Class of 2013: Don't Welcome Change, Be the Change

You are ready to start a brilliant career and you might be wondering where to start. Or maybe you have already set your sights on a job, in a given industry, and you wonder whether it is the right “entry point”, or whether it will define your career for the rest of your life. Relax! I started as an engineer (see picture), ended up managing newspapers and I am now developing a global PR network.

There’s no longer such a thing as ‘forever’, and nor should there be. The world we live in is going through a radical transformation. Very powerful forces are at work. I can’t think of an industry where the traditional business model, as it was in the 20th century, is not being re-invented. Whether it is the digital revolution, or the shift of the overall economic center of gravity, or the absolute necessity to change the way we use natural resources and commodities, we know that the value chains are being turned on their heads.

It means that you have to accept change. No, you have to welcome change and uncertainty. Actually, you have to be the change.

Whether you start working for a bank, a car manufacturer or in retail, you need to be absolutely convinced that, together with other young or more experienced colleagues, you will have to imagine how your company needs to adapt to the new reality. You need to be convinced that your competitors in five years’ time will be very different from who they are today. Who at Warner Music or EMI imagined ten years ago that Apple would, one day, rule the music industry? And you know what? There is no model out there you could follow: all the key players of your industry are confronted with the same phenomenon. The only difference is that some of them may move faster than others.

Hire grads and let them imagine the future

It is extremely difficult when you are in a well-established company to seriously challenge the processes and approaches that have made it successful in the past. It takes imagination and much bravery to think of a radically different business model.

It was difficult for publishers of print magazines and newspapers to imagine an online-only source of information. It was difficult for broadcasters to imagine that YouTube, Amazon or Netflix could dramatically disrupt their world. It was difficult for Walmart to imagine Amazon as their future enemy rather than Target, Carrefour or Tesco. And it was very hard for well established airlines to seriously consider a low-cost business model, like those created by EasyJet and Ryanair.

That is why I have often recommended to senior managers of traditional companies to recruit three graduates, to put them in a room without any specific position in the organization. Each time the top management of the company is trying to resolve an issue, I tell them they should give the brief to the grads without trying to influence them and tell them: “Take a day or two to brainstorm about this and tell us how you would approach this and which solution is best, according to you.” It is amazing how those grads will come up with very different proposals from the ones imagined at the top echelons of the organization.

Some managers say, certainly to reassure themselves, that it is a temporary and cyclical rough patch they are experiencing and that everything will return to “normal”, the old normal. How wrong this is!

The world you are entering in is in flux, and it has been so for some time. It is unstable, which means that you will have to change jobs and companies often, far more often than your parents did. It also means that you will have to be ready to learn all your life. You will always be students.

Learn to like uncertainty, to seize new opportunities, to be curious about other cultures, travel the world. It is a very exciting time. Thrive on the unique opportunity you have: you were born into this era of seismic shifts and unlike most of my generation, you are inherently more at home in this world. Enjoy it!

Photo: Olivier Fleurot (left) in his first of many careers, as a water treatment engineer, in Izmit, Turkey, winter of 1975-1976. Courtesy of Olivier Fleurot.