The Four Questions: How Does One Grow?
Photography by Toni Schneider
There are four questions that most companies and individuals seek answers to:
The Future: How will the future be?
Change Management: How does one navigate change?
Modern Leadership: How to lead today?
Purposeful Growth: How does one grow/remain relevant?
Three weeks ago, the focus was on the future. You can find it here.
Two weeks ago, the topic was change. You can read it here.
Last week’s post was on leadership. You can review it here.
This is the last of the series and shares perspectives on how to keep growing as a person.
Photography by Toni Schneider
Time is the only real asset.
Franz Kafka wrote “The meaning of life is that it stops”
In the future the ritual of the ordinary day will be special, just as we have come to realize after months of a new way of living that the simple pleasures of free movement, meeting friends, sitting in a crowded bar, and watching a sports game were so special.
Life does not have to be lived forward and understood backward if we decide to pay attention.
Two quotes capture what many may feel looking back and looking ahead:
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives wrote Anne Dillard.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? asked Mary Oliver
Life is a journey through reality and time in search of meaning.
Photography by Toni Schneider
Most growth comes from the 3 L’s: Loss. Love. Learning.
Loss is central to the human experience in three ways. The first is we often lose in our attempts to succeed. We lose pitches, Clients, jobs, and opportunities. Many times, we win. Some people win little, and others win a lot. But we all lose. But these losses are not the big ones. The second bigger losses are the losses we will face the ones we love and friends either because relationships end, or death comes, and our final loss is that of our lives.
How we live amidst this loss defines a large part of life.
The joy we make is because time is precious, and this moment of victory may not last forever. Given that loss is part of human existence it pays to be kind and to think about how to help those in loss for do not ask for whom the bell tolls since it tolls for you.
A big part of what makes life worth living despite the guarantee of loss is the hope of love and joy of learning. Love of people, of work, of art, of culture. Love may not compute but computers do not love. There is a great deal of progress made over generations on who one can love, the ability to do things one loves and because of modern technology to be exposed to new worlds, horizons, and things to love.
And learning is particularly joyous. Learning in its first form is building knowledge. With great knowledge and practice we build skills and craftsmanship. Learning to see things from other perspectives gives us understanding. Sometimes if we are lucky, we can graduate from knowledge, skills and understanding to wisdom.
Photography by Toni Schneider
To grow use time as a competitive advantage.
Three behaviors/beliefs that are common to most successful individuals and firms:
The Power of Compound Interest/Compound Improvement: The most powerful concept in gaining wealth or knowledge is continuous growth over a sustained time.
See early what others see late: Almost every successful person or company recognized a trend when it was a little stream rather than a gushing river and then committed to align with it.
Persistence: They just keep on going through adversity and setback and they remember Queen Elizabeth the First who said “Time dissolves more problems than man solves”
Leverage these learnings to plan your career over decades:
Early years: a) Find the least sucky job or opportunity you can, b) ideally in an industry which is growing, c) be realistic that most jobs are miserable a third of the time, d) so do not quit or make moves with a short-term horizon, and e) compete with yourself to become better every day rather than compete with others.
Middle years: a) who you work for is more important than the company you work with, b) it’s key to find something you love doing and fit well with and c) invest in building a personal brand.
Late years: a) Unlearn, re-invent and transform because in a changing world what brought you to success will probably not keep you there, b) plan an elegant exit since every career has a midnight hour and the smart people leave at five to twelve and c) start to build a portfolio career that expands from a job to one that includes a passion, consulting, advising and giving back since you are likely to work for decades after you “stop working”.
Photography by Toni Schneider
Combine roots and wings.
To succeed as an individual or as a firm one must have roots and wings.
Roots provide stability, a place to stand, a passed along tradition and a sense of history.
But roots alone which are important to ensure one does not get blown away by the winds of change might anchor one too much to the past and to a status quo which may no longer be relevant.
Thus, the importance of wings.
The ability to raise oneself and see above the horizon, to look down with new perspectives and to ensure that the roots which feed us do not wither by failing to adapt to a new world.
Roots nourish via what we were and where we came from and what we did.
Wings encourage us to go where we need to and to blaze new trails which will lay down tomorrows roots and are a highway to what we will accomplish.
Photography by Toni Schneider
Mindset Architecture
While one may not agree with Hamlets’ statement that “there is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so”, our mindsets matter a lot in how we perceive life, how we are perceived and the degree of success we may have in our varied endeavors.
In rapidly changing and chaotic times an agile mindset can be critical to success. While there are many personal trainers to help sculpt our bodies into somewhat supple forms, there is a scarcity in those who can show us how to exercise our minds to be as flexible as they need to be.
The ability to change one’s mindset and see, feel, and think differently about an issue is often the key differentiator between those who succeed and those who do not.
A few ways to ensure an elegant architecture for your mind include building an opposite case for what you believe since this will both stretch your skills but in today’s polarized world ensure that the self-reinforcing feedback loops due to your algorithmic feeds, media choices or close friends do not lead you to believe that your flatulence smells like Chanel 5.
Photography by Toni Schneider
To grow learn to repair.
Growth is not continuous and often there are many setbacks, detours, shocks and surprises.
Things that break us…
“Everything that has a shape breaks”- Japanese Proverb
But…
“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places”- Ernest Hemingway
And…
“Repair is the creative destruction of brokenness”—Elizabeth Spelman
There are many ways to repair oneself including time and friends.
In addition to these simple and free herbs exist to assuage and heal.
Poetry: Poems restores us to what is deepest in ourselves. Poetry finds the perfect words in the perfect order. The greatest poetry is written at the borders of what can be said. The best poetry is about persevering and resurrecting and restoring oneself through the ups and downs of life while never losing our internal melody …
Water: Flowing water whether it be rainfall, a stream, a river, or the tides of a lake or ocean has a certain timelessness to its biological rhythms and the human internal compass draws us to water as a place of rest, rejuvenation, and repair.
Gardens: One prescription for the pressures and challenges we face is to take a walk in a garden. Every individual is creative, and we have a garden within ourselves that we need to tend to so that we can heal, self-repair and always bloom.
Photography by Toni Schneider
Mind the Gap.
Today in the Instagram age so many of us try to be pixel perfect. But life is not pixel perfect.
In fact, most of life is “minding the gap”
The gap between who we are and what we want to be
The gap in communication between any two people.
The gap between what we say/project externally and what we believe/live with internally
The most contented people tend to be those who have narrowed this gap or being aware of it find ways to accept that life is incomplete, imperfect, often incomprehensible.
They are authentic, trustworthy, happy within themselves not needing constant external validation and have strong relationships and connections with people. They are vulnerable, empathetic, and constantly growing (often making mistakes as they do)
There are others who project power, fame, and wealth but you begin to see that often many have the warmth of a toilet seat, all the external validation they have or seek does not fill the chasm of emptiness that echoes with hollowness and this truth burns and eats their inside even as they smile and blow kisses on the outside.
So, what to do?
George Saunders the Author said “Err in the direction of kindness”
Today in the world we have much rage.
So, best be kind
Kind to others and to yourself.
Here are links to posts on Growth (Each a 6-minute read covering an area touched on above in greater detail)
The Four Questions: How to Lead Today?
Photography by Paul Sanders
There are four questions that most companies and individuals seek answers to:
The Future: How will the future be?
Change Management: How does one navigate change?
Modern Leadership: How to lead today?
Purposeful Growth: How does one grow/remain relevant?
Two weeks ago, the focus was on the future. You can find it here.
Last week’s post was on change. You can read it here.
This week’s focus is leadership.
Photography by Paul Sanders
The cauldron of leadership.
Leading today is challenging for myriad reasons which include but are not limited to:
a. Speed of change: Somebody forgot to add a pause button to the world we live in.
b. Globalization: From climate change to the rise of China to Covid to communications and content creation every business is exposed to global forces.
c. Inter-generational challenges: Everywhere there are differences in expectations, lived experience, communication method and much more between the multiple generations that all need to work together.
d. Disruption from technology: We are living in a platform age where the next generation of quantum computing, exponential leaps in machine learning, rollout of 5g and the rise of new interfaces (voice, augmented reality, and virtual reality) will make previous disruptions look like child’s play.
e. Managing remote and distributed workforces: There is going to be no return to five days in the office so companies are going to have to manage hybrid and distributed workforces.
f. DEI: The importance of diversity, equality, and inclusion which is essential for companies to attract and retain talent, remain innovative and meet customer expectations.
g. ESG (Environment, Social and Governance): From investors to consumers every company is being watched on ESG metrics.
h. Purpose and Values: Companies are realizing that purpose and values are key to remain competitive.
i. Empowered Key Constituencies: Employees, partners and customers now have the megaphones of social media, and access to how people feel about leadership, salaries, and culture of a company by visiting online destinations such as Glassdoor, Indeed and Vault…
Photography by Paul Sanders
The leadership traits that illuminate the path forward.
Everyone can learn and build the traits of a leader if they wish to and are disciplined about it. Becoming a leader does not entail anyone else allowing it, awarding it or being able to take it away.
The six traits are 1) Competence 2) Time Management 3) Integrity 4) Empathy 5) Vulnerability and 6) Inspiration
Competence: To be a leader in any field, at any level, you need to build proficiency.
One needs to learn a craft, hone skills, continuously improve, and remain relevant and up to date.
Too many “leaders” slip into irrelevance by letting their skills atrophy. Today due to the rapid change in demography and technology the half-life of whatever one has learned rapidly decays and the fuel tank of competence needs to be continuously filled.
Time Management: The three “time” skills that one needs to build to become a leader are that of a) bi-focal focus where one balances the urgent and today with the important and tomorrow, b) delegation/teamwork to allow one to think and to grow the talent around you and c) zero based time budgeting which means eliminating something from your schedule whenever you decide to add something to your calendar.
Integrity: Trust is speed, reputation, and an invaluable currency. It can be earned over time but also by making one’s intentions clear and your decision making transparent. The more people wonder what your real agenda is or what determines your decision-making process the more they will be wary about your motives and methods.
Empathy: Leaders bring about change and achieve goals by bringing other people along with them.
To do so it is key to understand where people are coming from. What their fears, concerns, challenges as well as hopes, desires and dreams are.
A simple way is to ask four questions.
a. What is on your mind?
b. What else?
c. If you were not doing this, what would you be doing or how could things be better?
d. How can I help?
Vulnerability: Vulnerability is strength and not a weakness.
By speaking about things, one worries about, one reveals humanity and comes off as believable.
It makes other people step up to try to help and offset a person’s concerns or lack of competence with their or other people’s complimentary skills.
Inspiration: As Blaise Pascal wrote “We choose with our hearts, and we use numbers to justify what we did”.
After the facts and the data, after the PowerPoints and the spreadsheets we often remain unconvinced, dis-believing, and hesitant.
Yes, we are living in a data driven, silicon based, computing world but all of us are story driven, carbon based, feeling individuals!
Joan Didion wrote “we tell ourselves stories in order to live” and thus storytelling and examples bring a vivid reality to get people to rise to another level.
Photography by Paul Sanders
The best leaders are turd slayers!
Often successful companies and individuals defeat themselves.
This comes from some combination of hubris, incestuous thinking, and improperly aligned incentives.
Intel was so deluded by its success around Windows computing and 86 architecture that they missed mobile computing and were late to the needs of Cloud computing. It has been superseded by Nvidia, Taiwan Semiconductor and AMD. And yet another CEO has come and gone.
Wells Fargo was so crazed and incentivized to drive revenue by opening new accounts that they started accounts for dead people and established multiple accounts for customers who did not need them. Billions of dollars of fines and 4 CEO changes in less than 6 years is a result of this besotted behavior.
Soon a trail of emails will show that Boeing for years was aware of the software problems with the 737Max but a zeal to ship, a disconnected or badly informed Board of Directors, and miscommunication deeply damaged this world class firm.
Again, and again leaders gathered and pretended that the brown moist thing in the middle of the conference room table was a brownie when most suspected it was a piece of shit.
There was a turd on the table but either no one informed folks because they were scared, or leaders looked the other way or were delusional enough to confuse an item found in a toilet bowl with a delicacy from a bakery!
The best leaders build an environment where people can call out the turd and they are constantly listening, looking and should one say smelling for it.
Here are some suggestions for you to become a “turd slayer”
a. Say what you think. In business we care what is between your ears. If you cannot say what you think (hey if it is wrong you will be told so, in fact even if you are right, you will be told you are wrong…). Truth eventually has a habit of breaking in. Why not open the door and save time and damage?
b. Assume the person you are trying to be diplomatic to about an issue knows what the issue is. If you bring it up, you will be more respected. If they did not know, you will earn an ally.
c. Do not go with the crowd if your instinct says no. Often group and crowd dynamics take over in much decision making. People think about what their boss wants to hear rather than what they should say. People worry about the impact of their career rather than what is right. Sooner or later too many people are dodging their own shadow and playing mind games that lead to slow and bad decisions.
d. Do not work for a boss who cannot bear the truth or whom you fear. We are living in a time of change and most of the time senior folks need to be told that their core beliefs may no longer be true. I have seen too many companies from newspaper to magazines to many other companies hasten their decline because their leadership did not face reality, in part because their staff feared them.
e. Tell all the truth but tell it slant: Once you have decided to address the turd on the table, you might want to do so in a way, so the message gets through. Ideally it is in a way that does not make the person receiving the news “lose face” so much of this is best done person to person. In other times some humility, self-awareness, metaphors, or humor will be called for. Emily Dickinson says it best in her poem, too much of shock and you will have blinded someone to the turd!
“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind”
So, let’s address the “turd on the table” wherever it might be.
Photography by Paul Sanders
Improve leadership skills through feedback.
One improves slowly over time.
Some days one improves and other days there are setbacks that one learns from. A practice of continuous improvement is what drives not just success for athletes but for all people.
The day we stop learning we stop growing and we begin dying.
By being accountable for our own feedback and by being comfortable helping others with feedback to unleash their growth is a sign of not just successful businesspeople but people who find success in every component of life.
Feedback is a key to growth and the journey forward.
1. Scan for signals: People are constantly providing feedback even if they are not vocalizing it. In some instances, you may gauge it in numerical signals from how well your writing is read, reacted to, or shared or whether you are invited to key meetings. Other times it is to watch facial and body language. You learn a lot by reading a room or a Zoom gallery.
2. Ask for feedback on a regular basis: One can do this with three simple questions which by the way they are framed ensure people are comfortable helping you since they are positive in tone:
a. What worked well?
b. If/when I do this next time what could be better?
c. Who do you think does what I need to do well and where can I learn more?
3. End of Day/Week Self Review: Most people know in their gut what worked or went well and what did not. Many successful individuals end the day or week with some variation of a quick review:
a. The Work: What went well with my work product that I feel proud signing it and what could have gone better.
b. The Team: What felt good and productive in the way I interacted with people and where could I have been better in some ways in handling my or someone else’s emotions.
c. The Improvement: What little improvement did I manage to make today or this week? A new habit. Learning a new approach. Strengthening a relationship.
Everyone can be a leader. We must sculpt at the block of marble we are to let the leader out just as Michelangelo did to let David emerge.
Here are links to posts on Leadership (Each a 6-minute read covering an area touched on above in greater detail)
The Four Questions: How Does One Navigate Change?
Photography by Sergio Larrain
There are four questions that most companies and individuals seek answers to:
The Future: How will the future be?
Change Management: How does one navigate change?
Modern Leadership: How to lead in today’s landscape?
Purposeful Growth: How does one grow/remain relevant?
Last week’s focus was the future. You can find it here: https://rishad.substack.com/p/the-four-questions-how-will-the-future
This week’s focus is Change Management.
Photography by Sergio Larrain
1. Organizations grow and change only when people grow and change.
Every company struggles with change and new ways to grow.
Many specialists help them on the way forward which often result in three very necessary steps which are a) Strategy, b) Mergers &Acquisitions and c) Re-organization.
While essential these three things are just plans.
Michael Tyson said, “Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the face”.
Boards and leadership of firms come quickly to the realization that everything is easy until people get in the way.
Telling people that change is good, threatening them with job loss if they do not change or creating communication materials and slogans to goad them into a cult like devotion to the new dear leader or the way forward rarely works in the short run and will likely fail after the threat of flagellation fades.
Because if there is nothing in it for them, people will out-wit, out-wait, out-pretend, and out-maneuver “management”. Until then they will fill the time genuflecting and bowing and going through the monitored motions of attending the right meetings, muttering the motivational mantras, and stating the slogans required.
The three questions talent want to know in addition to what the strategy is, the acquisition plan and the re-organization plan are:
Why are the recommended changes good for their personal growth?
What are the monetary or other incentives to change?
When and where will training be provided to help them learn the new skills needed?
Photography by Sergio Larrain
2. The Duality of Change: Embrace Technology and Upgrade Talent.
These are the two key drivers, and BOTH are required at the same time.
Fantastic silicon (tech) with mediocre carbon (human talent) or vice versa are unlikely to succeed.
Talented people in a good culture with enabling technology are what create happy customers, innovation, differentiation, revenue growth and profits.
Embrace tech by recognizing your company is a tech company.
Today every company is a tech company.
If a decade ago one had invested in Domino’s, Apple, Facebook, or Google one would have got a better return on investment with Dominos!
Yes, Domino’s makes pizza and delivers it to a person’s home, but they leveraged technology to re-imagine and then transform every single aspect of their business from how customers could order the pizza, monitor its journey, decide where to receive it (at the football field as you tailgated?) and how it was delivered to them (drone anyone?)
They re-imagined stores, understood how delivery services could become parasites eating into their margin while trying to control customer relationships. Domino’s controls every aspect of the customer relationship and delivery.
Creativity is where art and technology intersect so if you are in a creative business, you are in a technology business. Communication changes as technology changes and if you do not adapt (most newspapers for instance were done in by the failure of their management to recognize the impact of technology and not technology itself) your media business may not thrive in the future. Marketing is about understanding and meeting customer requirements and as customers’ requirements, expectations, and behaviors as well as the communication channels change every aspect of marketing becomes a technology infused business.
Smart companies and leaders recognize the critical nature of technology and realize an understanding of its potential should be throbbing in the beating blood of every key employee. Technology implementation may be led by the CTO and CIO but understanding of its impact and a vision about how to leverage it, must reside in every leader and should be central to every aspect of product, service, and experience design.
Upgrade talent: Technology smarts and modern technology are necessary but not sufficient to succeed.
If one reads Will and Ariel Durant’s “ The Lessons of History” it becomes clear that every advance in technology places a premium on superior talent.
Basically, technology is like a lever. It allows talent leverage and scale. It is never technology or talent. It is technology and talent.
Great people with great tools will win.
Today we are living in a truly transformed terrain for talent. One where every aspect of what talent wants from companies and their bosses, the nature of work and much more are being twisted into new shapes.
Leaders everywhere recognize we are at a unique moment in time due to the combined impact of Three Big Shifts : a) Importance of Diversity, Equality and Inclusion, b) Role of ESG, Purpose and Values in a company culture and c) The unbundled workplace and new life mindsets post Covid.
In many cases the better answers to managing change incorporate the concept of AND rather than ONLY. These juxtapositions include not just talent and technology, but ensuring diversity of faces and diversity of voices, understanding the young but recognizing that most countries are aging, and older people control the wealth, and that we will work in many places and not just in the office. To learn more about Juxtapositions and other dualities to incorporate as you manage change look here.
This is the ideal time for leaders to truly re-think their talent strategy, company culture and training plans to attract and upgrade people.
Photography by Sergio Larrain
3. Recruit, train for and promote people with 6 C’s to thrive in a connected world.
The big C of Change can only happen when teams and talent sculpt, hone, and grow the Six C’s
Three of these have to do with the individual (Cognition, Creativity, Curiosity) and three how we connect with each other and the world outside our minds (Collaborate, Communicate, Convince).
Cognition is learning to think and keeping your mental operating system constantly upgraded. This requires deliberate practice and sustained work. Improved cognition is achievable.
Creativity is connecting dots in new ways, looking beyond the obvious and this skill will be key as AI powered computers, data crunch and co-relate faster than we ever will. To be human is to be creative. We need to learn and feed this inside us.
Curiosity is being alive to possibilities, questioning the status quo and asking what if? Today the key competitor or opportunity in any category comes from outside it. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but the lack of curiosity killed the careers of many people.
But being cognitively gifted, creative, and curious will not be enough since we are living in a connected world where eco-systems, teams and linkages is how ideas are born, value created, and long-term careers forged. For these we need to hone and build and train for three other skills.
Collaborate: Collaboration is key to work in a world where API’s (Application Protocol Interfaces) are not just about handshakes between software/hardware but between individuals with different skills, teams in different countries, partners, suppliers and much more.
Communicate: Learn to write. Learn to speak. Learn to present. It may be so old school but watch the people who succeed, and they are good at communication. And all of these can be taught and learned.
Convince: Every one of us is a salesperson regardless of what we believe our title is. This is true even if we do not sell anything at work. We must convince colleagues of our points of view. We must convince our partners to join us on our life journey. Learn to convince and learn to sell.
Photography by Sergio Larrain
4. Cure Inner Dinosaur Disease.
Change sucks.
Change exposes us to vulnerability and loss: of control, of clout, of turf and of face. It demeans the very currency of expertise, seniority, networks, and image we spend decades building. How dare some pompous young pup, some fresh idea, some innovative technology, some fearless startup, or bossy consumer challenge us?
Five weapons slay our inner dinosaurs.
Own change. If you change, others will follow. If they do not, change your partners, or your options. outsourcing or by committee.
Empower the iconoclasts. There are many talented revolutionaries within your corporate environment, but they are often dismissed as “too junior” to add value. Seek out your best thinkers at any level or age. Listen to them, give them a platform and the support they need to achieve their goals. Encourage them to attack your ideas, your company.
Cross the line. We all cower within self-drawn boundaries. Too often we self-edit ourselves, fearful of crossing a line. Or we wait for permission. Let ethics guide you and start changing things. Now. You will be surprised to find that people will not stop you but most likely will follow you.
Leverage organizational inertia: It is possible to get “The Company” todo what we want if we simply start doing it. If getting approval requires lots of forms, presentations, and justification, it means your organization may suffer from so much inertia it might not actually know how to say no. This is a real opportunity for the daring.
Act to change or change your act: You might be a highly talented individual cowering within some imagined or real constraint. If your company is repressing you and you are good, risk taking can only beget one of two outcomes. You will succeed or you will be asked to leave. If you are asked to leave and you are good, many companies will be ready to hire you, or you could go into business for yourself. But staying put and becoming some bureaucratic czar will eventually lead to you resenting yourself and reducing your market value.
Change sucks.
But irrelevance is even worse…
Here are links to posts on Change (Each a 6-minute read covering an area touched on above in greater detail)
Growth and Change are about People.
Two To Transform : Embrace Tech. Upgrade Talent.
This is your industry and your future. You can decide where it will go from here...
The Four Questions: How Will the Future Be?
Photography by Heiko Hellwig
There are four questions that most companies and individuals seek answers to:
The Future: How will the future be?
Change Management: How does one navigate change?
Modern Leadership: How to lead in today’s landscape?
Purposeful Growth: How does one grow/remain relevant?
Every Sunday for the past 48 weeks this letter has shared perspectives on these questions. Over the next four weeks a curated compilation of writing on these topics will be published.
Starting with a focus on the future.
Photography by Heiko Hellwig
Three probabilities about the future.
We are all interested in the future since we will be spending the rest of our lives there.
But the future is unknowable since it is yet to unfold.
However, are three very high probabilities about the future that we should heed so that we can better align and adapt to what is likely to occur.
The future will not fit the containers of the past: From organizational structure to how markets are organized, the existing ways of doing business have been optimized on what has come before. The challenge for most of us is to realize that the future refuses to be contained in the containers of the past whether it be media, money, markets, or mindsets.
The future will come from the slime and not the heavens: Future prognosticating is often aligned with crystal ball gazing, scenario planning and blue-sky thinking. We look ahead and above. We watch market leaders and todays visionaries and time after time we are surprised that the future did not come from where we were looking but from those we looked down upon or were outside the “velvet rope” or who never appeared on our radar.
The future while challenging for some is likely to be much better for most: Someone said that they were not afraid of the future, but they were scared out of their minds by the headlines. What enrages powers the algorithms that are built on what engages. While there are real challenges and some segments of society and certain regions fail and slip back, history indicates that for humanity the future can be looked at with optimism.
Photography by Heiko Hellwig
Six Forces driving the future
Everywhere in the world six unstoppable intertwined forces are shifting the very landscape that business and society have been built on.
Multi-polar globalization: Globalization is here to stay but it will be no longer a western centric but a multi-polar form of globalization increasingly with an Asian flavor as China and India continue to rise.
The Three Divides: Every country is dealing with three internal divides of age, ethnicity, and geography. In most advanced economies and China populations are both rapidly aging and also declining, creating new stresses and opportunities. The United States and Europe are dealing with multi-ethnic populations among younger generations that have different values than older generations and every country is seeing a schism between their urban and rural populations in economic outlook, voting patterns and even vaccination uptake.
The Third Connected Age of Technology: Already Society has been greatly impacted by the First Connected Age where we connected to discover (Search) and connected to transact (E-commerce) and the Second Connected Age where we connected to each other (Social) and all the time (Mobile).
We have now entered Third Connected Age where we will enjoy four new types of connections as data connects to data and writes software (AI), and all our devices are connected to Supercomputers (Cloud), with much faster connections (5G) and new interfaces to connect (Voice/AR/VR).
The age we are going to enter will be both magical in what will become available to us as individuals (AI capability is supposedly doubling every 6 months vs the old Moore’s law of 18 months) but challenging on a Society level (anything a machine can do it will do and more and more things will be done by machines)
And with more powerful algorithms which will make today’s sinister newsfeed look childish fueled with the power of facial recognition, will we be entering a utopian or dystopian society or more likely a combination?
A Re-wiring of health, education, and financial industries: In many countries these areas account for over a third of their GDP and are filled with legacy structures and rules which are now being buffeted by a new generation of competitors, new enabling technologies, and a shift in mindsets among regulators and consumers. Even established firms are filled with leaders who understand the challenges and opportunities and the urgency to change and so one will see significant shifts in all these areas.
Climate Change: Denying climate change is like denying gravity. It does not matter what we “think” for just like if we reject gravity, it will not prevent us from becoming a symphony of broken bones and goo if we step out of a multi-storied building to broadcast our “beliefs.” Business and their Boards/ CEO’s take a leadership role on all forms of sustainability. They do this not only because it is the right thing to do but because without it no “Purpose Mantra” rings true and as importantly their customers, and their employees demand it. Big investment firms like Black Rock monitor it.
Second and Third Order Effects of Vaccine Drives: Over the next two years different regions of the world will be vaccinated at different levels. One already sees the impact of differing rates of vaccines determining the outlook for society in the US where the vaccinated rates vary from 15% to 75% depending on the region. Now imagine Africa with only 1% and many Asian and Latin America countries in the single digits. From travel to mutations the second and third order effects of vaccination drives will impact our near term and possible long-term future.
Photography by Heiko Hellwig
The Great Re-invention (The Impact of Covid-19 as an Ongoing Force)
Covid-19 has changed the contours of the future in ways that many of us may not be fully comprehending
After nearly eighteen months of fragility, resilience and in some countries resurrection, we are changed as businesses, as society and individuals.
And one would be short sighted in thinking that the key driver of Covid-19 is limited to an acceleration of digital channels and technologies.
It is far deeper.
There will be no new normal or going back but rather a new strange as we think anew for what is ahead as everyone re-thinks their lives, their careers, their leaders and re-evaluates what is important.
The signs are everywhere including the how companies are struggling to attract talent or get them back to the office. It is seen with a Microsoft study that indicates that 40 percent of workers in the USA are thinking of switching jobs.
Photography by Heiko Hellwig
The Transformed Talent Terrain
Five forces ricocheting off and re-enforcing each other are sculpting a new terrain.
Demographics: Most countries outside of Africa and the Middle East are aging as people live longer and there is less immigration and fewer children being born. This means more people are going to stay in the workforce longer. In addition, those aged under 34 having grown up in a very different economy (less growth and more shocks), technological (digital natives) and social set up (more liberal and more ethnically diverse) and have very different mindsets and expectations than those over 50 that might be currently leading companies and making up most of Board leadership.
Unbundled Workplace: Post vaccine the office is not dead but it will play a lesser role for a variety of reasons from talent preference to work part of the time from home or near their homes ( a third place that is not home or the old HQ office), a need for companies to either manage costs ( lower real estate costs) or be more aggressive in filling open roles and finding scarce expertise (allowing talent to live wherever they want), Covid-19 has made remote work a reality and very few companies will be able to compete for talent without being open to it.
Technology: While broadband technology, cloud-based computing, and communication software like Zoom and Slack have enabled remote work and collaboration we are on the cusp a quantum jump of enabling technology including integrated AI for improved competency, Voice and Augmented Reality for leaps in communication, and 5G for faster and more resilient connections.
Government and Policy: Most governments are tilting resources to labor and collective infrastructure rather than capital and private enterprise, recognizing that after years of disinvestment in society and poor market driven outcomes in some areas such as climate change the pendulum may have swung too far. It is also clear that company leadership is now being asked to take stands and work with, or influence government.
Culture: After a long while diverse voice and points of view are now both being heard and paid attention to all over the world as for too long too many talented people’s potential was never unleashed or recognized as well as many company cultures needed to be rethought to ensure greater fairness, equality, and opportunity.
Photography by Heiko Hellwig
The Future of Work
The nature of work: We are all going to be gig workers. The only difference is that the lucky ones will have longer, higher paying gigs with better benefits like a consultant at McKinsey or members of a movie/television crew who come together for as long as the project takes and then the disband and recombine in new ways on the next project. Many others will be working for Uber, Door Dash or on contract for tech and other companies (Google has many more contract workers than full time employees already and the divergence is growing). This change will be driven by employees wanting flexibility, companies wanting to make costs variable versus fixed, enabling technologies that allow for distributed and fractional work, as well as the shrinking half-life of skills that place a premium on plug and play work forces.
How work is done: Almost all work will be instrumented and technologically augmented. Today everything is measured including page views and interactions with each piece written by an online writer, time spent answering a tele-marketing call or billable time spent by doctors in seeing patients or lawyers in seeing Clients. If there is an emission of data it will be used to stack, compare, enhance, iterate, and improve.
Where work is done: The ‘office” of 2019 will become like a typewriter did three decades ago in the age of computers and Microsoft Office. A collectible and a romantic notion of a time past. Or movie theater chains believing that people will flock back to their locations to see movies at the same frequency as before despite every blockbuster being available at home the same day as part of subscription service
Photography by Heiko Hellwig
Ruptures in the Mediascape
Every decade or so there are significant shifts in the media landscape.
In the early 80’s we saw the birth of cable, the 90’s the beginning of the World Wide Web, less than a generation ago we witnessed the explosion in social media and the criticality of mobile phones as revolutionary creation, consumption, and distribution platforms/instruments.
We are now amid what maybe the most significant rupture in the mediascape whose implications on business and society are only beginning to be sensed. A rupture that is not just driven by advances in technology but a very deep wrinkle in the very fabric of every element of how media, messaging, content, information are created, designed, distributed, consumed, shared, and trusted.
Media is becoming mongrelized as the difference between offline and online media, above the line and below the line communication and audio/video/word blur. Even more importantly the differences between social, mobile, search and e-commerce make very little sense and yet so many organizations are set up this way. A shoppable mobile video with chat support belongs to which part of a marketer’s organization?
In addition to mongrel media another key change is determining who is a creator and what is a media company? In the United States nearly 50 million people define themselves as creators and Kylie Jenner’s Instagram gets more traffic than the Super Bowl and Oscars combined.
Add to this the rise of Voice (Amazon Echo, Google Home, Podcasting, Clubhouse), the emergence of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality and the renaissance of Out of Home as an electronic wired interactive media one can sense the entire media landscape is ready to rupture.
Here are links to posts on the Future. (Each a 6-minute read covering an area touched on above in greater detail)
The Future: https://rishad.substack.com/p/the-future
The River of Change: https://rishad.substack.com/p/a-river-of-change
The Great Re-Invention (Covid Impact): https://rishad.substack.com/p/the-great-re-invention
The Transformed Talent Terrain: https://rishad.substack.com/p/the-transformed-talent-terrain
The Future of Work: https://rishad.substack.com/p/the-future-of-work
Ruptures in the Mediascape: https://rishad.substack.com/p/ruptures-in-the-mediascape
Next week we address the second of the four questions is which is how do companies, teams and people navigate these changes?
Privacy Matters.
Photograph from the CF Gallery Australia.
Over the next few years privacy will grow increasingly more important than it is already.
Matters around privacy will become central to every society, business and country and the way these different establishments handle privacy will drive everything from brand value, market capitalization, economic output, and the happiness of citizens.
Why Privacy is important.
In 2014 at a TED Global Conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the journalist Glenn Greenwald gave one of the finest talks on why privacy is important.
It is a must watch.
Privacy is important because we are not who we are when somebody is watching…
When someone negatively impacts our privacy, they might prevent us from being ourselves.
In a quest to identify and put us in a box they may impact the very identity they are trying to understand.
Photograph from the CF Gallery Australia.
Privacy and Life Operating System (LoS).
Privacy has been an issue for a long time. It started to become more central to everyday life in the First Connected Age which began in 1993 with the launch of the World Wide Web and the rise of Search Engine Marketing and E-Commerce.
But it was really in 2007 with the beginning of the Second Connected Age where everybody was connected all the time (mobile) and everybody was connected to everybody (social) that the volume, speed and granularity of data exploded exponentially. The primary monetization engine of the First and Second Connected age was advertising and the ability to leverage data for marketing purposes made the underlying data structure an Advertising Operating System (AoS).
But as the 2016 elections in the US, Brexit and much more have shown the You-Tube’s, Facebook’s and Twitters of the world had unleashed a targeting and content delivery system so powerful that they were used to not just sell soap but determine elections, drive enraged crowds, and impact society.
What began as an Advertising Operating System to sell product is really a Society Operating System (SoS)and brings with it powerful positive and negative forces that impact society. Data collected to sell goods and services drives politics, promotes magical thinking, and can kill people through the promotion of bad science.
And we have not seen anything yet as we enter the Third Connected Age.
In the Third Connected Age the centrality of data will grow more important as a) data connects to data via machine learning and even more powerful algorithms, b) data drives an Internet of Things driven by 5G, c) we connect with devices and data in new ways from voice to augmented reality and d) everything is driven by cloud-based quantum computing.
As data, connections and algorithms permeate our financial and health records, connect our automobiles and homes to navigation systems and electricity grids, and mark our place and identity in the matrix of life we will be embedded in a Life Operating System (LoS).
Photograph from the CF Gallery Australia.
Privacy as business strategy.
There are many reasons that Apple may be emphasizing privacy to sell its products and ecosystems. On one hand it helps them curb the advertising business of Android Operating System creator Google (though they also accept billions from Google to make its search engine the default engine on Apple products), or it could be a personal animosity between Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg, or a recognition that its highly desired and expensive products are bought by people who do not need an advertising subsidy to afford the products and services.
Apple also recognizes that a focus on privacy earns them the trust necessary to continue to integrate their products and services into a wider spectrum of our lives. MacOS and iOS will continue to blend and merge into one flavor of Life Operating System as Apple technology continues to embed into larger parts of their customers lives. The Apple Watch is a foray into health. Apple Pay and Apple Card into finance. The HomePod and Apple TV will integrate along with the iPhone and other devices into our homes. Apple AirPods are in our ears and soon Apple Augmented Reality devices will be over our eyes. All this before the much rumored and anticipate iCar!
Apple faces its own privacy challenge due to its dependence on China for most of its manufacturing and a significant portion of its sales. They cannot be as stringent about about the privacy of Chinese citizens if they wish to remain on the right side of the government of that country.
So, Apple will continue to a) increasingly focus on services and not just hardware, b) move manufacturing into other countries (India among others), c) create new products that are not manufactured in China and d) overcompensate on privacy outside of China to offset the challenges there.
Amazon who’s next trillion will be driven in part by health care has built the third largest advertising business after Google and Facebook with what appears to be a far more consumer/customer driven approach to privacy recognizing that its next frontiers require trust.
Google has temporarily dialed back some of its decisions to make its browser and ad operating system more privacy friendly, but they will continue in this direction.
While we are living in a platform age, every business and not just the major platforms will grapple between privacy and their need to identify and build relationships with their customers.
Because privacy is at its heart about trust.
And brands, leaders, and companies cannot thrive in the medium to long run without trust.
Trust is the currency that has most receded in current times as measured by the Edelman Trust Barometer.
As we all begin to be enveloped in a matrix of personalized devices and experiences it will be clear that privacy will be key, and every major company and media organization will need to think and plan deeply on privacy.
Photograph from the CF Gallery Australia.
Privacy is more than data.
A company’s approach to privacy will mark its reputation, its Brands, and its management.
Privacy declarations will be even more comprehensive than today’s documents that inundate us on how and when our data will be shared and used.
Because privacy will be far more than a data policy.
We will see Privacy become a key part of a company’s ESG (Environment Social Governance) reports and be knitted into Values and Mission statements. The culture of places will be impacted by how they deal with not just the privacy of their customers but also their employees.
Photograph from the CF Gallery Australia.
The private, the personal, data and true understanding.
David Orr is a poetry critic for the New York Times who a few years ago wrote a book called “Beautiful and Pointless”. In the opening chapter titled “the personal” he seeks to show how “private” and “personal” are two very different things.
David provides a list of sentences:
Bob Smith was born on November 9, 1971.
Bob Smith’s favorite password is “nutmeg456”
Bob Smith’s Social Security number is 987-65-4320
Bob Smith has a foot fetish.
As a child, Bob Smith had an imaginary friend named Mr. Pigwort.
Whenever Bob Smith hears a high wind, it makes him think of his wife, who died ten years earlier, and he hears her voice faintly calling, as if from a great distance.
He notes that the first three sentences contain deeply private information, but they don’t seem personal like the last three.
Mr. Orr then states:
“The point here is that our conception of “the personal” has to do more than the data of our lives, no matter how sensitive. It has to do with how we see ourselves, how we see others, how we imagine others see us, how they actually see us, and the potential embarrassment, joy, and shame that occur at the intersection of these different perspectives”
In an age obsessed with data we often believe that data can explain, and data can convince.
To a point it might, but we should never forget that meaning lies within us and combines emotion and rational thinking.
We often barely know ourselves and can be two different people in two different moods.
Because we choose with our hearts and use numbers to justify what we just did.
And we need space and privacy to be who we are.