HROTodayGlobal

Europe Preview Adapt or Perish One of the world's workplace thought leaders looks over the horizon. By Lynda Gratton There are forces at work that over the coming decades will destroy forever many of the old assumptions of a traditional job and career. Around the world, outdated hierarchies will crumble; notions of nine-to-five working will come under immense pressure; and those who in the past would have been disadvantaged will have the opportunity to join the global talent pool. Over the coming decades there will be positive upsides for each one of us. But there will also be significant downsides. The traditional jobs and careers of the past may have been constraining and frustrating, but they did bring a measure of predictability. The nine-to-five rhythm may have created annoying inflexibility, but at least it was a rhythm and not a continuous 24- hour barrage. Opening up opportunities for people across most of the regions of the world has enormous benefits, but it also puts under colossal pressure those born into what had previously been privileged regions. Our world is changing at an extraordinary pace, and what will go are many of the beliefs about what work is and how it is performed. In its place are greater opportunities and more choice. It is the opening of the aperture of choice that creates the space that will enable you to write a personal career script that can bring you fulfilment and meaning. However, with this comes the necessity of actively making choices, and of being able to live with the consequences of these choices and the trade-offs they might require. The pleasures of the traditional working role were the certainty of a parent–child relationship. You could leave it in the hands of the corporation to make the big decisions about your working life. The adult–adult relationship we are moving towards is healthier and more capable of creating meaning. However, it also requires each one of us to take a more thoughtful, determined, and energetic approach to exercising the choices that are available to us. It requires reflexivity—the capacity to both reflect on and to make decisions about what it is we want to become. Towards Mastery To create a great working future you will be called upon to make a number of fundamental shifts in your assumptions, and indeed in your knowledge, skills, working practices, and habits. One way of thinking about these shifts is to consider them within the context of the three sources of capital or resources we all have available to us. The first resource or capital, which in many cultures is the one that is most lauded in careers, is your intellectual capital. That is a combination of what you know and your capacity to think deeply and intelligently about issues and challenges. It is to the building of intellectual capital that most schooling and education are directed, with the aim of increasing cognitive capability and the depth of learning. Intellectual capital plays a key role in the development of your career in the sense that it defines the areas of knowledge that you engage with, and your capabilities to work in these areas of knowledge. It is clear that in the future, intellectual capital will become increasingly important in the creation of valuable jobs and careers. The first shift addresses the development of intellectual capital. While in the past, developing broad, general knowledge and skills may have been valuable, this will not be so in the future. In a joined up, global, and technologically enabled world, there will always be thousands, perhaps even millions of people who know the same as you yet can deliver it faster, cheaper, and perhaps even better. In the future you will have to increasingly differentiate yourself from the crowd. You will do this by building depth and by putting in the time and resources to create a body of knowledge and skills—in other words, to achieve mastery. However, focussing on a single area of mastery is hazardous. What happens if that area becomes obsolete, or devalued, or you begin to loathe it? In the past, short working lives made single-focus careers the norm. In the future, long working lives mean that you can start deep and then slide or morph into other related areas, or even jump into something completely different. So the first shift, HRO Summit SUMMER 2011 | www.hroglobal.com [17]

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