Hybrid is here to stay. But does it really work?

This March, Emergn hosted an executive breakfast in partnership with the Global Peter Drucker Forum, featuring London Business School’s eminent Lynda Gratton and her latest book, Redesigning Work: How to Transform Your Organization and Make Hybrid Work for Everyone. It was nearly three years to the day since the COVID-19 pandemic took its grip, offices emptied practically overnight, and much of the world went into various degrees of lockdown. Yet, fast forward three years, and some time since we emerged blinking from our bunkers, there remains an unfamiliarity about the new working order.

How do we sustain the new normal?

In a time of crisis, many businesses found a way not only to make things work, but to thrive. It took a tectonic shift to prove what some of us already suspected – that a workforce operating remotely could still be a productive one. But now, we face a further shift in the landscape. As the threat of COVID-19 recedes, we find ourselves wondering how to create the ideal working model for our current conditions. An environment that looks right from every angle.

Because – don’t be fooled – the new ways of working might seem like an established part of the “new normal,” but they’re still emerging. We don’t have all the data to back them up. We know the world didn’t grind to a standstill when employees started working from home en masse – 60,000 Fujitsu workers switched from office to home working in a week, Gratton noted – but we are still at an experimental stage. We’re still finding out what works, we’re still waiting for the concrete proof that points one way or the other – to the home or the office. Or, of course, that middle ground where we find the hybrid working model dancing enthusiastically for our approval. Another method that needs to find its feet.

Hybrid working needs a roadmap.

At our breakfast, Lynda Gratton noted that companies are mostly set up to thrive either remotely or in-office, so it wasn’t surprising that a clearly signposted roadmap for successful hybrid working has yet to be established. It’s at an embryonic stage, and whether it can ultimately impact positively depends on numerous factors – most notably, on finding a way to manage hybridity effectively.

At Emergn, we interact with companies all over the world that are facing this test, and we see positives in all modes of working. While we wholeheartedly support remote working, we also see the benefits of coming together in person to reinforce the company culture, collaborate, and foster the overall well-being of our employees. As such, we encourage a model that embraces both remote and on-site work, with both teams and clients.

We’re working it out in real time.

The challenge for all of us now is to strike the right balance and put in place the proper infrastructure to make it work. This requires agility to allow for experimentation and antennae tuned to pick up what’s happening at other companies: where they’re getting it right, and where they might be falling short.

We need to understand all the challenges that hybrid working presents. The pandemic may have demonstrated the benefits of working from home, but it also left people feeling isolated. The definitive model needs to work for everyone, covering all bases. This demands precise insights that can only come from learning as you go. It requires understanding the key drivers of productivity for specific jobs and tasks, understanding whether they would benefit from extra focus (from the quiet you might get at home) or from collaboration (better suited to the office). 

It means having the right tech to ensure projects can be successfully carried out from different locations. And, significantly, it requires understanding the different needs of employees, and experimenting with the kind of flexibility that benefits everyone in the company.

Successes and failures will always dictate the implementation of new methodologies, so it is important to be open to these changes. Because, don’t forget, everyone is in the same boat. Hybrid isn’t a working methodology that arrived fully formed, it is an eventuality that landed on our doorstep on the back of a global crisis. As such, it could be either more or less productive than a single method. But It’s an exciting problem to have – and ultimately, it’s one we will solve together. Because we do know this: as human beings first and professionals second, the pandemic shone a spotlight not just on how we work, but how we live.

And how we want to live is the key.

Successful companies will generally comprise employers and employees spanning a broad swathe of the socio-economic spectrum. And while remote working models have obvious benefits for some groups – notably working parents or keen globetrotters – the reality is that individual home-working conditions will vary. Higher up the company ladder, more senior employees may well have space to set up comfortably at home. No longer weighed down by a commute, they may be eating more healthily and feeling energized. 

On the other hand, an isolated younger worker living in cramped accommodation might be desperate to get back to the office to enjoy the benefits of community, support and mentorship to help with their career – something much-needed in a world that now looks likely to expect us to work deep into our 70s. There are all kinds of needs to be considered. As Lynda Gratton said, we are looking at a massive Petri dish, out of which is emerging the hybrid model that is likely to represent both the present and the future of how we operate. 

We have to make it a success. Three years on from the pandemic, one thing certainly hasn’t changed – it remains the key job of our leaders to adapt and learn. 

About the author:

Alex Adamopoulos is Chairman and CEO of Emergn Ltd

Sign up to view the full eBook, Creating Performance that Matters in the Workplace, at emergn.com/drucker-performance

Peter Drucker once said, “if you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.” The simplicity of Drucker’s dialogue seems always to cast a shadow over the depths of the words he said. 

In the wake of past and ongoing hardships—the pandemic, labor shortages, supply-chain instability and inflation—businesses continue to adjust while looking for something new to keep up with quickly evolving market and consumer demands. Many organizations have begun to reconsider new working models and the implementation of cutting-edge tools as much as the outcomes of their work, productivity and employee satisfaction. While new articles are published daily preaching the effectiveness of hybrid working or giving us 10 reasons our business needs AI, these innovative practices and tools are only as effective as employees working with and within them. 

That is why, to generate performance that matters, businesses must remember that an inside-out approach which focuses on employees and their work environment must be part of their broader business plans. And, by looking inwardly, employers can determine the support and resources their employees need to flourish as well as identify the pieces of their workplace environment and culture that must change. After all, if you want to find new ways to increase performance, you have to stop doing the same old things.  

In anticipation of this year’s Global Peter Drucker Forum, the Emergn team developed an eBook to be released at the Forum, Creating Performance that Matters in the Workplace. In it, we discuss the five surefire ways to create performance that matters in the workplace:

1. Building trust

By implementing an employee-first environment, working models that promote employee performance and servant leadership that focuses on the enhancement and elimination of employees’ strengths and weaknesses, employers can build trust with employees through compassion, inclusion and earned autonomy. This two-way trust, in turn, increases employee job satisfaction, wellbeing and self-motivation while encouraging creative and innovative thinking.

2. Facilitating communication and team collaboration

Research estimates that poor workplace communication costs US businesses $1.2 trillion a year. Implementing popular modern methodologies, like Scrum or Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), to drive team collaboration without analyzing if the method is truly the best fit for specific teams and projects is one frequent culprit. Effective, performance-enhancing internal communications require employee engagement, effective leadership and the right technology. Through the alignment of all three, leaders ensure teams are working toward a shared goal, with the knowledge and tools to streamline communications and facilitate team collaboration.

3. Encouraging forward thinking and experimentation

Agile operations that thrive through rapid innovation and changing market and demand responsiveness are only successful alongside equally agile employees. Introducing a ‘discovery mindset’—a philosophy that pushes teams to take a more iterative approach to their thinking by encouraging experimentation, forward-thinking, and learning from failure—teaches employees to think freely, embrace change and learn through experimentation and their own mistakes. Teams working with a ‘discovery mindset’ do not get lost in routine. They are constantly searching for ways to improve customer and business outcomes and are willing to try new things even if they fail. Allowing employees to think and work openly and creatively will lead to more intuitive, context-sensitive, and personalized products and better overall performance.

4. Investing in employees’ growth

Emergn’s 2022 survey report, The Pursuit of Effective Workplace Training, found that having a strong workplace training program played a big role in an employee’s decision to stay with a company. However, many organizations still use generic learning and development (L&D) programs that are inaccessible or irrelevant to their employees. Developing strategic context-focused L&D that aligns training with business and customer goals is an easy way to feed employees’ appetite to grow and fuel motivation while improving productivity and outcomes.

5. Creating purpose and motivation

Now more than ever, employees are looking for purpose and fulfillment through their job, and it is up to business leaders to create that purpose and fulfillment in their contributions. Research has shown that effective short- and long-term goal setting positively affects employee engagement, motivation, and accountability. Further, setting achievable goals and celebrating the completion of those goals has been shown to increase both satisfaction and job retention. The setting of effective short- and long-term individual goals that align with larger strategic business objectives will help employees feel more connected to the company, increase accountability and generate improved performance and business outcomes.

Businesses looking for new ways to improve productivity in today’s fast-paced markets should think twice before trying to patch operations with the latest methodologies and innovative tools. Leaders who truly understand business, like Peter Drucker, know that if you want something new to work, you must change your old ways. Looking inward, focusing on empowering employees and improving the working environment through strategic and calculated change is one important lever to drive performance that matters.

About the author:

Alex Adamopoulos is Chairman and CEO of Emergn Ltd

Sign up to view the full eBook, Creating Performance that Matters in the Workplace, at emergn.com/drucker-performance

Early on, I realized that continuous learning in the workplace is essential to move businesses forward and stay competitive. Yet I noticed that many organizations hadn’t fully embraced or found ways to offer the support their people needed to achieve and apply continuous learning. Around the same time, I was reading more from Peter Drucker and his thinking on knowledge workers and a knowledge society.

A Day of Drucker 2021

This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to A Day of Drucker on June 30, 2021.

Continuous learning for knowledge workers

Peter Drucker introduced the concept of knowledge workers in his 1959 book, The Landmarks of Tomorrow. Much of the work done today is by knowledge workers – someone who brings value to an organization based on their specific knowledge area. Throughout history, this often wasn’t the case, as people would study as an apprentice and after a certain amount of time would be considered fully trained in everything they’d ever need to know about their trade.

Today, companies are realizing the power of upskilling and cross training their staff, especially after the volatile 15 months we’ve just experienced. More and more online education tools are becoming widely available, such as MOOCs (massive open online courses). And while these tools are very helpful at the individual level, taking the knowledge gained, applying it to the organization and ultimately seeing value can still pose a challenge. 

Learning and teaching organizations

I’m reminded of this quote in The Daily Drucker from May 28: “Knowledge workers must have continuous learning built into their tasks. And a knowledge organization has to be both a learning organization and a teaching organization.”

Throughout my career as a senior technology and business leader, I have pursued training in all types of methodologies—like Agile, Lean Startup and Design Thinking—but still struggled to pull out the best of each and apply them to unique workplace situations. In 2009, we formed the team at Emergn to solve this problem. We brought the best schools of thought and practices together, and let our clients design their own way of working with our help. We wanted to be a different kind of consulting business. Remembering the words of Peter Drucker, we wanted to teach companies how to become learning and teaching organizations. Once we did our job of helping companies curate best practices and apply them with their people, we wouldn’t be needed again.

This may sound a little bit unorthodox as a consulting business, but it has been successful because knowledge workers want to continually learn, and companies will invest in ways to help them learn and apply those learnings to their unique role. This type of continuous learning doesn’t just benefit people—it benefits the entire organization.  

With our passion for the power of learning and through years of experience and research, we created our learning platform called Value, Flow, Quality ® (VFQ). All the knowledge we continue to acquire through client engagements is reflected and continuously updated in our courses, learning materials, tools, and templates.

Remembering Drucker’s insights for the future of knowledge work

I often go back to Peter Drucker’s work and have been a long-time partner of the Drucker Forum. I see his way of thinking as a mindset and realize now how ahead of his time he was. His teachings are relevant today more than ever. As we re-emerge from the pandemic and begin to rethink work again, our people will continue to be our single greatest competitive advantage and benefit.

“Knowledge-worker productivity requires that the knowledge worker be both seen and treated as an asset rather than a cost.”

-Peter Drucker, The Daily Drucker (May 23)

I leave these six considerations from Drucker for managers to consider so that they can improve knowledge worker productivity post-pandemic:

1. What is the task?
2. Do my people have autonomy?
3. Is continuing innovation part of the work?
4. Is continuous learning happening?
5. Is there a focus on productivity and quality?
6. Am I treating my people the way I would want to be treated?

At the same time, knowledge workers should be asking themselves:

• What do I need to learn to stay up to date on what I’m being paid to know?
• What do my colleagues need to know and understand about my knowledge area and how it contributes to the organization and their work?

Continuous learning is a personal journey and a corporate responsibility. We need to challenge ourselves every day as managers, leaders, individual contributors, and knowledge workers.

About the Author:

Alex Adamopoulos is Chief Executive Officer, Emergn Ltd.

This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to A Day of Drucker on June 30, 2021.

This year’s Drucker Forum abstract, Proclaiming the Century of Leadership, shares one of Drucker’s most famous quotes – “management is doing things right, but leadership is doing the right things”

It’s profound that the theme of this year’s Forum, Leadership Everywhere, was selected at last year’s Forum when no one could have predicted how significant this topic would be at this time. It’s also a year where we saw the passing of one of the greatest management thinkers of our generation, Clayton Christensen.

Drucker Forum 2020

This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the fully digital 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” on October 28, 29 & 30, 2020.
#DruckerForum

Further on from disruptive innovation

While most of us may remember Clayton for his work on Disruptive Innovation, what he was really teaching us all along is how to be better managers of our work. Perhaps the most impactful theory has been Jobs To Be Done (JTBD), which was developed as a means to take disruptive innovation further in order to help organizations get to the core of what customers needed and what jobs were there most important to get done. If you’ve spent time studying JBTD then you know that Clayton emphasized how knowing more and more about customers takes organizations in the wrong direction, and that the real need is to know the progress that the customer is trying to make in any given situation. In other words, it’s more about the outcome of the journey than the point in time solution.

JBTD and leadership

As a management theory, JBTD has helped organizations understand the behaviors they need to employ and has increased their ability to make better informed predictions. I find it interesting that JBTD, as a management theory, is also something we can apply to leadership.

Leadership is perhaps the greatest and most needed Job To Be Done. If we consider Drucker’s quote on management doing things right then we would classify those as mechanics, or rather the proper use of tools, practices, processes and frameworks that help us manage the work. If we consider that leadership is doing the right things then that’s about mindset; thinking that drives behaviors and influences people towards a set of principles and outcomes.

Purpose and why it matters

This is exactly the Job To Be Done of leadership; taking people on the journey. As Clayton also described, Jobs are complex and multifaceted. They’re not simple and require a well defined path. For leaders that means that we need to be able to explain the purpose of the journey to our teams and why it matters both to them, the organization and impact on those we touch.

The mindset we possess related to the circumstances we find ourselves in now and in the future will be more important than the mechanics we use to manage our way through them.

About the author:
Alex Adamopoulos is Chief Executive Officer, Emergn Ltd.

This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the fully digital 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” on October 28, 29 & 30, 2020.
#DruckerForum

One of my favorite presentations at this past November’s Global Peter Drucker Forum was from Marshall Goldsmith, a leadership coach and the author of, among other books, “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.” As the title suggests, the qualities that make leaders successful as individuals can later become obstacles to their success as leaders.

Ascending to a leadership position requires prioritizing your individual success. Along your journey to a leadership role, you’ll likely face tests – both literal and figurative – that require you to prove how smart and capable you are as an individual. But great leaders need to work in the best interest of the people they manage, and not themselves.

Here are a few examples of the obstacles that stop leaders from being the best they can be.

Competitive instincts

Leaders are winners. In fact, they love winning – no matter the context, and, sometimes, to their own detriment.

Marshall provided a funny example that he shares with his own clients: imagine making dinner plans. You want to go to Restaurant X, but your partner likes Restaurant Y. You decide to go to their choice, and you hate it. The food is bad, the service is bad, it’s a major disappointment. How do you react?

You could say “I told you so.” Critique the meal, complain about the service, and insist that dinner would have been way better at Restaurant X.

Or, you could just keep quiet. Eat the food, try to enjoy it, and make the best out of the evening.

Which option do you think is better? And which do you think many people actually do? The obvious answer is to just keep quiet and try to have a good time, but leaders are competitive. Your instinct may be to prove that you’re right, but what would you even gain from having that argument? You’d end up with a bad night and a pretty annoyed partner.

Winners want to win at all costs, even if the “battle” is over something trivial. It’s an instinct that leaders should resist not just in their personal lives, but at work, too. If you’re in a position of authority, you don’t need to prove yourself. And in fact, if you keep trying to sound like the smartest person in the room, you’re more likely to alienate the people who depend on you, rather than provide any sort of valuable support.

The desire to add value

We all want to be seen as a valuable member of our teams. That instinct doesn’t really go away as a leader, but it can become more of a problem the higher you climb up the ladder, and that’s because of the influence your contributions can have on others around you.

Marshall provided another example: imagine a member of your team tells you their great idea. You like it, and you tell them so. But, you also throw in a suggestion. “Nice idea, but why don’t you add this, too.” There, you’ve added value. Job well done, right?

Not quite. Because, as Marshall explained, a suggestion from one’s boss is not merely a suggestion – it’s an order. Whether you intend to or not, the minute you make a suggestion to a member of your team, you’ve given them an order that they feel obligated to follow. So, when you decide to add on to their idea, you’ve actually made it your own. You may have added 5 percent of value to the idea, but you’ve removed 50 percent of their motivation to execute the idea, because it’s now something their boss has ordered them to do.

Instead of trying to add value, bless their idea as is, effectively taking yourself out of the way so they can get it done.

Telling, not asking

Quoting Peter Drucker, Marshall said that “The leader of the past knew how to tell, the leader of the future knows how to ask.”

The workforce of the future will be primarily knowledge workers. These people are the experts in their fields and will know more about what they’re doing than their leaders. But, leaders are traditionally taught to give orders – to tell their teams what to do and how to do it.

That simply won’t work in the era of the knowledge worker. How could you possibly dictate orders to someone who knows more about their own job than you do? It makes much more sense, Marshall said, for leaders to ask their teams how they think something should be done, and then empower the team to get it done themselves. Leaders need to ask, listen and learn.

Stop and breathe

This all sounds simple and intuitive, but it’s hard to do in practice. Marshall had a piece of advice: the next time you’re presented with a “test” of your leadership, just try to stop and breathe. Acknowledge any instincts to prove your smarts, add value, or give an order.

After that, I would suggest you think about what you could say or do that would actually help your team. In some cases, it might be to clear an obstacle for them, or to provide some resources that can help. Other times, it may be better to do nothing at all. If already you’ve done a good job hiring and empowering your team, then it could be best just to pass along some encouragement and let them get to work.

We see this type of thinking align well with the whole idea around servant leadership, a phrase that popped up in the last decade around the whole agile thing but something that has been out there for sometime as a mindset around being a better leader. We recently talked about The Servant Leader in our podcast series on The Emerging World of Work.

About the author:

Alex Adamopoulis is the Chief Executive Officer at Emergn Limited

This article is one in a series related to the 10th Global Peter Drucker Forum, with the theme management. the human dimension, that took place on November 29 & 30, 2018 in Vienna, Austria #GPDF18 – you can also check out my other articles related to the Forum; 5 Lessons the Managers of Tomorrow – and – The Power of Pull vs Push in Innovation

This article was first published on LinkedIn Pulse

This year’s Global Peter Drucker Forum in Vienna tackled the theme of the human dimension in management. In a rapidly changing world, where the business landscape is increasingly dominated by automation and AI, managers need to apply a human touch to the world of work more than ever. Particularly in regards to AI, business leaders are going to be playing an absolutely pivotal role in managing the impact artificial intelligence has on the workplace and the workforce.

I wanted to make the following points the central plank of my opening keynote at this year’s Drucker Forum because it’s crucial that the kinds of leaders that make the trip to Drucker are all on the same page about this. It really all boils down to this:

Leadership is about creating a vision.

Management is the harder part of putting it into practice.

This is also a core part of the work we do at Emergn and something I’ve touched on before in this Forbes article and our Emerging World of Work podcast.

As leaders, we have to chart a way forward on how AI and other technologies are going to shape what kinds of skills, tools and opportunities workers will be armed with, in order to keep absorbing new ideas and new ways of working, and stay ahead of the curve in their changing industries. And as managers, we have to be providing the day-to-day practical guidance that allows workers to keep doing just that.

There were a lot of outstanding and insightful sessions at this year’s Drucker Forum, exploring just what applying this human touch to management means – and also needs to mean going forward. Here are a few of my favorite takeaways from Drucker Forum 2018:

1. Driving innovation and inspiration requires trust.

Vineet Nayar, the CEO and Founder of Sampark Foundation, gave a really moving presentation about his and his wife’s work in helping to transform the quality of schools and public education for children in India. During that talk, he hit the nail on the head about what it takes to get the best out of people: inspiration. Workers want to be inspired to feel like they can take on seemingly impossible tasks and drive forward important missions. They don’t want to be seen as drones; or as Vineet put it, they want to be recognized as butterflies, not ants. Everyone is looking for inspiration, but inspiration starts from trust. Trust your employees and, in Vineet’s words, they will create magic.

2. Good management means celebrating empathy.

Jim Keane, CEO of Steelcase, opened his talk with an anecdote about his first job, as an elevator operator in the 70s. As Jim pointed out, while some like to romanticize the nostalgia of old-school elevator operators, the fact is it was backbreaking, tedious and dehumanizing work – stand there, crank the elevator up and down, don’t talk to the people riding with you. Technology like automation has done a great service in eliminating menial work like this, opening up opportunities for more engaging and innovative work for humans to do. That gets to the core point of Jim’s presentation: management has to celebrate empathy. As managers, we can’t forget to connect with workers on a human level in order to ensure we’re not throwing them into menial work. We need to be allowing humans to be humans, and do the kind of work only they can do. It’s not enough to just let technology do what technology is good at; we need to reinvest in people on a personal level, and make empathy a part of our work.

3. Skills are not the same as capabilities.

The difference between the two: skills are very context specific while capabilities are more fundamental and independent of context. Curiosity, creativity, imagination, emotional and social intelligence – these are all capabilities. As John Hagel, co-chairman at the Deloitte Center for the Edge, so precisely diagnosed, years of school have basically stamped out these capabilities in us and instead conditioned us to memorize and imitate whatever our teachers did, rather than think for ourselves. But capabilities are like muscles. They may be atrophied, but they’re also waiting to be exercised. As workers face a future where they shift from menial jobs eliminated by technology to the kinds of jobs that human beings really should be doing, it’s important we emphasize the importance of flexing these muscles and investing in human capabilities as instrumental to work.

4.  Innovation is a team effort, not the work of just one genius.

Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill gave one of my favorite talks of the event, and really drilled down into how leading innovation is not the same thing as leading change. Leading change means inspiring people to move in one direction, while leading innovation is about shaping context. That means getting leaders to foster environments that encourage a “collective genius” built from a diversity of views and experiences. Linda correctly points out that most innovations are not the result of just one genius having a lightbulb moment. Instead that genius more often than not comes out of a collection of people that span a diversity of perspectives and knowledge domains. Building that sense of community, with a shared purpose and a shared set of values but driven by all voices in the organization and not just the majority consensus, is what leads to true innovation.

5. Not pushing solutions allows better ideas to come forward.

One of the most compelling sessions of this year’s forum was a talk by Efosa Ojomo, who shared the story of the impact of instant noodles in Nigeria. Yes, you read that right. Efosa talked about how a Western bias for solutions aimed at improving life in Nigera typically focused on building schools, roads, hospitals, water-wells – all well-intentioned but ultimately dead-end projects. But what actually made a difference was an Indonesian company’s introduction of instant noodles, as a cheap, easy and nutritious meal that completely turned around the country and built a whole new economy around it: thousands of new jobs, millions of dollars in tax revenues and investments, new infrastructure like seaports, electricity, water treatment and agriculture. It’s an incredible story of not just how this company saw an opportunity to more easily feed people – and the ripple effects that came from that – but how abandoning old biases around solutions and focusing instead on simple needs in a new space can allow better ideas to come to the fore, creating new markets, new opportunities and new innovations.

I’m really just scratching the surface here; there is plenty more to share than just these five lessons, but I think these takeaways also represent a good cross-section of the kind of thinking and leadership that was on display at this year’s Drucker Forum.

It’s an exciting time to be a business leader. The world is changing at a rapid clip right before our eyes, and it’s in our power to ride the wave of these changes and leave behind a lasting impact for workers, their environments and the world around us – but only if we heed the importance of not just leading but also managing, and putting in the work on a ground-level, day-to-day basis to drive new ways of working and true innovation.

This article is one in a series related to the 10th Global Peter Drucker Forum, with the theme management. the human dimension, that has taken place on November 29 & 30, 2018 in Vienna, Austria #GPDF18

This article was first published on LinkedIn Pulse.

Alex Adamopoulos is the founder and CEO of the international digital business consultancy Emergn Limited, based in Boston Mass. He tells Peter Day why he’s a champion of products over corporate projects..and how (in Peter Drucker’s words) “culture eats strategy for breakfast”.

Variations of this quote have appeared for over a century. The quote comes from a book written in 1822 and it was used in a slightly different variation on July 8, 1896 in a speech given by William Jennings Bryan.

Bryan was a leader of the Democratic party and served as Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson. Bryan’s speech, the Cross of Gold, is known as perhaps the most famous and the most effective speech ever delivered at a national party convention on the topic of a monetary plank – in other words, how all things related to money are best managed for the good of all so that there is more equality when it comes to prosperity.

The widening gap

This topic will never go away. In fact, the prolific expansion of technology in nearly all industries has begun widening the gap between those that want to change and those that have the power to change. the underlying message that this quote offers is about the dangers of increasing prosperity at a rate that leaves many behind. Many are concerned with the advancement of robotics, for example. Is it really a question of technology taking over or one of waning talent?

We’re facing the largest talent gap we’ve seen in decades and the concern that many jobs will potentially be lost to machines. Some of these fears are misunderstood. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a shift in how work gets done. The automotive industry introduced robotic prototypes in 1961 that eventually helped the segment soar. The industry worked with it’s workforce to build a higher quality product, which increased the requirement for learning and new skills. We’ve seen this same trend as every major technology advancement has arrived.

Prosperity challenge

The challenge with growing prosperity is that it typically involves the few, not the many. With that comes the burden to close the widening talent gap. In 2016 Gartner published a research note titled “Survey Analysis: What Leading Enterprises Do Differently With Talent and Organization” – where 77% of those leading enterprises stated that within 10 years the skills and knowledge in their organization will have little resemblance to the skills and knowledge in their organization of today.

This same report showed that acquisitions were the most favored and likely answer by a large margin to closing the gap. It’s clear that most major enterprises are trying to catch up to respond to the talent and technology gaps they face. It makes sense that acquisitions are leading the way simply because companies can’t change fast enough and re-train people quickly to adapt to the modern skills and practices that are needed now. Therefore, this consolidation effort is exactly why growing prosperity typically involves the few, not the many. Growing through acquisition doesn’t decrease the risk of failure nor will it stop the growth of startups. For many startups, their exit strategy might be largely based on the differentiated skills they offer a larger competitor.

Job losses and gains

Robotics was mentioned earlier as one example where there is growing concern about the loss of jobs, automating the more basic tasks that organizations undertake today. But before we assume all such jobs are going away, research shows that over the next decade areas such as business strategy, product enhancement/development, the Internet of Things, innovation and even marketing are expected to grow at larger percentages than digital anthropology. What this means is that while AI and robotic process automation are areas that are beginning to thrive, the need for skills and talent in those other areas is growing faster still.

Develop new skills

We need greater emphasis to help people rework their mindset and rapidly develop new skills that will help them and their companies compete.

“Poverty has slain its thousands but prosperity its tens of thousands”

It’s relevant because while we appreciate the impact of poverty, we often neglect to understand the second half. Prosperity always runs the risk of leaving a greater percentage behind. What we must aim for, even in our smallest of circles, is to help balance this by increasing learning and purpose for those we serve.

“Learning is an ornament in prosperity, a refuge in adversity, and a provision in old age.”

― Aristotle

About the author:

Alex is the Chief Executive Officer for Emergn, which helps enterprise companies execute digital transformations. Emergn is the developer of Value, Flow, Quality (VFQ), the only accelerated work-based education product for modern ways of working, used by many of the world’s leading companies.