Paul's Update Special 4/14

PwC: Five Global Shifts Reshaping the World

PwC: Five Global Shifts Reshaping the World According to PwC, there are five global shifts reshaping the world and their implications for organizations, ind...

According to PwC, there are five global shifts reshaping the world and their implications for organizations, industries and wider society will be significant. The five global megatrends are:

• Demographic shifts: migration of global spending power to emerging economies
• Shifts in economic power: investments in emerging economies and volatile and rapidly changing conditions
• Accelerated urbanization: more than half of the world’s population live in urban areas and almost all of the new growth will take place in lesser known medium-sized cities of developing countries.
• Climate change and resource scarcity: increased population, urbanization and prosperity will increase the demand for energy, food and water supplies.
• Technological breakthroughs: digital revolution has no boundaries or borders and changing behavior and expectations as much as the tools to deliver new services and experiences.

In the fourth industrial age, there is a big change in people and demographics. According to Mike Quindazzi, managing director at PwC, there are more of us, we are having less children, and we are getting older. We are getting older by 30 years compared to 100 years ago. In fact, in you were born in 2017 versus 2016, you will live 10 weeks longer.

50% of population growth from now and 2050 will come from Africa. By 2030, we will add another billion people to the population. By 2050, we will add another billion. The rising middle-class from Asia is another shift in demographics. There is a rapid rise of people moving to cities: 1.5 million people are added to cities every week. 

Quindazzi highlighted the massive cost reduction of computing and storage as some of the technological trends that have helped fuel the digital economy. He also points to the API economy as the driver for businesses shifting to the cloud in order to accelerate innovation velocity and grow scale.

The gig economy and sharing economy will continue to disrupt legacy business models. Every business will be a digital business and there are essential technologies that will drive digital business transformation. Some companies are working towards digitizing all of their products and services by 2020. Quindazzi also spoke about business disruption with new emerging and essential technologies including artificial intelligence and smarter applications.

Quindazzi also discussed the upcoming Davos conference and the theme of responsive and responsible leadership. Digital transformation is accelerating at unprecedented rates. All leaders need to think about building trust in the digital world. All leaders must extent their digital personas and be more accessible to all stakeholders. Companies need to take the lead on how we engage with stakeholders, develop a diverse workforce and be inclusive and collaborative.

For more insights on the five global megatrends, I highly encourage you watch our video conversation.

(1 hour, 5 minutes)

DisrupTV Episode 0044 – Featuring Mike Quindazzi, Patricia O’Connell and La... This week on DisrupTV, we interviewed Mike Quindazzi, Managing Director at Pwc, Patricia O'Connell, Author o...

We Wait Too Long to Train Our Leaders

We Wait Too Long to Train Our Leaders The average supervisor has been managing for 10 years before he gets any training.

When I looked back at our database of some 17,000 worldwide leaders participating in our training program, who hailed from companies in virtually every sector throughout the world, I found that their average age was 42. More than half were between 36 and 49. Less than 10% were under 30; less than 5% were under 27.

But the average age of supervisors in these firms was 33. In fact the typical individual in these companies became a supervisor around age 30 and remained in that role for nine years. It follows then, that if they’re not entering leadership training programs until they’re 42, they are getting no leadership training at all as supervisors. And they’re operating within the company untrained, on average, for over a decade.

The fact that so many of your managers are practicing leadership without training should alarm you. Here are three reasons why:

• Practicing without training ingrains bad habits. My children and grandchildren learned to ski at early ages. I began when I was 41. They learned the fundamentals early and well. I did not. They didn’t pick up any bad habits. I did. While they were taught correctly, I learned my skills willy-nilly — just like all those supervisors left to their own devices until they reached their 40s. Worse, I practiced my questionable skills over and over, ingraining them deeply.
• Practice makes perfect only if done correctly. Practicing for hours doesn’t automatically create excellent skills. Say, for instance, that, as an aspiring golfer, you go to the driving range and practice by hitting buckets of balls. You draw a circle 20 feet in diameter, move back a bit, and proceed to hit balls until 80% land in the circle. Then you move farther back, take a different club, and do the same thing. That is deliberate, focused, and productive practice. Perfect practice makes perfect performance.
• Your young supervisors are practicing on the job whether you’ve trained them or not. Would it not be in the organization’s and the individuals’ best interests to begin that process the moment they’re selected for that position?

For as long as I can recall, there have been those who have observed, “With all the money and effort being spent on leadership development programs, why don’t we have better leaders?” The answer to that question is obviously complex, but could a part of the answer be that we have simply waited too long to develop these skills? It may be possible to teach old dogs new tricks, but there’s no question that the sooner you begin, the easier it is.

If Your Talk Doesn’t Do These Three Things, Don’t Give It

If Your Talk Doesn’t Do These Three Things, Don’t Give It No matter the size of the audience or the occasion, every memorable talk is a hat trick that nails these three e...

No matter the size of the audience or the occasion, every memorable talk is a hat trick that nails these three elements:

1. ENTERTAIN

This is the base of the starting point. Want to know how entertained your audience will be by the time you get up to talk? For starters, we all touch our phones 2,500 times a day, according to researchers at Dscout. We’re scrolling Instagram, watching SNL clips, reading fantasy football trash-talk, and listening to podcasts. This is now your competition. So how do you beat it?

Well, you have one major advantage over the latest Wait But Why article, and it is that you’re here. You’re live. You get a deeper personal connection from the beginning. Nobody needs a Wi-Fi signal or has to tap a link to watch you. You get 30 seconds of free attention.

So what do you need to do with that momentary leg up you have on your listeners’ attention? Reward it immediately. Raise interest as you get onstage, create a laugh, but most importantly, be the most into your speech of anyone there. The audience can only rise to your level of excitement—nobody else’s—so no apologizing, no self-deprecating, and no remarking, “Well, now how am I gonna follow that?!”

A good test is this: If your speech entertains one other person you’re close to (especially a friend or significant other) during a dry run, it will entertain a whole room. Start with the toughest critic first.

2. EDUCATE

Humans are learning animals. We’re always growing our minds, abilities, and knowledge. In fact, why are you on this site right now? Chances are you came here to learn something.

So what is your speech teaching? Make sure you can write out the answer to that question in fewer than 140 characters. If the essence of your message is too complicated to tweet, it’s too complicated period: “I’m teaching my employees why they should feel proud about last year’s results and excited about next year’s goals”; or, “I’m giving people new techniques to apply at work to improve their personal well-being."

3. EMPOWER

This one is the biggest trick of a good speech, the hardest to pull off, and admittedly the most ambiguous-sounding as a result. But “empowering” your listeners really all comes down to making them feel like these were all their thoughts. Not yours. We only really do what we want to do.

Remember: It can’t be your message, shared. It has to be their message, heard.

Your role is to lead listeners through a series of iterative thoughts (“iterative” because they build on one another as you progress), where they nod and think to themselves, “Yes, yes, yes.” And fortunately, there are at least three reliable tools you can use to generate this kind of empowerment in your talk:

• Pause and interact. Can you use a flip chart where you create the content together with the audience? Can you leave pauses for the audience to jump in with their own answers? Can you do a short interactive exercise or experiment using the content you just shared? 
• Find a lesson that’s doable, not just interesting. We don’t want to hear how you climbed Everest if we think we never will. 
• Keep it conversational. It has to feel like a coffee-shop chat with your best friend, not like a charmer onstage tossing takeaways into the audience. People want trust. That means sharing your background, your story, your warts and all. 

So yes, giving a great speech that entertains, educates, and empowers is a tall task. Are you up for it? 

Paul's Update Special 4/7

The War For Talent Is Over, And Everyone Lost | Fast Company

The War For Talent Is Over, And Everyone Lost | Fast Company Two decades ago, McKinsey researchers saw a “war for talent” brewing. Looking at current trends, two experts see...

In 1998, after a year-long study on the subject, McKinsey researchers declared that a “war for talent” was underway. In the years ahead, they said, organizations’ future success would depend on how well they could attract, develop, and retain talented employees–an ever more valuable asset in ever higher demand. Today, in a world full of many more Chief People and Chief Happiness Officers, that war nevertheless appears to have been lost on all sides. Of course, many workers excel in their jobs and make pivotal contributions to their organizations. But for every one employee who does, there are many more who are underemployed, underperforming, and just plain miserable at work.

More people than ever are dissatisfied enough with their current jobs to want to consider other opportunities. In the U.S., many people who dabble in freelancing say they’d love to quit their day jobs to work for themselves full-time, if it weren’t for income instability and other factors.

But it’s clear that the flexibility and freedom to pursue more meaningful work is pretty alluring. Interestingly, self-employed people tend to work longer hours only to earn less, suggesting that traditional jobs are under-delivering on what employees want to such a degree that many are willing to take pay cuts in order to get them.

Younger workers especially tend to be disenchanted with traditional career paths and are seduced by the idea of becoming entrepreneurs instead. Instead of winning a war for talent, organizations appear to be waging a war on talent, repelling and alienating employees more successfully than harnessing their skills. The result is a highly inefficient job market where most companies complain about their talent shortages while most employees complain about their pointless jobs. The definition of a bad deal is when both sides lose.

So what can organizations do to improve the situation? Three things.

1. Get better at measuring and understanding talent. This means shifting from intuitive toward scientific assessment methods. It also means refocusing on the proven predictors of job performance, such as the raw ingredients of talent: being rewarding to deal with, and able and willing to work hard.
2. Stop developing people’s “leadership skills.” Shockingly, research suggests there’s a strong negative correlation between the amount of money spent on leadership development (which in the U.S. totals over $14 billion a year), and people’s confidence in their leaders.
3. A little more self-awareness can go a long way. The better people understand their own strengths, limitations, and interests, the smarter career choices they’ll make.

The war for talent, in other words, is at least partly personal: If organizations want to turn around current trends and start unleashing human potential, one good place to start is simply helping individuals understand their own talents–and limitations–a lot better.

Competing in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Competing in the Age of Artificial Intelligence By Philipp Gerbert How can business leaders harness AI to take advantage of the specific strengths of man and machine?

Until recently, artificial intelligence (AI) was similar to nuclear fusion in unfulfilled promise. It had been around a long time but had not reached the spectacular heights foreseen in its infancy. Now, however, AI is realizing its potential in achieving human-like capabilities, so it is time to ask: How can business leaders harness AI to take advantage of the specific strengths of man and machine?

A field that once disappointed its proponents is now striking remarkably close to home as it expands into activities commonly performed by humans. 

Because AI systems think and interact, they are invariably compared to people. But while humans are fast at parallel processing (pattern recognition) and slow at sequential processing (logical reasoning), computers have mastered the former in narrow fields and are superfast in the latter. Artificial intelligence is no longer an elective. It is critical for companies to figure out how humans and computers can play off each other’s strengths as intertwined actors to create competitive advantage.

The naked algorithms themselves are unlikely to provide an edge. Many of them are in the public domain, and businesses can access open-source software platforms, such as Google’s TensorFlow. OpenAI, a nonprofit organization started by Elon Musk and others, is making AI tools and research widely available.

Let’s look at three examples of how AI shifts traditional notions of competitive advantage.

Data. AI’s strongest applications are data-hungry. Pioneers in the field, such as Facebook, Google, and Uber, have each secured a “privileged zone” by gaining access to current and future data, the raw material of AI, from their users and others in ways that go far beyond traditional data harvesting. By building, accessing, and leveraging shared, rented, or complementary data sets, even if that means collaborating with competitors, companies can complement their proprietary assets to create their own privileged zone. Sharing is not a dirty word. The key is to build an unassailable and advantaged collection of open and closed data sources.

Customer Access. AI also changes the parameters of customer access. Well-placed physical stores and high-traffic online outlets give way to customer insights generated through AI. Major retailers, for example, can run loyalty, point-of-sale, weather, and location data through their AI engines to create personalized marketing and promotion offers. They can predict your route and appetite—before you are aware of them—and conveniently provide familiar, complementary, or entirely new purchasing options. The suggestive power of many of these offers has generated fresh revenue at negligible marginal cost.

Capabilities. Capabilities traditionally have been segmented into discrete sources of advantage, such as knowledge, skills, and processes. AI-driven automation merges these areas in a continual cycle of execution, exploration, and learning. As an algorithm incorporates more data, the quality of its output improves. Similarly, on the human side, agile ways of working blur distinctions between traditional capabilities as cross-functional teams build quick prototypes and improve them on the basis of fast feedback from customers and end users.

In addition to reframing specific sources of competitive advantage, AI helps increase the rate and quality of decision making. In this new AI-inspired world, where the sources of advantage have been transformed, strategic issues morph into organizational, technological, and knowledge issues, and vice versa. Structural flexibility and agility—for both man and machine—become imperative to address the rate and degree of change

Scalable hardware and adaptive software provide the foundation for AI systems to take advantage of scale and flexibility. Winning strategies put a premium on agility, flexible employment, and continual training and education.

Companies looking to achieve a competitive edge through AI need to work through the implications of machines that can learn, conduct human interactions, and engage in other high-level functions—at unmatched scale and speed. They need to identify what machines do better than humans and vice versa, develop complementary roles and responsibilities for each, and redesign processes accordingly.

Executives need to identify where AI can create the most significant and durable advantage. We advocate looking at AI through four lenses:

• Customer needs - First, define the needs of your customers.
• Technological advances - Consider how you can use such technologies to transform your processes and offerings.
• Data sources - Third, create a holistic architecture that combines existing data with new or novel sources, even if they come from outside. 
• Decomposition of processes - Finally, break down processes and offerings into relatively routinized and isolated elements that can be automated, taking advantage of technological advances and data sources. Then, reassemble them to better meet your customers’ needs.

Only when humans and machines solve problems together—and learn from each other—can the full potential of AI be achieved.

The Power of And

The Power of And One short, simple word can reframe your leadership mind-set.

Occasionally, a new word or phrase breaks out of the confines of the business world and into the cultural conversation. Often, the word comes out of genuinely original thinking and can stimulate new practices. Without care, however, it can quickly spiral into overuse and achieve buzzword status.

There’s a word that is unlikely to join this list, though it accurately captures and communicates the essence of today’s leadership challenges. It is the common conjunction and.

The complex issues with which executives wrestle today — global supply chains, multigenerational workforces, and political polarization and instability, to name a few — are not solved through simple bifurcated choices. They require more nuanced thinking. And can provide the needed stimulus.

For example, imagine that a direct report asks for permission to work from home two days a week. If you respond, “I understand your desire, but I need to ensure coverage in the office,” there is an implied denial of the request. An alternate reply of “…and I need to ensure coverage” is an invitation to mutually solve a problem. The shift of one word acknowledges each person’s interests as legitimate and recognizes that there are issues to be resolved. It creates an environment for positive dialogue.

Milton Friedman’s theory on the social purpose of corporations was clearly predicated on an either/or choice between profit and social good: It was a zero-sum game with profit the only logical choice.Today, there is a different zeitgeist. Whether it’s called shared value, higher ambition, or conscious capitalism, these emerging approaches are centered on a belief in and as an economic imperative, a source of competitive advantage, and a key for engaging a wide range of stakeholders. What once seemed like an impossible paradox can now be reconciled with and.

As you lead, try substituting "and" for "but" as often as possible. Note what opportunities for collaboration and novel solutions emerge. When contemplating your next strategic move, think about "and" instead of "or." See what new perspectives this generates. "And" is one small word that can make a big difference in the way you think and lead.

In the late 1840s, Henry David Thoreau made copious notes about the natural world of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. He noted the date the ice left the pond, when birds arrived, leaves appeared, and the dates of first-flowering for three hundred plant species. These journals were never published, but when Richard B. Primack found them, he knew they would be useful for documenting changes in climate since Thoreau’s time. The highbush blueberry, for example, now blooms three to six weeks earlier than in the 1840s. In our free e-book for April,Walden Warming: Climate Change Comes to Thoreau’s Woods, Primack carefully and compellingly reveals the scientific data in Thoreau’s writings and its implications for our own time. Get the e-book of Walden Warmingfree in April. “Primack shares striking tales from the field and elucidates from an unnervingly close-to-home perspective the dynamics and impact of climate change on plants, birds, and myriad other species, including us.”—Donna Seaman, Booklist Fans of Thoreau should keep an eye out for our new biography, Henry David Thoreau: A Life by Laura Dassow Walls. We will publish the book in July, the two-hundredth anniversary of Thoreau’s birth. Stay informed with our monthly e-mail notification of new releases by subject. We’ll tell you about the latest books from Chicago and other fine publishers we distribute. Thanks for reading. About Chicago's e-books: The University of Chicago Press has more than 4,000 titles in its Chicago Digital Editions e-book program. Some of Chicago's e-books are DRM-free, while others require Adobe Digital Editions software, which is freely downloadable. Chicago Digital Editions are powered byBiblioVault. This is the April 2017 free e-book notification.