The Changing Nature of Work

When I started my career in the mid 80's, we were in a very different world. We were an industrial society, driven by production of physical goods and tangible services. GM was the undisputed #1 car manufacturer in the world. Communication was done largely by phone and paper correspondence - I remember getting my first "bag" phone in a company vehicle in 1994 as a big deal. Companies built capabilities in-house to deliver the things they needed for their evolving businesses. Employees hired on with the expectation they'd picked a company for life.

Today we're evolving to an information and services economy, where competitive positioning is driven by innovation of data and technology for most of the Fortune 500. The recent pandemic drove digital adoption at the expense of bricks and mortar stores and service platforms. The Fortune500 is led by Walmart and Amazon, each with over one million employees. The 5 most valuable companies in the World are all tech companies. The 47 tech companies on the Fortune500 list are cumulatively valued at $9.6 TRILLION! Companies like Amazon, Alphabet, Apple are growing at strong double-digit rates while airlines lost a combined $31Bn last year and hoteliers including Hilton, Wynn Resorts and MGM Resorts all fell off the Fortune500 for this year. While some of those hospitality and travel declines will turn around, it is the savvy technology players like AirBnB that will continue to outpace their old school rivals and capture market share.

The impacts in the job market have been profound, especially for those of us in our 50s. A 2017 McKinsey & Company study projected between 75M and 375M workers will need to be retrained in the coming decade to maintain marketable skills. Consolidation in hospitality and retail markets, combined with the impacts of automation and machine learning, will result in more than half the current employees in certain fields being obsolete by the end of this decade. Acceleration of change in certain other fields, like digital marketing and data sciences, make any technical skills acquired prior to the past few years irrelevant in today's global marketplace. Entire new industries such as payments processing, digital health, alternative energies and cloud hosting are growing at breakneck speeds, leaving behind those unprepared for the transitions. The pandemic only accelerated the adoption of remote work and the migration out from crowded metropolitan areas.

After years of fighting for the nicest corner office, where I sat in face-to-face meetings all day every day talking about weeks' old data in my awkward business casual attire, I now instead find myself very happily working from home in a t-shirt and jeans, communicating via Chime with my peers in 14 different time zones, working together to solve complex problems impacting our operations teams around the World. I'm using a variety of real-time Quicksites, Tableau dashboards, and other reporting tools to measure the impact of our efforts and thinking strategically about technologies that will change not just our company but all companies when we're successful... and I'm throwing the tennis ball for my goldendoodle... and I'm planning to work from an AirBnB on the beach in Hawaii for awhile... and I'm reviewing a data deep dive with my team in Bangalore... and I'm learning to use a new project collaboration tool... and I'm partnering with a BU POC to discuss project implementation timing... and I'm reviewing the projected growth of sub-businesses and that impact on volume mix and overall rates for 2022-2025... and I'm looking at our open management roles and wondering how we're going to fill these key slots... and I'm thinking about how best to structure the GSF MBR to best convey MSD RIR opportunities and actions needed going into 2022 to achieve budgeted entitlements and glide path to 2025.

My point is this - the need for strong leaders and capable strategic thinkers remains of paramount importance, but the forum, format, technologies and nomenclatures in which we operate are changing rapidly! Truly understanding your own personal capabilities and knowledge gaps, then actively working to close critical gaps, is essential to remaining a viable asset to companies in this new economy. The technical knowledge that helped make you successful a decade ago may well be irrelevant today, but your ability to lead people and make sound decisions to drive quantifiable results must remain at the core of all you do and the actions you take today.