Loss. Love. Learning.
Rishad Tobaccowala
Loss.
Loss is central to the human experience in three ways.
First, is we often lose in our attempts to succeed. We lose promotions, jobs and opportunities. We lose money and valuable assets.
Many times, we also win.
Some people win a little and others win a lot.
But we all lose.
But these losses however daunting and disappointing are not the big ones.
The second set of losses are the losses we will face of loved ones and friends either because relationships end, or death comes.
And our final loss is that of ourselves.
Our health.
And then our lives.
Franz Kafka wrote that “the meaning of life is that it ends”
How we live amidst these losses 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 and deal with and recover from loss.
To learn to practice “personal resurrections” after setbacks and to endure and keep on growing and going.
Rishad Tobaccowala
Love.
A big part of what makes life worth living despite the guarantee of loss is love.
Love of people, of work, of art, of culture, of craft and of things and hobbies.
It is in fact this love and attachment that is deeply intertwined with the feelings of loss.
The Buddha said to avoid suffering one should avoid attachment.
Attachment is programmed into our DNA, so as a way of living and an ideal or a guiding path this is all well and good but is hard to live this way.
Love does not compute; and computers though they are getting increasingly advanced into deluding us that they love us since they ingest all our stories and then customize their reaction to be our “personalized” friends cannot love us.
In part that is because they cannot feel.
And therefore cannot feel loss.
And with love comes loss and love is an anti-dote to loss.
Also, though we individuals care about ourselves and what is ours, it is the love of something bigger, greater and outside us that often matters more.
Thus the human search for purpose, identity, meaning and belief.
Rishad Tobaccowala
Learning.
Today we have large language models that learn by ingesting, sorting, parsing, co-relating, re-combining and digesting all they can eat.
It is clearly a form of learning and the machines are getting “smarter”
Thus while machines may not know about love and loss they definitely can learn.
But do they feel joy as they learn?
Without the reality of loss or the feeling of love can they turn information into insight into wisdom?
Learning is particularly joyous.
Learning in its first form is building knowledge.
With great knowledge and practice we build skills and craftsmanship.
Human progress has been driven by learning and passing on the learning to those who follow.
We architect, hone and sculpt our lives into forms that fit and resonate.
Learning is also seeing things from other perspectives which gives us understanding.
Sometimes if we are lucky, we can graduate from knowledge, skills and understanding to wisdom.
Love, loss and learning are intertwined with each one feeding and influencing and resonating with each other.
Life is about love, loss and learning and how we live our life is deeply affected by how we incorporate and then unify, balance and integrate them into our lives.
Three Years Later…
This is the 156th issue of this thought letter.
It has been published each and every Sunday morning (Central US Time) for three years.
The thought letter was conceived to be both a gift to the reader in that it would be totally free, 100 percent opt-in, easy to opt out, would carry no advertising, nor use the mailing list in any way besides to email the weekly post.
If done right it also be a way to build goodwill for the author.
Three years and a quarter of a million words later ( 5 full length books! ) the thought letter has nearly 22,000 subscribers each of whom have chosen to enter their email address into the subscription box, enjoys high engagement (weekly open rate of 48%), a very low opt out rate ( about .1% or 25 readers of 22,000 a week or a 5% annual churn) and adds about 150 new readers a week.
Subscribers include hundreds of CEO’s, thousands of C-Level executives with a concentration in the fields of marketing, technology, strategy, innovation, HR and education.
The readership far exceeds the 22,000 subscribers with a much larger group of readers engaging with the content in other ways including LinkedIn ( last week’s post on A Company of One was seen by 30,000), or in other publications where it is re-published including Media Village and The Continuum among others in the US and around the world, and most importantly it is forwarded weekly across organizations and to friends and often to the readers children!
Readership spans 135 countries with most of the readers living in eight markets ( United States and Canada in North America, India and Singapore in Asia, the United Kingdom, France and Spain in Europe and Australia).
The five most popular posts have been:
Re-Thinking Presentations which suggests that if one cannot make a case in 9 slides or less one does not have a case to make.
12 Career Lessons which takes ten minutes to read is far more useful than most career books for any stage of one’s career.
The Future of Marketing is People reminds us that most marketing speak including consumer fixation is possibly wrong and most firms are severely marketing challenged particularly in the Board Room.
De-Bossification! is a real thing and if you are or want to be a “boss” watch out! It is one of the reasons companies are struggling with hybrid-remote work.
Ruptures in the Mediascape written two years ago anticipated all the big shifts that have happened since.
Also strongly recommend these five:
The Four Shifts which explain the four shifts that are driving the future which every individual and company needs to align with.
The Six Keys To Change explains why change is difficult and having a strategy, M&A plan and a re-org alone almost never work.
Six Ways to Be and Feel Better will likely leave you changed as a person and is the one most shared by parents with their grown kids.
Architecting Joy begins by defining success as the ability to spend time in the ways that give you joy and then builds from that…
Time Passages reminds us that time is all we have and looks at it through different prisms.
Now 3 years of writing distilled and organized on one page!
The 156 pieces written over the past three years span 12 different subject areas including The Future, Managing Change, Becoming More Effective, Leading with Soul, Creating Great Cultures, The Future of Work, Managing Careers, Personal Growth and even Wisdom but have kept away from news and politics and therefore have remained evergreen.
You can access the best of these pieces organized, curated and kept up to date here: https://rishadtobaccowala.com/100
This one page is accessible on any device anywhere in the world totally free and all the materials can be used with or without attribution.
Many professionals book mark it and use it as a thought starter (like a GPT-4 but written by a human) when they are grappling with a topic like managing teams and creating cultures, learning to learn or on remaining relevant in an AI age. Some share articles as part of their monthly or weekly all hands. Others use the many frameworks shared to help brainstorm ideas.
Do click here and take a look at it. It could save a lot of time and help one become more productive.
Thank you for being a reader and please share this post with others who may benefit from this writing by forwarding it or clicking below:
And if you would like to get this writing delivered every Sunday for free please subscribe
A Company of One.
It is projected that in 2027, 86.5 million people will be freelancing in the United States making 50.1 percent of the population.
A combination of five forces is driving this re-configuring of the workforce:
Aging: In the United States 10,000 people turn 65 every day and many of this group continue to work because they need to so as to make ends meet, or want to for reasons of identity, community, purpose and/or growth but cannot or do not want to work full time for a company. Many firms which are finding it difficult to access certain skills and experience are now becoming far more flexible in their approaches to retaining their seasoned workforce on a part-time basis.
New Mindsets: 76 percent of Gen-Z want to work for themselves and 66% of Gen-Z who hold a full-time job also have a side-gig or side-hustle. In addition, Covid-19 have many people re-framing the question of how life could fit into work ? with how does work fit into a life?
Remote/Hybrid Work: Remote-Hybrid work provides the flexibility to work anywhere for anybody which can enhance opportunities to get work while moving to locations that cost less which allows for more career options.
The Technology powered Gig-Economy: New marketplaces from Fiverr and UpWork to find talent and work, AWS and Open-AI to access technology, Etsy and Shopify to sell and connect to marketplaces, Tik-Tok and Meta to connect and brand, combined with companies need to remain agile is driving more talent and firms to a plug and play workplace.
AI and Web 3: While AI may not lead to fewer jobs it is going to change the nature of most if not all jobs and the half-life of skills are going to decay considerably faster. Web-3 while out of favor will eventually enable more ownership and equity for individuals. Most importantly many of these technologies are now providing super-computing power to everybody who cares to learn, allowing individuals to get all the benefits of scaled companies. Otter.ai allows you to have an AI assistant to take notes and write meeting summaries. Side-Kick and Magic from Shopify provides entrepreneurs with an army of digital helpers which allow for scaling without adding staff.
Whether it is finding work post-retirement, working a side-hustle or passion project to make ends meet or build an expertise or create an off-ramp, or filling the gaps between full-time employment at firms which are often trigger-happy in adding and removing talent from their payrolls, the smart professional prepares to be a company of one.
But even if you do not fit any of these categories be aware that companies are creating internal marketplaces where opportunities can be identified and applied for and teams of experts can form and dissolve around projects.
As a result, for an individual to thrive in a company they will need to learn how to operate as a company of one. The combined power of the Avengers is because each of the Avengers is powerful on their own and not just because they learn to work as one.
Think of yourself as a better paid Uber driver with benefits if you work for a company.
If your expertise is needed at that time or in a particular market and location, and your collaboration and ability to work in teams is highly rated you will be in demand.
If not, as companies manage and monitor costs and increasingly find ways to plug into resources all the time everywhere you will find yourself parked permanently.
Or consider the Hollywood model where expertise come together on tv or movie projects and then the people disband and move on. Very few people work at a studio. Most people work in teams where they bring their skill whether it be casting, directing, catering or make up etc. The future of business will be similar as companies begin re-aggregating expertise around projects versus having hordes of generalists or people hanging around for a project. McKinsey and Bain have done this for years.
I am not suggesting that everyone will be a freelancer going from gig to gig but if you build your career with the mindset of continually honing expertise, working well with other people in teams and being flexible you will succeed in your company of tens of thousands versus thinking of yourself as a cog in big machine waiting for someone to care for or build your career.
In fact, I strongly encourage people to stay if they can at their firms as long as they are growing or can find opportunities to grow. Make no mistake there are huge advantages to work amidst people you can learn from, with infrastructure that these firms have, their reputations that create a glow and aura around each talented individual, and growing because access to amazing Clients, big challenges and amazing leaders and mentors.
But to succeed over the long run in a firm you need to maximize your options. If you have options, it means you are market competitive, and it allows you to tolerate a lot of drama and day to day nonsense at your current firm because you care about the firm and you know you have options. Because you have options you have skills that are valuable to your firm. People stay a long time in firms where they are growing and building skills and they never feel trapped.
You stay because you can go.
To thrive in a company today regardless of the size one must be responsible for one’s own career and ensure one is remaining relevant and not living on the fumes of past successes or believe that change will come slowly.
Becoming a Company of One.
1. Read A Company of One by Paul Jarvis. He asks us to consider if the real key to a richer and more fulfilling career, is to be able to work for oneself, determine one’s own hours, and become a (highly profitable) and sustainable company of one? It is critical like never before to identify opportunities that combine your skills and the market. To thrive means to “flourish by doing what one is best at for which there is a market.” Do not wait to find this later when you are out of work or under pressure but do so now. Finding what you flourish at allows you to further your career at your existing company. Again, operating with a company of one mindset does not mean you need to work in a company of one but it is a mindset that ensures you are honing skills and have options which allow you to stay in your firm.
2. Architect, hone and sculpt your key superpowers: The true power of any organization is a combination of th power of the talent to work as one but also that each person has superpowers and is very talented in some niche, expertise or craft. The Avengers are successful not just because they work together but because each one of them whether it be Wonder Woman or Iron Man have their own unique powers. They have powers of “one”.
Career Turbocharging is a piece that helps you identify your superpowers:
Career Turbocharging!
RISHAD TOBACCOWALA | DECEMBER 19, 2021
3. Build out your online and digital presence. Your resume is not what is on your hard drive or LinkedIn. It is increasingly your digital presence, particularly the first page that people see on Google when they search for you or the answer to a prompt “who is X” on GPT-4, Bing, Bard or Claude.
Go search for yourself but do not look just at the search results. Click the news tab, the image tab, and the video tab and recognize that this is the first impression that will be made and also this is what the AI engines will ingest. Ask a chat bot about yourself. This is “you” as the future becomes more distributed and digital. Try searching for your colleagues and competitors on search and chat-bots and you will be surprised at how your perceptions of a person can change.
To help create a better presence think of being active on two or three platforms like Twitter (X), Threads, Instagram, Tik-Tok and LinkedIn, develop a website (using Square Space or some other service), consider writing a blog on some passion or hobby or even start a newsletter.
4. Invest deeply in relationships including the firm you work at: In a connected age it is critical that you have as many allies and people who will vouch for you and serve both as leads and references.
Try to stay as long as you can at a firm working to fix issues with jobs and people there vs giving up or leaving. Do not believe the grass is greener on the other side because you will find that it is often because it is fertilized with bullshit.
If you do leave do not burn bridges because everyone will check with the places you worked at or the people who worked there especially if you decide to become a company of one. Elegant exits are as critical as energetic entrances.
Think long term. Help as many people as you can as often as you cannot just because it may help you but you will feel great doing so. Even if you spend your entire life working at a large company as most people do keep thinking of yourself as just yourself without your title, the budgets and the armies of supplicants or staff. Many people confuse their title with themselves and are shocked to find the hard way that it was the title and not them that people were genuflecting too.
5. Invest in learning: The day a human being and a professional stops learning is the day they stop growing and career decay sets in. Anybody who does not spend a few hours a week learning is falling behind today.
Here is everything I have learned about learning.
Learning to Learn.
RISHAD TOBACCOWALA | FEBRUARY 13, 2022
We are entering a brave new world and the future is hard to tell. Maximizing optionality in a changing world requires each of us to think with a company of one mindset even if we wish to spend decades at our current place of work.
Admiration: Yuval Noah Harari
A great piece of advice has been “find something or someone to admire”.
When we spend time with people or things or places, we admire we learn and grow.
We usually are inspired, our goals enhanced, our benchmarks raised though we may also feel envy and diminished in comparison.
In a life of limited time, we can spend our hours being exposed to and learning from those we admire, or the things we admire whether they be a book or painting or a place or we can spend time enraged, complaining, while surrounding ourselves with those less accomplished so we feel better in comparison.
Most of us do both but when we feel ourselves in a downward spiral maybe we should say to ourselves “let us spend time with something or somebody we admire!”
Yuval Noah Harari is a historian, author and philosopher who is an extra-ordinary thinking and feeling filled human being who tells stories while warning us about stories, who explains technology while being suspicious about technology and a person who will change the way you perceive and understand things.
He is one of many people and things I admire, and this is the first of a series of posts that will focus on these individuals or things.
Here is Yuval’s website which is teeming with goodies: https://www.ynharari.com/
Yuval’s three books’ Sapiens, Homo Deus and 21 Lessons for the 21st century are each absolutely incredible and are worth reading and re-reading.
Long before data was cool Yuval pointed out that there was a new religious order called “dataism” which he described eight years ago in the Financial Times like this:
”For thousands of years humans believed that authority came from the gods. Then, during the modern era, humanism gradually shifted authority from deities to people.
Humanist thinkers such as Rousseau convinced us that our own feelings and desires were the ultimate source of meaning, and that our free will was, therefore, the highest authority of all. Now, a fresh shift is taking place. Just as divine authority was legitimized by religious mythologies, and human authority was legitimized by humanist ideologies, so high-tech gurus and Silicon Valley prophets are creating a new universal narrative that legitimizes the authority of algorithms and Big Data.
This novel creed may be called “Dataism”. In its extreme form, proponents of the Dataist worldview perceive the entire universe as a flow of data, see organisms as little more than biochemical algorithms and believe that humanity’s cosmic vocation is to create an all-encompassing data-processing system — and then merge into it.”
Yuval has been studying AI for 8 years and has some very interesting perspectives including that AI is the first human tool created that can make decisions and is capable of creating ideas!
The Atomic Bomb could not decide to launch itself or a piano to will itself to create a Beethoven sonata but AI can.
To illustrate his thinking have listed below 10 perspectives shared by Yuval in a recent conversation with Lex Fridman that is nearly three hours long and is worth every minute of your time. You can listen to it as a podcast or watch it on You Tube. Both embedded below:
The Twilight of Homo-Sapiens: In less than one hundred years Homo-Sapiens may not exist for a couple of different reasons. One possible path is that we destroy ourselves due to nuclear war or climate change or some other calamity. The second is we harness AI and Biotech in ways that give us so much power that we re-program our minds and bodies and create a new generation of us as different from homo-sapiens as homo-sapiens are from Neanderthals.
Intelligence and Consciousness are very different: Machines can be intelligent but they are not yet conscious and cannot feel. Life is basically feeling and reacting to sensory experiences and at its core is suffering.
Stories Rule: From religion to economics, humans have thrived due to our ability to create, believe in and distribute stories. Look under most power structures and you will see a scaffolding of stories. We fight over stories. There are human stories like the US Constitution that can be changed and there are God Stories like those in religion which are infallible and cannot be modified.
AI will feel very human and create intimate feelings because it focusses on us, listens to us and knows what stories will resonate with each of us: Algorithms already have hijacked our attentions and modern AI is learning our culture by imbibing all our stories and art. Today in a world where so many people are lonely Chat GPT resonates because it listens to us, answers us, and feels more empathetic than another person. Increasingly the machine understands us better than we understand ourselves.
Without conversations and learning and checks and balances democracy will not exist: Once upon a time politicians in Congress would debate each other and be open to change their minds. This is no longer true. In Israel, the Prime-Minister is trying to remove the checks and balances of their Supreme Court, and this has divided the nation. The world is constantly changing and requires lots of people and perspectives. Truth is complex. Growth does not happen by telling simple stories, closed minds and hating all those who oppose a point of view. Insularity and Messiah complexes lead to disasters such as Putin living in his own mind building a reality free unhinged story about Ukraine.
How Liberals Differ from other “isms”: Liberals answer “yes” to the following three questions of whether a) individuals should choose their government, b) select their work and c) find their mates. Conservatives are liberal regardless of their economic and market beliefs. Fascists and nationalists and communists are different in that they believe a leader or national interest, or a certain class matters more than individuals. Aspects of life such as human rights, or beauty or truth matter little.
Why other “isms’ are popular: Fascists and nationalists endure because they blame other people for a world which many feel is spinning out of control and where we feel left behind. These simple stories never find any fault with those who follow the ideology but blame a cabal of “they” and “them”. They do not traffic in truth because truth is complicated and painful and very few people want to deal with reality.
The idea of powerful cabals who operate in secret is nonsense but believed all the time for the issues facing people: Yes, there are small groups who might have massive power like President Xi of China and his Standing committee, but they are not secret. You cannot be all powerful if nobody knows about you. As importantly you can be very powerful, but the world behaves in ways nobody can control. Everything that the US tried to do in Iraq ended up doing the exact opposite. It gave birth to Isis. Strengthened Iran. Massively hurt the US in lives lost, treasure expanded, and soft power diminished. There is no “they” who are so powerful and secret, but we are all susceptible to stories that pin our and society’s troubles on others.
Feminism is probably the most successful revolution in history: Across eons regardless of geography or time with rare exceptions patriarchy ruled and women were second class citizens with few rights. Without firing a shot or breaking an egg a revolution, which is still underway around the world called Feminism is spreading and it is the one that has inspired everything from Gay rights to more.
Reinvention is the only strategy: Nobody can predict the future and it is changing fast. Computer coding may be done by AI soon and many programming jobs which were seen as jobs of the future may disappear. Translation in real time by your phone and other technologies is already replacing the need for translators and learning languages. Industries will rise and fall, and change will accelerate. The only way forward is to be flexible, upgrade one’s mind and skills and continuously reinvent. It is easy to become deluded and make up stories that insulate us from changing but life is change. Adaptation requires courage, an optimistic mindset, help from others and a sense of compassion.
5 Keys to Ensure Professional Relevance.
Photography by David Nissen
Professionals across the world, across industries and across all levels (but particularly middle to senior executive levels) are grappling with the issue of relevance.
1) Are our businesses and business models relevant?
2) Are our organizational designs, incentive plans, and talent relevant?
3) Are our partners, suppliers, and the way we tap into external resources relevant?
4) Are our positions and roles relevant?
5) Are WE still relevant?
While we may give voice to the first three there is no doubt we are also concerned about our own roles and our own capabilities.
This hold true whether we work in a company of a hundred thousand or are self-employed.
Photography by David Nissen
Business Models
The past decade has made clear to every business and individual that the biggest threats and opportunities to any business comes from outside our category or competitive set.
The moment one benchmarks only against current competitors or historical performance and cost data one has begun a slide into irrelevance.
Dollar Shave club came for Gillette.
Google came for the newspapers and classified advertising.
Tesla and Uber came for the auto industry.
Netflix and Spotify and Substack came for the content industry.
Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs is coming for Anthem, United Health and other PBMs.
None of these were spotted or taken seriously till they did significant damage to the leaders.
Completely new ways of marketing in a world of empowered purpose driven people, innovative experience and data driven storytelling is challenging every marketer and agency and media company.
Do not ask for whom the bell tolls and what the era of the Third Connected Age of AI, Block Chain, AR/VR and 5G ( read here about what real 5G is already changing experiences and expectations when it is deployed in private networks) are coming for.
They are coming for all of us, but they are also coming to help us re-invent and turbo-charge ourselves, our companies, our growth, and our future.
We are in Re-Inventing Times!
To Re-invent we should consider the blank sheet of paper exercise:
a) Identify a challenge or opportunity.
b) Assume we have every asset we currently have.
c) Do not constrain our solution except that we need to keep within the law, what is technologically possible today and some goal to break-even or show results in x months.
Every team that does this exercise will come up with amazing ideas to address challenges or opportunities and will realize that most constraints are self-imposed. If we do not do what we have imagined we can to address our challenges and seize our opportunities to re-invent someone else will and they will clean our clocks
Photography by David Nissen
Organizational Structure
The future does not fit in the containers of the past.
Most companies’ organizations and incentive systems have been optimized for their past or existing business rather than the world we are moving into.
If we want people to work together but we measure how our individual units do, we will not gain collaboration.
If we want people to think multi-platform and multi-media but we promote and incentivize magazine page sales, or radio or tv inventory we will fail to transform.
If we try to manage tomorrow and today with the same teams, we will have a diluted today and a non-competitive entry into tomorrow.
If we delude ourselves in thinking scale, marketing spending, brand and access to resources create a moat we will find that what we have done is build walls and laid the seeds of self-defeat in a world where data, eco-systems, ideas, talent, and access to modern marketplaces are the new scaling drivers.
In addition today we also have to design organizations that incorporate in-person and remote teams and grapple with how to combine and integrate and set expectations.
And if we blame Wall Street, “Management” or some other factor no customer or client will really care.
It is just fear and bad leadership.
Companies and management that thrive bend structures and processes to adapt to change.
Change and marketplaces do not bend to fit our yesterday’s shapes and business models.
At minimum consider a model of “schizophrenia”. Develop a team to optimize for tomorrow with its own specific goals and incentives while focusing the rest of the organization to maximize today with their own goals and incentives. Both teams report to the same management and are aware of each other’s goals and can swap talent and resources as necessary but need to focus on their goals.
Photography by David Nissen
Partnering Ecosystem
No individual is an island and no company in a connected world can prosper without great connections to other individuals or companies whether they be suppliers, partners, sources of talent, technology, and other platforms.
In a world of Amazon Web Services, Azure, Shopify, Open Ai, Upwork which are bring new sources of solutions, talent, and scale while at the same time every service provider is upgrading themselves to remain competitive, all of us need to ensure that we have the best people, the best processes, and the best value as we partner with the marketplace.
All smart managers are asking if we are investing enough in upgrading and resourcing talent. (If we work for ourselves are we investing enough in ourselves? ) Are we ensuring tight co-ordination with our partners and suppliers? Are our external resources constantly iterating and improving to help give ourselves and our companies an edge?
Photography by David Nissen
Management Relevance
Today managers are buffeted from every direction.
There is a “de-layering” mania underway as companies try to find cost savings and increase agility to cope with transformational times.
This is most acute in technology companies where between twenty and twenty five percent of employees have been let go with a particular emphasis on mid-level management and anyone who is not a revenue contributor or a maker, builder, and creator.
At the same time there is a deepening generational mindset divide with many Gen-Z youth holding senior management in low regard wondering what they do and contribute besides allocating, monitoring, and delegating while senior management looks askance at middle and lower management who are refusing to work “hard-core” painting them as crybabies and softies who need a kick in the pants and a dose of reality.
The market meanwhile wonders whether many legendary CEO’s have lost the plot or are just not fit for the times. Bob Iger of Disney in his return seems overwhelmed and tonally off, David Zaslav of Warner Bros. Discovery seems to be experimenting and destroying brand value at CNN and minimizing the best brand in content HBO by Maxing it and managing a multibillion-dollar firm by trial and error the way a start-up CEO might. Howard Schultz in his final months as CEO seemed to come off as a curmudgeon talking about the good old days who appeared to be anti-labor and off putting to a new generation with new issues who are living in current times.
These three legends as well as other senior management are far more aware of reality and have shape shifted before and continue to shape shift. Howard Schultz course corrected and then made an inspirational choice for a successor. Bob Iger faced the facts including the possibility that the cradle he forged his career in which was ABC may no longer be fit for purpose.
Every individual and manager can continue to be successful in a transforming world. The issue is how to see, think and feel differently and then execute, iterate, and improve to remain relevant.
Provide personalized guidance and nuances versus mandates. Be a coach versus a boss. Communicate clearly and be transparent versus thinking that information and data is power. And be open to receiving and giving feedback including recognizing the turd on the table.
Photography by David Nissen
Personal Relevance
The scale and rate of technological, demographic, mindset and global change (The Four Shifts) means the half-life of knowledge and skills are growing shorter and shorter.
This places a premium on having to learn new skills while simultaneously unlearning skills.
Take any senior or middle manager for drinks and sooner or later you will discover we are all struggling with how we can add value to a world which seems to be so different and alien.
The competitors are different, the category dynamics are changing, the talent landscape and the workspace seem to be shape shifting in ways we do not recognize.
At the same time the workload is increasing, the expectations rising and change which sucks is coming so fast that we a) cannot hope to wait it out till we retire, b) have the time to manage our today while preparing for our tomorrow c) fake it with buzz word bingo (AI! Data Lake! Personalization! Platform Strategy! Disruption!) or playing for time by launching task forces or hiring consultants to do landscape overviews, competitive benchmarking, and scenario planning which everyone else can see and we know ourselves is nothing but doing the 3D dance of delaying, dawdling and dithering.
Companies do not grow or remain relevant unless managers grow and remain relevant. Every individual is a manager in that they manage themselves.
We will all spend the rest of our lives in the future which begins as early as tomorrow, so we must find our time today to prepare for tomorrow or there will not be a tomorrow.
The future is bright for all of us in what may be the most exciting times.
All we must do is upgrade ourselves to continue to remain relevant.
Ai-Volution of Culture
Clearly remaining relevant will include staying on top of Ai.
One of the Boards I serve on is a company called Quilt. Ai and they are holding an incredible event at The Times Center, New York on September 6, 2023, where they will bring together marketers, storytellers, builders, and technologists to understand the fundamentals of AI, discuss the integration of it into their business, and how to use it for good.
Quilt have provided me with access to a limited number of FREE tickets for people who might want to attend. Speakers will include the Chairman of the Editorial Board of The Financial Times, an Oscar nominated director, the head of a major museum, Fashion leaders, pioneering CMO’s and technologists. Everybody will get lots of free books, content, and software subscriptions. You can read about the event and sign up by clicking here and get in for free with my code: rishadxquilt ( limited number of free passes so do sign up if you can be there).
It will also be streamed globally.
Event Link: https://www.quilt.ai/september-event
My code: rishadxquilt