Define Your “How”, Refine Your “Next”

I am sure you’ve heard this before – it is not about the destination, it is about the journey.

And it really is. Where we reach is very much dependent on what path we take to get from our NOW to our NEXT. Today we live in times where both the rate of change and the scale of change are exponential. If you look at the top Fortune 100 list of the year, you’ll see names of organizations that didn’t exist even 20 years ago. Earlier, a decade was a short span of time in the life of a company or the career of a person. That isn’t true anymore. Today, 3-5 years are enough to have a game changing effect.

History teaches us many lessons. You’ll see that while most companies are great at their core business, not many of them are great at reimagining the future of their business. We've seen plenty of such examples over the years, of very successful businesses like Nokia and Kodak that eventually faded away. Then there are businesses like Netflix, which started as a mail order DVD business and reimagined itself to become a service that streams video, and is now one of the largest producers of content.

Earlier, NEXT was complicated but easier to determine as the variables like business context or consumer needs changed sequentially and over longer periods. Today when everything from consumer needs, business competition, technology landscape are changing rapidly, and that too simultaneously, defining NEXT has become a fairly complex process.

While companies look at differentiating themselves, how does one look at transformation of self? When everything around you is changing constantly, how do you define ‘your’ NEXT?

When you start to look ahead, you’ll realize that the ways you functioned earlier are no longer the set of muscles that will work going forward. The HOW that you used to get to your NEXT needs a dramatic alteration as you are required to redefine yourself multiple times to stay relevant.

Here are four things I am using to frame my mindset in defining my HOW in my journey to NEXT :

• As a leader, one must stay close to the direct context of where the work is happening since it is moving at a rapid pace. It will help one stay relevant, which is going to be key. Managing through too many layers will lead to dilution of context and a way of leading with a short runway. The era of leaders as player-coaches is definitely here.
• The brands that will win are the ones obsessed about value creation for their consumers. As a leader, I am focused on being clear in the value delivered through any investment of time or effort irrespective of whom it is for. It is the primary lens to use to look at impact created for the world. If I am unclear on the value of what I or my team is doing, it makes me hit the pause button.
• In this increasingly complex context, no one person will have the answers and anyone could have a valuable role to play in attaining a solution. As a leader this means building a collaborative, open and encouraging environment where people work and build off each other’s ideas. The journeys of today are more of rapid incremental steps where giant leaps are rare. As such, we need to be experimenting all the time learning from failures and build on success.
• Learnability will trump expertise since the frames of time within which change happens is getting thinner. I am constantly pushing myself to learn and grow in new areas and stay curious since this is not something you can absolve yourself of as a leader when it is an imperative for everyone. You can learn from anyone on your team so don’t let hierarchy come in the way of your growth.

I reckon that at the current and expected rate of change, the NEXT will go through frequent iterations in perpetuity. Like Marco Polo said – “A true traveler never arrives”, we are now going to be in a never ending state of HOW. In the space between the “Now” and the “Next”, HOW you #SeizeTheSpace is everything and that could not be more true today.