a consultant's value to the company topped $2 million one year. Shouldn't she have access to that number and be free to use it as a negotiating tool? In a workplace defined by metrics, even those of us who like to think that we're beyond measurement will face growing pressure to build our case with numbers of our own.

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How mathematicians skirted torpedoes in World War II

Of Math and War

In early 1942, Nazi U-boats were sinking convoys, and the U.S. Navy was in desperate need of...mathematicians. In a 1984 book, Operations Evaluation Group: A History of Naval Operations Analysis, Keith R. Tidman recounts the drama in which quants modeled the North Atlantic and optimized shipments to avoid losses to the Germans. The Americans' success helped turn the tide of war and gave birth to operations research (OR), the key to modern logistics. OR has spread throughout the entire economy but remains true to its military roots. The biggest OR shop in the world is at the Naval Post-graduate School in Monterey, Calif.