It’s useful not just for top management and HR practitioners, but for employees too, as it gives you tips on how to navigate the future office.
There are new trends at play now. We are moving from so-called job-hopping to actual career-hopping. People are throwing caution to the wind to pursue their passions and be their own masters. Most of us know someone who has spent some years in the corporate sector, given it up to pursue their passion for a sport or to travel, and then, a year down the line, become an entrepreneur by setting up a restaurant or some other business. That’s what’s fuelling the Indian startup dream. Then there are those to give up materially comfortable lives and high-paying jobs to work in remote areas for the uplift of people. Read more
The creative people treat constraints as triggers for innovation. Today there is a name for this. It is called frugal innovation or jugaad. Maybe it is time to stop celebrating jugaad and focus on being original creators of innovative products and services. What do you think?
Using a trans-disciplinary lens to solve complex problems will become the norm. Google uses anthropologists to understand how users think and behave. Anthropologists are used to making sense of the full sweep of complex cultures. Google’s coders work with psychologists to understand the emotions that their fonts create among users. Being able to understand others is an integral part of how work will get done. Routine, repetitive work will all get done with machines. So what skills will matter more in future?
When machines start doing our tasks, we hold them to standards that no human can match. We expect them to be perfect. Maybe we know that they are peering over our shoulder and learning to take over our lives. They better be perfect. That is the only way our lives will be perfect. But is it?
Could a tsunami be nature’s way of warning us about massive changes? Look at the timing of the four tsunamis. 1782 and 1883 roughly coincide with the first and second industrial revolutions. Work shifted from agriculture to manufacturing as factories became the main sources of employment. This saw the rise of the blue collared workforce.
What is it with search engines? First it was Google who is building a driverless car. Now the Chinese search engine Baidu testing autonomous cars in California. There are enough people worrying about the millions of drivers who will lose jobs because of driverless cars whenever that happens.
The digital shifts place a premium on innovation and speed. Creating small prototypes and testing them with consumers will help organizations move faster than their competition. This needs a very fundamental change in the way we view failure and innovation. We still hide our failures and feel ashamed. The Digital Tsunami will change how we view failure.
