R for Ready

This past Friday, Charlie and I attended the New York Times Thomas L Friedman The Next New World Asia Forum.  Friedman’s opening comments were titled “What world are you living in?” and, in a humorous, insightful and optimistic manner, he painted a picture of where we came from to get to where we are today and what tomorrow holds – always making it clear that the future is ours to create.  But we must be prepared as things have, and are, changing. Hence this week’s word – R for Ready.  Are you ready?

One of the foundational changes is in authority structures.  We’ve moved from vertical to horizontal.  In the old world of hierarchy, bosses bossed and workers worked and if everyone just followed the plan, all was right with the world.  Frederick Taylor, the father of scientific management, believed that “one best way” could be found for any job and that workers should have detailed training in their discrete task and then repeat that over and over for mastery. 

But who has discrete tasks in their job?  Every job is a combination of strategy-implementation, customer service, sales, marketing, finance, compliance, corporate security and technology – and the requirements change from customer to customer, day to day.  The world and its workers do not fit into neat little boxes – it’s a big messy complex rapidly changing world in which we live.  To succeed, we must be able to learn and unlearn and relearn – Friedman calls this ability the new literacy.  We can look to the past as prologue, but not as a pattern for the future. 

Another change he pointed out was that we are moving from high wage middle skill jobs to high wage high skill work – and our greatest shortage is brain power. Thanks to the Internet, knowledge is abundant.  Skill – defined as the practical application of knowledge – is not as plentiful. It’s not what we know, it’s what we can do with what we know.   

A third change in the new world is that companies only hire if they have to do so.  Although GDP and job growth used to move together, this is no longer the case. Rather than find a job, we may have to invent a job – and, if we have a job already, it’s important to think about how we add value to the organization.  Our contributions should not be based on a static job description, but by a desire to be relentlessly entrepreneurial in how we identify opportunity and help to drive corporate objectives.

So how do we prepare for what’s next?  A healthy dose of persistence, curiosity and imagination will be helpful.  Add to this a desire to take risks, to experiment, to fail and try again. Get comfortable with ambiguity – in case we had forgotten, the first decade of the 21^st century has made us painfully aware of the uncertainty and unpredictability of life. Keep learning and unlearning and relearning. Always be in beta. 

That may sound like a lot.  So be sure to take regularly scheduled R&R.  Once restored, you’ll be ready to rule your realm.