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Five strategies you should consider adopting today, in order for your company to prepare for the future.
- Winning at mobile will mean having an app. Research shows that 89 percent of all mobile media time is now spent in apps, while only the remaining 11 percent is spent on the mobile web. This means that not having an app for your business is almost certainly costing you. If you don’t already have an app, now is the time to start planning for one.
- Increase your use of freelancers now so you’re not playing catch-up. We now know that 34 percent of the US workforce are freelancers. It has also been predicted that by 2020 (that’s just four years away!), freelancers will make up 50 percent of the workforce. One of the most important “future-proof” benefits is this: in the event of an economic downturn, using freelancers will make you and your business far more nimble.
- Prepare for the aging workforce. According to the CDC, by 2020 one in every four workers will be over the age of 55. Now is the time to begin identifying high-potential individuals within your organization. This will give you time to invest in training and development, ensuring they’re ready for their new roles when the time comes.
- Adapt policies attractive to millenial employees. In their report, Millennials At Work: Reshaping the Workplace, PricewaterhouseCoopers offers some important insights into the differences employers should consider, including:
- Due to recent economic downturn in many parts of the world, Millennials now expect to work for up to six or more employers over their lifetime. This means decreased loyalty toward employers, and therefore greater turnover.
- Millennials value flexibility and diversity in terms of their working hours, location, training and work/life balance
- Millennials prefer to communicate electronically rather than in-person or on the phone. Employers will need to adapt their current model to accommodate this.
- Millennials prefer a digital wallet over being paid by check. They are demanding a new wave of ease in payments.
- Prepare your business for environmental and social sustainability. Using the Future-Fit Business benchmark, businesses can define their own future-fit goals to ensure they’re on the path towards becoming sustainable. Businesses can aspire to a list of 21 goals each with its own set of key fitness indicators (KFIs).
No one can predict exactly what’s in store for your business in the future. However, by monitoring current trends, it’s possible to prepare your business now for possibilities that will very likely become realities in the near future.
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The One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence is the brainchild of Eric Horvitz, technical fellow and a managing director at Microsoft Research.
Every five years a panel of experts will assess the current state of AI and its future directions. The first panel, comprised of experts in AI, law, political science, policy, and economics, was launched last fall and decided to frame their report around the impact AI will have on the average American city. Here’s how they think it will affect eight key domains of city life in the next fifteen years.
- The speed of the transition to AI-guided transport may catch the public by surprise. Self-driving vehicles will be widely adopted by 2020, and it won’t just be cars — driverless delivery trucks, autonomous delivery drones, and personal robots will also be commonplace.
- Robots that do things like deliver packages and clean offices will become much more common in the next 15 years. Cloud-connected robots will be able to share data to accelerate learning. Low-cost 3D sensors like Microsoft's Kinect will speed the development of perceptual technology, while advances in speech comprehension will enhance robots’ interactions with humans. But the cost and complexity of reliable hardware and the difficulty of implementing perceptual algorithms in the real world mean general-purpose robots are still some way off.
- AI’s impact on healthcare in the next 15 years will depend more on regulation than technology. The most transformative possibilities of AI in healthcare require access to data. If these hurdles can be cleared, AI could automate the legwork of diagnostics by mining patient records and the scientific literature. This kind of digital assistant could allow doctors to focus on the human dimensions of care while using their intuition and experience to guide the process.
- The line between the classroom and individual learning will be blurred by 2030. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) will interact with intelligent tutors and other AI technologies to allow personalized education at scale. Computer-based learning won’t replace the classroom, but online tools will help students learn at their own pace using techniques that work for them.
- AI will help improve life for the poorest members of society. Predictive analytics will let government agencies better allocate limited resources.
- By 2030 cities are likely to rely heavily on AI technologies to detect and predict crime. Contrary to concerns about overly pervasive law enforcement, AI is likely to make policing more targeted and therefore less overbearing.
- The effects of AI will be felt most profoundly in the workplace. By 2030 AI will be encroaching on skilled professionals like lawyers, financial advisers, and radiologists. As it becomes capable of taking on more roles, organizations will be able to scale rapidly with relatively small workforces. AI is more likely to replace tasks rather than jobs in the near term, and it will also create new jobs and markets, even if it's hard to imagine what those will be right now.
- Entertainment in 2030 will be interactive, personalized, and immeasurably more engaging than today. Democratizing the production of high-quality entertainment makes it nearly impossible to predict how highly fluid human tastes for entertainment will develop.
When I ask my executive clients, “If I cleared your calendar for an entire day to free you up to be ‘more strategic,’ what would you actually do?” most have no idea. How can we implement strategic thinking if we’re not even sure what it looks like?
Here are three practical ways I’ve helped executives shift their roles to assume the appropriate strategic focus required by their jobs.
- Identify the strategic requirements of your job. For many executives, the connection between their role and the strategic contribution they should make is not so obvious. Executives with less clarity must work harder to etch out the line of sight between their role and its impact on the organization’s direction.
- Uncover patterns to focus resource investments. Once a clear line of sight is drawn to a leader’s strategic contribution, resources must be aligned to focus on that contribution. Focus helps leaders allocate money and people with confidence. They know they are working on the right things without reacting to impulsive ideas or distracting minutia.
- Invite dissent to build others’ commitment. Strategic insight is as much a social capability as it is an intellectual one. For people to commit to carrying out an executive’s strategic thinking, they have to both understand and believe in it.
Sound strategic thinking doesn’t have to remain an abstract mystery only a few are able to realize. Despite the common complaint, it’s not the result of making time for it. Executives must extract themselves from day-to-day problems and do the work that aligns their job with the company’s strategy.
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We've all heard the calls for innovation ringing through the education field. This age of exponential change leaves us no choice -- we must change or our students will fall behind. But for many educators, shifting away from the status quo can be incredibly uncomfortable. So how do we encourage every educator to seek out that discomfort rather than avoid it?
According to Simon Sinek's discussion of the Law of Diffusion of Innovation, only about 16 percent of any group actively pursue change. Why? In my experience, these individuals thrive on it. They naturally follow a continuous cycle:
- Risk: They enjoy experimentation. They look for opportunities to try new technology with their students, redesign assessments, suggest curriculum shifts, or pilot new programs.
- Learn: Each risk may result in success or failure. They embrace both. They gather data, self-assess, reflect, and collaborate so that they can learn as much as possible.
- Grow: They have the growth mindset described by Carol Dweck. They believe that they can and should continuously improve themselves and their practice.
- Innovate: They embrace what George Couros calls the innovator's mindset. They seek new and different ways to solve any challenges they might encounter, which usually means identifying a new risk to start the process all over again.
This is hard work, and these individuals should absolutely be recognized for their efforts. Yet if we celebrate only 16 percent of our people, any efforts toward systematic innovation are ultimately doomed to fail. So how do we encourage the rest of our colleagues toward this cycle of innovation? That requires three key strategies.
- Empathize: Most of the time, educators who adamantly refuse to take a risk in their practice feel afraid, insecure, undervalued, or overwhelmed, but they rarely say those things out loud. We have to empathize with them to translate what they say into what they actually mean.
- Model: Educators look to respected leaders or colleagues for direction. Those individuals must be willing to visibly engage in the innovation cycle or no one else will.
- Celebrate: Educators want to know that their hard work is valued. A small risk for an early adopter seems like an enormous risk to others. But they deserve our heartfelt respect and applause for taking any step that improves their practice.
This is not a quick fix. It requires an investment of time, energy, and patience that may not be realized for years. But by creating a culture in which our teachers celebrate discomfort, we also enable them to encourage their students in the same way.
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According to a recent survey by Hinge Research Institute and Social Media Today, organizations with employee advocacy programs have seen increased brand visibility, improved brand recognition and better brand loyalty. To boost social brand reach, many organizations start leveraging one of the most valuable marketing assets – Its EMPLOYEES.
Employee advocacy enables companies and brands to amplify the marketing messages by encouraging its employees to share approved branded content on their personal social media channels.
Here are the four compelling reasons why Employee Advocacy is the next big thing in Marketing:
- People trust friends, family and peers more than any other information source
- Digital-Savvy Employees are your biggest marketing assets and trusted brand advocates
- Employees have a wider social reach than brand channels. The industry experts estimate the following statistics: • Average Facebook user has 338 friends • Average Twitter user has 208 followers • Average LinkedIn user has 393 connections That’s the power of your employees’ organic reach for your business
- Employees become your thought leaders. By empowering your employees with valuable content to share across their personal social media channels, create an online identity for your engaged employees in a broader communities. This in turn will position them as an ‘Industry Thought Leader’ and also continuously encourage them to build their personal brand online.
Employee advocacy has become a new marketing channel to build your brand in social media. It’s also a great way to engage your employees productively.
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