Past performance is no guarantee of future results

strategy+business, October 18, 2019

by Theodore Kinni



Photograph by aeduard

By 1905, when philosopher George Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” humans had already been gleaning lessons from history for several millennia. Around 800 BC, in the Iliad, Homer used the principal players in the Trojan War to explore leadership strategies and styles. Nearly a thousand years later, at the start of the second century AD, Plutarch compared the character traits of historical leaders in Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans. And of course, we are still at it today. The business bookshelves are sagging with leadership and strategy lessons drawn from the lives of yesterday’s inventors, tycoons, generals, politicians, and other leading lights.

Sometimes these lessons feel like too much of a stretch — not only because they tend to idealize their subjects, but also because they elevate ad hoc responses into generic rules. How much credence, for instance, should a new CEO put in creating a “team of rivals” à la Abraham Lincoln? Or, to hold my own feet to the fire, how much faith should a leader in a battle for market share put in the “hit ’em where they ain’t” military strategy of Douglas MacArthur?

Ben Laker, professor of leadership at Henley Business School and dean of education at the National Centre for Leadership and Management in the U.K., points to current Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who wrote a book about another U.K. prime minister, The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History, to illustrate the difficulties of applying lessons from the past. “The Prime Minister knows how Winston Churchill created a sense of connection through a ‘backs against the wall’ mentality in 1941. He is basing his rhetoric, decisions, and actions on Churchill’s example. And many people do feel more connected to him because of it,” Laker says. “But as Johnson’s critics observe, Brexit is not a war and a wartime mentality is at odds with a situation that requires openness and collaboration to reach a feasible outcome.”

Clearly, context is a critical factor in applying history. “You can look at the past and ask yourself whether you would do the same thing in the same situation,” Laker told me in recent conversation. “But the problem is you are not in the same situation. So, how relevant is history to your present situation?”  Read the rest here.

Need to Work Differently? Learn Differently

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

Boss Magazine, October 2019

by Michael Griffiths


Digitization requires a new set of skills and a new set of training for employees

The next time your company holds an all-hands meeting, look around the room — or the arena — and consider this: It’s likely that more than half the people present will need reskilling or upskilling in the next three years.

This probably doesn’t come as a complete surprise to you. The forces of change are transforming every aspect of work, including what is done, who does it, and where it is done.

For example, emerging technologies — especially AI and machine learning — are among the most disruptive of these forces. In fact, 81 percent of respondents to Deloitte’s 2019 Global Human Capital Trends survey indicated they expect the use of AI to increase or increase significantly over the next three years. Unlike some, we don’t believe that AI will eliminate the need for a workforce. Instead, we anticipate the rise of hybrid jobs, which are enabled by digitization, technology, and the emergence of a new kind of job, which we call the superjob. A superjob combines work and responsibilities from multiple traditional jobs, using technology to both augment and broaden the scope of the work performed and involving a more complex set of digital, technical, and human skills.

Hybrid jobs and superjobs can enable your company to be more responsive to customers and adaptable to change. But it requires a more deliberate and agile approach to capability development. Already, many companies are responding to this need: Our research finds that 83 percent of organizations are increasing their investments in reskilling programs, and more than half (53 percent) increased their learning and development budgets by 6 percent or more in 2018.

But will more learning be enough at your company? It’s doubtful. To Work Differently we think your company should first Learn Differently. Read the rest here.