BDO Alliance USA: Get Ready for the Fast Future
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Becoming "anticipatory" -- learning how to spot future trends before they disrupt is -- is more important than ever. It's also a skill we can learn.
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BDO Alliance USA: Get Ready for the Fast Future
- 1. The fast future Get ready for … The anticipatory accounting and finance professional Bill Sheridan, CAE The Business Learning Institute
- 2. bli.cnf.io
- 8. MPH: 300,000 MPG: 2 million Price: 4 cents
- 10. “When the job is in the way of the work, consider changing your job enough that you can go back to creating value. Anything less is hiding.” Seth Godin
- 11. Top five issues impacting CPAs 1. Keeping up 2. Information overload 3. Doing more with less 4. Being proactive vs. reactive 5. Complexity Bill Sheridan, CAE The Business Learning Institute
- 13. 0 2 4 6 8 Poor reputation No personal relationship Inadequate staff to meet… Out-of-date technology Fees were too high CPA lacked expertise Referral to a new firm Poor responsiveness CPA advice not proactive Why SMBs leave their CPA / accountant Bill Sheridan, CAE The Business Learning Institute
- 14. Source: CPA.COM Insight into the CPA of the Future Study 2014 Only 8% of CPAs are future-ready Future-ready is the capacity to be aware, predictive, and adaptive of emerging challenges, tech innovations, and trends and changes in business, population, and social environment. Bill Sheridan, CAE The Business Learning Institute
- 15. “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn how to surf.” – Jon Kabat-Zinn Oceans of opportunity
- 16. 5 steps to becoming future-ready 1. Context 2. Certainty 3. Capacity 4. Competence 5. Core beliefs Bill Sheridan, CAE The Business Learning Institute
- 17. Context
- 18. “We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another. In its scale, scope, and complexity, the transformation will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before.” -- Klaus Schwab, World Economic Forum Bill Sheridan, CAE The Business Learning Institute
- 19. “In the next five years, game-changing technologies will transform every business process, including how we sell, market, communicate, collaborate, educate, train, and innovate.” -- Daniel Burrus
- 22. Source: Frey & Osborne, “The Future of Employment,” Oxford University Race against the machines? Bill Sheridan, CAE The Business Learning Institute
- 23. 47%of all jobs gone within 25 years ‘No government is prepared’ for that level of job loss Source: The Economist
- 25. Bill Sheridan, CAE The Business Learning Institute Are your offices, workspaces, and technology future-focused? Do you know what your clients are facing now and in the future? Are you using the language of the future or the past? Will students and potential employees feel like they are traveling back in time when they walk through your door?
- 26. Certainty
- 28. Hard trends = future facts Four hard trends: 1. Government regulation 2. Technology 3. Demographics 4. Globalization
- 29. Disruption and RONI The gap is widening, faster! Source: Clayton Christensen, “Innovation Killers” We think this is the trade-off Bill Sheridan, CAE The Business Learning Institute
- 30. Capacity
- 31. 6 ways to create capacity • Maximize the software and tools you have • Use the latest, most efficient technologies • Workflow and process efficiency • Focus on your best ‘A’ clients / customers • Communicate your services (cross-sell) • Engage your people
- 32. Competency Disruptions before they disrupt Problems before you have them Customer needs before they have them New opportunities before the competition Anticipate Source: Daniel Burrus
- 33. The research The latest research inside and outside the CPA profession re- affirms the top competencies and skills needed by accounting and finance professionals. Bill Sheridan, CAE The Business Learning Institute
- 34. Top skills that accounting and finance professionals need today BLI Research in 2015 with over 1,000 responses from all segments of the CPA profession identified these top skill needed to be successful in these rapidly changing times. This confirms and reinforces the research from the Conference Board, AICPA’s CPA Horizons 2025 report, Bersin, and Burrus Research. 75% covered by these top 5 skills
- 36. V A L U E Adding Insight for Action Information Wisdom Knowledge Data Compliance Reliance Source: CGMA and DIKW Pyramid V A L U E
- 37. #FutureReady Is the capacity to be anticipatory (aware, predictive and adaptive) of emerging technology and trends in business, demographics, and the social environment impacting your organization and industry. Bill Sheridan, CAE The Business Learning Institute
- 38. Respond lightning fast Access an encyclopaedic memory Stay awake 24 x 7 x 365 Remember conversations Analyze on the fly Continually learn and improve Advantage, machines Source: AccountingWEB
- 39. Intuition Political acumen Challenging Reading the back story Who’s who? Probability of change Culture What’s in it for me? Advantage, humans Source: AccountingWEB
- 40. “Professional judgment and expertise is not replaceable by machines.” — Cathy Engelbert CEO, Deloitte
- 41. “What can I become quite good at that’s really difficult for a computer t o do one day soon? How can I become so resilient, so human and such a linchpin that shifts in technology won’t be able to catch up? It was always important, but now it’s urgent.” -- Seth Godin
- 42. “Humans should only do work that only humans can do.” Peter Sheahan
- 44. Trust Integrity Objectivity Excellence Lifelong learning Core beliefs and values Protect the core and stimulate progress
- 45. Autonomy Mastery Purpose What do people really want?
- 46. 5 steps to becoming future-ready 1. Context 2. Certainty 3. Capacity 4. Competence 5. Core beliefs Bill Sheridan, CAE The Business Learning Institute
- 48. Calendar: The No. 1 app Spend just one hour per week in the future …
- 49. “We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.” R. Buckminster Fuller
- 50. “The best way to predict your future is to create it.” Abraham Lincoln
- 52. Questions? Bill Sheridan, CAE The Business Learning Institute
- 53. Books These are among the resources that were discussed during the our “Future-Ready CPA” programs. The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts By Richard and Daniel Susskind www.susskind.com The Fourth Industrial Revolution By Klaus Schwab bit.ly/1qLrfzs Flash Foresight: How To See The Invisible And Do The Impossible By Daniel Burrus bit.ly/1SOn7FG The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress And Prosperity In A Time of Brilliant Technologies By Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee www.SecondMachineAge.com The Industries Of The Future By Alec Ross bit.ly/2fP8cnU Thank You For Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations By Thomas Friedman bit.ly/2hag0Rg
- 54. What SMBs Want From Their Accountant From The Sleeter Group bit.ly/2fCsvkc Welcome to the Fast Future From CPA.com bit.ly/2gdHlBj The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs To Computerization? By Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne bit.ly/1kre5T6 CPA Horizons 2025 From the American Institute of CPAs bit.ly/1UEN1x2 Innovation Killers: How Financial Tools Destroy Your Capacity To Do New Things By Clayton Christensen, Stephen P. Kaufman and Willy Shih bit.ly/1JtBxfG Ready-Now Leaders: Meeting Tomorrow’s Business Challenges From DDI bit.ly/V05HQ6 Whitepapers These are among the resources that were discussed during the our “Future-Ready CPA” programs.
- 55. Download these slides: Slideshare.net/BillSheridan Follow me: MACPA’s blog: CPASuccess.com Facebook.com/BillSheridan LinkedIn.com/in/BillDSheridan Twitter.com/BillSheridan YouTube.com/BillSheridan SlideShare.net/BillSheridan Instagram.com/BDSheridan The future- ready CPA Bill Sheridan, CAE The Business Learning Institute
Notes de l'éditeur
- So we’re going to talk a little bit today about this notion of future-readiness – what it means to be future ready.
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- Assuming the average thickness of a sheet of paper is a tenth of a millimeter, -- 4 folds would give us a sheet of paper as thick as a credit card. -- 11 folds = the height of a can of soda. -- 17 folds = about 4 feet tall. -- 25 folds = almost as tall as the Empire State Building -- 30 folds = a little over 6.5 miles, about as high as commercial planes fly. -- 40 folds = 6,832 miles. That’s about where GPA satellites orbit the earth. -- Just 5 more folds will get you to the moon. -- 100 folds = more than 8 billion light years in thickness. -- By some estimates, just 3 more folds, or 103 total, gives you a sheet of paper as wide as entire known universe. Exponential growth. In fact, a graph of exponential growth looks nothing like this.
- It looks like this. Gradual, then sudden.
- Stories like that are fun, but there’s a phenomenon happening in our world right now that’s exactly like the paper and the rice. It’s called Moore’s Law. Know what all of that means? It means that computers today are about 130,000 times more powerful that they were in 1988. That your iPhone 6 is as powerful as Apple’s most powerful laptop was just a decade ago. That an iPad Mini is as powerful as the world’s biggest supercomputer was in 1985. We’re all carrying mainframes in our pockets. But Moore’s Law has given us more than a bunch of cool new gadgets to play with. It means that everything and every job is changing – and not just changing, but transforming. (health care) It’s all too much for any single person to keep up with, let along get in front of. And why?
- In Thank You For Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations, Thomas Friedman writes that Intel engineers recently tried to illustrate the power of Moore’s Law by calculating what would happen to a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle if it had improved at the same rate as microchips have over the past 50 years. “Today,” Friedman writes, “that Beetle would be able to go about 300,000 miles per hour. It would get 2 million miles per gallon of gas, and it would cost 4 cents.” Intel’s engineers took it a step further, Friedman writes, and “estimated that if automobile fuel efficiency improved at the same rate as Moore’s Law, you could, roughly speaking, drive a car your whole life on one tank of gasoline.” It’s all too much for any single person to keep up with, let along get in front of. And why?
- So how many of you are busy? How many are really, really busy? How many are so busy you’re too tire to raise your hands? That’s really what I believe is our biggest challenge – we’re so busy trying to keep up that we’re too busy to be future-ready.
- Consider this from Seth Godin: We’re so busy doing our jobs, we can’t get any work done. And that’s a great place to hide, isn’t it? That’s a great excuse to NOT do the really important work. I just don’t have time. And that’s a crock. It’s just an excuse. The truth is, we make time for the really important stuff. And folks, THIS is really important.
- In our surveys over the past year, we’ve seen a few issues that seem to keep bubbling up to the top when we ask, “What are the top challenges you’re facing?” Interestingly enough, this is across the entire profession – public practice of all sizes, corporate, government, and not-for-profits. The same ones keep coming up. And they all have to do with this notion of disruption – new stuff, new technologies, regulations, demographic shifts, global and economic issues. They’re all ganging up on us, aren’t they? And making our lives really, really complex at the same time.
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- Now, combine those with recent research from The Sleeter Group – this is a report called “What Small and Mid-Size Business Want From Their CPAs.” These are the biggest reasons why clients say they leave their CPAs. Look at number 1. In essence, clients say they leave because their CPAs aren’t future-ready enough. By the way, look at how low fees are on that list. Often when we talk to CPAs, they complain that clients leave because they complain the fees are too high. What the research tells us is that they won’t pay your fees … if you aren’t giving them proactive advice. I think the flip side of that is that if you DO give them proactive advice, how might that change? That’s a critical issue, right? That difference between reactive service vs. proactive advice. And a lot of times, it starts with a simple question: What’s keeping you up at night? If you ask that question and pay attention to the answer, a world of opportunity suddenly becomes clear.
- And this idea that we’re not future-ready? Research within the profession bears that out. This is a report from CPA.com, which is the technology arm of the AICPA. The report is called “Welcome to the Fast Future.” It found that only 8 percent of CPAs believe the profession is future-ready. And how do they define “future-ready?” I think the key here is that we have to move beyond accounting. We have to start moving beyond the historical data that has traditionally driven this profession and start looking at those weak signals of disruptive change that are coming at us from the horizon. And there’s our predicament, right? We don’t have enough time to become future-ready. And our clients are leaving because we’re NOT future-ready. If all of this is true, an important question arises: How will we EVER make time to think about the future if we’re constantly stuck in the day-to-day minutia of trying to get our work done?
- Here’s your answer. Look, disruption is going to happen whether we like it or not. Our lives will continue to become more complex whether we like it or not. We can’t do anything about that. What we CAN do is learn how to spot those disruptions before they disrupt us and take advantage of the opportunities they provide. Those who do that will be the winners going forward.
- So let’s talk about those surfing lessons – some ideas that might help us be more future-ready. Five steps. We like to call them the 5 Cs. If you pay attention to these five things, you’ll position yourself as a much more future-ready CPA or accountant – and you’ll bring your whole firm along with you. So let’s talk about each of these.
- Context is simply being aware of what’s going on around you. So let me ask you a question: Is disruption most like to come from inside our profession or outside of it? Outside, right? It’s not going to come from inside. So being able to look outside the profession and identify some of these trends and issues will be critically important going forward.
- Consider this: It’s a quote from Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum. He’s the author of a mind-blowing book called “The Fourth Industrial Revolution.” Pick up a copy today. It’s an important book. But here’s what he had to say:
- Now think about that word that both of them used. That’s transformation. They didn’t say “slightly change” or “tweak.” They said “transformation.” That means EVERYTHING is different. Now, what does that mean?
- That means things like this: Did the taxi cab industry see Uber coming? According to the New York Post, there are now more Uber black cars in New York City than yellow cabs. (Story about Valentine’s Day 2015 in NYC, trying to get a cab to dinner.)
- Then there’s AirBNB. It took Marriott and Hilton 100 years to get a million rooms under their management. It took AirBNB six … six years to hit a millions rooms. Did Hilton or Marriott see that coming? And it came from outside the hotel industry, didn’t it? It didn’t come from inside. That’s the kind of thing that worries me about the CPA profession. Are we paying attention? Are we taking that longer view – and through the windshield, not through the rear-view mirror?
- We’d better be. These are estimates from Oxford University. The odds of certain professions being completely automated within the next 20 years. The only profession worse than us? Telemarketers. The safest profession? Massage therapists. The point is, it’s coming. What will we do when it gets here? Will we be scrambling to keep up, as usual? Or will we have already positioned ourselves to move beyond that disruption and create future-focused value?
- Other studies offer similar predictions. Art Bilger, a venture capitalist and expert at the Wharton School of Business, says 47 percent of the jobs in all developed nations will disappear in the next 25 years — that’s blue-collar and white-collar jobs. Moreover, says The Economist, “no government is prepared” for that level of job loss. Other studies aren’t quite that alarmist. James Manyika, director of the McKinsey Global Institute, says “more jobs will change than will be automated away in the short to medium term.” Still, that change will be extreme. While only 5 percent of jobs can be completely automated over the next 10 years using current technologies, Manyika says at least 30 percent of the activities in 60 percent of all occupations can be automated over the next decade, from welders to gardeners to CEOs. One way or another — complete automation or partial — our jobs are about to change. This type of disruption is coming. In one notable example, in fact, it has already arrived.
- Let’s talk about IBM Watson. Many of us will remember when IBM’s Deep Blue computer beat Gary Kasparaov in chess in 1997. Then, IBM’s Watson technology beat Jeopardy’s reigning human champion, Ken Jennings. Now, fast-forward to last year. A futurist we work with, Dan Burrus, traveled to Toronto to watch Watson prepare a meal. So here’s what they did. They told Watson to read a million cookbooks from all over the world and come up with an innovative recipe. Now, Watson couldn’t cook the meal, but Watson read a million cookbooks and produced a completely unique recipe for the chefs to cook. How long do you think it took Watson to do that? One second. Now, given the exponential nature of change, how long will it take next year? Here’s the really interesting thing: In March, KPMG announced plans to apply the Watson technology to the KPMG professional services offerings – including audit, tax, and advisory services. This comes a little close to home, doesn’t it. It makes you wonder: How long would it take Watson to analyze the tax code? And recommend tax reform? Now, rest easy: I think our tax code is so screwed up that Watson wouldn’t stand a chance. So I think we’re safe … for a little while. But this stuff is coming … and it’s coming fast.
- So that’s context. I want you to be thinking about these questions and ask yourself, am I aware of these trends? And how will I KEEP being aware of them. That’s what context means. Are your offices, workspaces and technology future-focused? And if not, what does that say about you? Do you know what your clients are facing? Are you just reading the footnotes to them, or are you asking them questions that will reveal how their business is doing and what’s keeping them up at night? As you have those conversations, are you using the language of the future or the past? And what image are your offices and technology projecting to students and potential employees? These are questions I want you to keep in mind as you think about context.
- Now let’s talk about the next C – certainty.
- Can you predict the future? So let’s see. Right now it’s summer. What comes after summer? Fall? And after that? Spring? You just predicted the future. How many of you have a smartphone? Will the next one be … So there are things about the future we can predict. If you can start basing your strategies and opportunities on things that are certain, you’ll have a much higher success rate and much lower risk. That’s what we mean by this idea of certainty.
- Our friend, Dan Burrus, a world-renowned futurist. He likes to say there are 4 hard trends – things that are definitely going to happen – four hard trends that are impacting our profession: -- government regulation -- technology -- demographics. So let’s predict the future: Next year, will you be a year older? So will every other person on earth. What will that mean? We all need more managers, right? Well, how long does it take to create, say, a 35-year-old manager? 35 years, right? They’re not going to magically appear. We need to figure out a way to ramp up the leadership skills of some of our high-potential millennials. So again, there are some things you can predict about the future. If you narrow those down and base your firm’s strategy around those certainties, risk goes down, higher rate of success.
- One more thing about certainty: Our inability to decide or move on some of these certainties is starting to cost you money. This is research from Clayton Christianson on disruption. And what he found was, the cost of saying no is zero. If I don’t spend money, I’ll be OK. I might not MAKE money, but in a stable environment, I’ll be OK. But in a fast-changing, disruptive environment like the one we’re in, saying no can actually cost you money. It can actually be fatal. And that’s worth thinking about. THE CURVE: For years, the issue was ROI – what’s the return over time.
- Now let’s talk about capacity. How do we make time to deal with these things from a future perspective. One of the secrets is technology. Are you using the technology you have to its fullest.
- So here’s a simple example: How many of use use Microsoft Word? How many functions and features are there in Word? I’ve heard as high as 4,000. How many have you paid for? 4,000. How many do you use? That’s what we’ve got to stop doing. We have a huge opportunity to say, what are the time-saving features of the things we already have that we can use to start creating time for us? Right? We have to start making time and learn to work smarter, not harder. Use the latest, most efficient technologies – are there apps that will do things for us that we’re now doing by hand? Ask your young people. Bring a few of them in and just ask them: How could we do this pivot table better. Workflow and process efficiency – I’ve heard of firms that have made major strides in tax, for example, by deploying workflow technology. Are you saving time so that you can be more proactive? Because that’s what your clients want.
- Another reason to create capacity is so you can build new competencies – knowledge, skills and abilities. And the one key competency that we believe is critical today – and we’ve researched this through the CPA Horizons Project, with firms and in the corporate community, and with Dan Burrus – is anticipation. That is the key missing competency. How can we anticipate disruptions before they disrupt, problems before we have them, customer needs before THEY have them, and new opportunities before the competition.
- And all of the major research that we’ve seen out there tells us the same thing. Studies conducted by the Conference Board, CPA.com, the new CGMA Competency Framework, right on up to the CPA Horizons Project. https://www.cgma.org/Resources/Tools/DownloadableDocuments/competency-framework-overview.pdf http://www.aicpa.org/Research/CPAHorizons2025/DownloadableDocuments/cpa-horizons-report-web.pdf http://www.cpa.com/whitepapers/welcome-fast-future-cpa-future-2015-study http://www.ddiworld.com/ddi/media/trend-research/global-leadership-forecast-2014-2015_tr_ddi.pdf?ext=.pdf
- And what is that research telling us? Well, the top skills that accounting and finance pros need today – from study to study to study. But you see, we’re all facing the same thing. These are things we need to learn how to do in this increasingly complex world. The funny thing is, when you ask CPAs how much they are investing in teaching these competencies to their teams? Very little. They say they need them, but they’re not spending the money to acquire them. That has to change.
- The good news is, we’re starting to see more and more resources being developed specifically to deliver these types of competencies for accounting and finance professionals. One is Daniel Burrus’s own Anticipatory Organization. The Business Learning Institute worked with Burrus to create a version of his Anticipatory Organization learning platform specifically for accounting and finance pros. That’s available now and is becoming extremely popular in the profession. Another is IBM’s Big Data University. It’s an online curriculum designed to help accounting and finance pros learn key skills in artificial intelligence, Big Data, and cognitive computing. And based on what we’ve been talking about today, these skills are going to be huge differentiators going forward, and will help CPAs play a bigger role in guiding digital transformation within their organizations.
- Here is a great article from Geoffrey Moore (author of Crossing the Chasm) about the power of understanding the trends and issues facing customers and prospects. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/so-you-want-trusted-advisor-geoffrey-moore "Specifically, what you want to bring to the conversation is a point of view about the challenges you are seeing in companies like theirs and a diagnostic of some sort to talk through to determine what their particular issues are. You tee this up by making clear your company is investing to address problems of this sort, but before you talk about that, you want to better understand their situation. Then you start to probe. The diagnostic itself is transparent. By contextualizing the conversation in terms of trends you are seeing at other companies, you give the prospective customer permission to talk through problems they are facing in an open, non-defensive way. The longer this unfolds, the more they confess. The more they confess, they more they trust you. (The Catholic Church got this just right.) In this process, it is important that you engage with the customer around the particulars of their situation, that you ask pertinent questions and offer relevant examples from other companies you are familiar with. What you do not do is interrupt the flow to explain your solution to the problem."
- Right? And this goes right back to that definition of future-ready we talked about earlier.
- Respond lightning fast: AI doesn’t need to put clients on hold, write email replies, or queue at the airline check-in counter. Access an encyclopaedic memory: AI can understand and access thousands of business tools and processes. Stay awake: 24 x 7 x 365. Remember conversations: Track and analyze all conversations ever had with a customer for future learning. Analyze on the fly: Review data trends to predict future behavior. Continually learn and improve: From thousands of conversation patterns.
- Intuition: A feeling as to whether a customer can achieve their objectives. Political nous: Understanding the power plays and relationships within a business. Challenging: An ability to question direction and the vision of owners or managers. Reading the back story: What has been the track record of a business’ implementation success? Who’s who?: Identifying high achievers with time to invest on a project, the blockers, and those people it’s imperative to get “on side” to drive the team. Probability of change: The likelihood of the team to change their behaviors for a given time period. Culture: Identifying strategies with the biggest impact on buy-in from the team. Highlighting WIIFM (What’s in it for me?): The team’s appetite for achieving stated goals.
- “I still believe professional judgment and expertise is not replaceable by machines. I’ve never met a machine with courage and empathy, one that can read body language and adjust what they say. While we’re going to digest larger volumes of data and information, the key is to use artificial intelligence to augment what the human does. … Using these technologies to augment human intelligence and find the insights in the data is more important than ever.” Cathy Engelbert CEO, Deloitte
- One more time from Seth Godin, this time with a key question:
- So here’s the question: Are we going to be able to beat the machines? No. Our only hope to be friends with the machines.
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- And the fifth C, the fifth step to being future-ready: Our core values. Jim Collins famously said, “We have to protect the core and stimulate progress.” And that came straight from the CPA Horizons Project as well. In 2011, the AICPA hired a futurist, we facilitated discussions with CPA groups from coast to coast to figure out how the profession needed to change going forward. About 1,000 CPAs in 16 cities took part, and they identified the competencies we talked about as well as a core purpose for the entire profession: Making sense of a changing and complex world. Pretty cool – in 2011 they were already thinking about how the profession needs to be more proactive. And these were the core values they identified. And as a profession, we’ve always been good at continuous learning. Now the challenge is redirecting it and applying it to these new skill sets that everyone is saying they need. And this ties directly to engaging young professionals, by the way. The one thing the millennial generation will consistently say is that they want to work for a purpose-driven organization. And that purpose has to be about more than just making money. (NASA STORY – That;s purpose. What’s yours?) This isn’t touchy-feely stuff. Jim Collins found that when you tie purpose to your strategy, you outperform the industry average by 1,500 percent. So I would argue there’s gold in here. It increases engagement dramatically. It increases trust dramatically. And it increases performance dramatically. So we’re all struggling to keep up with change, but sometimes this stuff is as much about understanding what MUST NOT change as it is figuring out the things that NEED to change. And the stuff that must not change are our core values. And knowing that can give your team a sense of security. In the midst of all this change and complexity, here are some foundational beliefs that should NEVER change. And again from Jim Collins: Sometimes you have to change what you do to remain who you are. That’s the notion of protecting the core.
- Put another way, let’s turn to Dan Pink. Dan is a best-selling author and a really deep thinker about what motivates people, and according to him, it all boils down to these three things. Autonomy: Give people REAL control over various aspects of their work. Self-direction is a key to meaningful engagement. Mastery: Give your folks room to grow. Give them stretch assignments that will push them a bit out of their comfort zone and let them master those, then push them some more. The idea is to foster improvement, continual mastery, and growth. (Most important skill is the ability to learn new skills.) Purpose: We already talked this one. Connecting to a cause that’s larger than yourself drives the deepest motivation and engagement. Does YOUR organization’s purpose motivate people in that way?
- Let’s recap: Context: How are you learning to look further and wider at the trends and issues in our industry AND in the industries you serve? You’ll never be proactive if you don’t understand your clients’ context as well. Certainty: What can you be doing to make good bets on the future, on things you actually CAN predict with a great deal of certainty. Capacity: How will you create capacity to become future-ready? Competence: How will I provide our teams with the key skills they need to succeed going forward? Core beliefs: Have you even thought about it?
- So the bottom line is that you actually CAN make time for the future, but you have to do it strategically, and not let the tyranny of the urgent kill you when you get back to work. You’re all going to leave here and go back to work and have all of these voicemails and emails and day-to-day stuff to do, and you’ll lose everything we talked about here today in about a week. And I don’t want that to happen. I don’t want you to look like this.
- So here’s what I want you to do – and this, again, comes from our buddy, Dan Burrus. He says the most important app on his smartphone is his calendar. So right now, block off just one hour of time within the next week to think about the future. -- one hour to look at a new app or to better understand a technology that you already have -- one hour to read a book about the future -- one hour to scan the internet for clues about hard trends that are impacting you and your clients. -- one hour to think about how this profession is changing and what you can do about it. Then make it a recurring appointment. One hour a week. And you can’t say you’re going to do it. It won’t get done. Schedule it. Make an appointment on your calendar with yourself. Just one hour a week to think about the future.
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