Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/73199
Cover Story The Tides of Change Futurist Graeme Codrington on social media, old people, and labour in the 21st Century. By the Editors Graeme Codrington is a futurist and expert on the new world of work. He counts five academic five degrees, including a doctorate in business administration and a masters in sociology. He also lectures part-time at four universities, including the London Business School and Duke University. He has worked for KPMG in the private sector, and his current client list includes some of the world's most recognisable brands. Codrington is also an entrepreneur, having successfully been involved in building an IT start-up and selling it before the dot com crash, and now is one of the founding partners of a global consulting firm, TomorrowToday. The author of three best-selling books, he writes regularly for many magazines and journals, and speaks to nearly 100,000 people in more than 20 countries around the world every year. At the HRO Today Forum APAC, he limned a world undergoing epochal turbulence "politically, socially, organizationally." He noted that leaders of the labour force ignore such shifts at their peril. The late business guru Peter Drucker, he said, had observed that the danger we face during such times is "defaulting to short-term thinking to just try to get through the turbulence." The turbulence, he added, is not restricted to abstract trends and external events. "How many of you have been through HR restructuring during past five years?" he asked the assemblage, almost all of whom raised their hands. "How many of you expect to go through HR restructuring again during the next five years?" he followed, with the same result. Codrington employs the acronym TIDES to order the five dynamics of disruption that he thinks predominate today: technology, institutional change, demographics, environment, and social systems. On the issue of technology, he said that most observers consider it a given that the totality of world information will be on your laptop within a few years. But that, he contended, is the floor not the ceiling. "We think we're at the height of the information age," he said. "We're not. We're only at the beginning." What does that mean for labour force leadership? It requires attending to the new generation of "digital natives," whom Codrington noted expect to have "information anytime, on any and every device, preferably for free." And for human resources, per se? "HR has to take back info from IT," he said. "Restricting workers' social media, websites access, use of their own apps [12] HRO TODAY GLOBAL | SPRING 2012 during work hours—that's not about security. That is not an IT issue, it's an HR issue." The second of Codrington's five dynamics was "institutional change." He said: "Competitors are coming from nowhere to ambush your industry. Recruits move between industries now." If that is, in fact, the case in most sectors, he added, our central challenges change: "We're leaving normal regulation and expectation and company cultures. What is your different script?" The third was demographics. The world population of centenarians is quadrupling each year. Half of the world population that ever reached the age of 80 are still alive. Half of the world's disposable income resides with people between 55 and 70. "The new normal is not retirement," he said, "it's retreadment. You can't afford not to continue to work." That combines with the new mobility: 53 million people in Asia work outside their native country. "There's a huge chance for older skilled workers to re-enter the workforce," he said. "And the best way to do that is through the outsourcing process and labour brokerage." Number four was environment. Although he demurred on spending too much time exploring this topic—because, he said, it was well trod amongst most organisational thinkers at this point—he noted one wrinkle for those in hiring positions. "You will see candidates choosing or not choosing your company," he said, "based on your environmental positioning—that will be especially true with those digital natives." For that reason, he concluded, the pursuit of corporate social responsibility "should be squarely within HR's sights." The last letter of Codrington's acronym was supplied by his fifth dynamic: shifting societal values. "There is no normal anymore," he argued, followed by a series of rhetorical questions. What does a normal career look like anymore? What does a normal day look like? What does a normal family look like? What does normal talent look like? What does a normal woman look like? To murmurs from the crowd on the last construction, he had a concluding riposte. "I'm serious. We've done a bit better at getting more women into the workforce. But now we need to get more feminine values into the workplace, and that's a whole other matter altogether. Some people have argued that if Lehman Brothers were called Lehman Sisters, we might not be in this mess right now. And I think they have a point."