My main question for the winter break: “What should I do now to prosper in 10 years?”

The winter holiday season is the perfect time to take a break and free your mind from operational load, to enjoy the silence of cold nights, time with the family, and warm fondue on the table. Once you do that, it becomes easier to abstract away from what you do in day-to-day life and think about your trajectory and whether you have to fix the course. At least, that’s what I do between the years. The key question that I ask myself during the winter break sounds as follows:

“What should I do now to prosper in 10 years?”

Why 10 years, and not 5 or 20? Anything more than 10 is too far away for me to make any serious forecasts, but at the same time, it is already distant enough to put my life now into some kind of perspective.

This question is very powerful as it sets your thinking into the right frame. Furthermore, it is applicable to both individuals and businesses. For me, this question is the essence of what we should understand under strategy. I have met many people who like talking about strategy, but only a few who can actually formulate a strategy the right way. At the same time, there is nothing really complex about it; being strategic means knowing how you want to differentiate from others and what you have to start doing now to achieve this (in other words, what kind of investments you have to make now to get the desired returns in the future). Let me illustrate the importance of this question with a canonical case study from business development.

Do you know how Nestlé, using sweets and psychoanalysis , got the residents of Japan hooked on coffee? Their marketers found out that in the experience of adult Japanese, there was not only no habit of constant consumption but even no concept of the taste of coffee. They took a fundamental approach—started creating this concept among children by launching candies with the flavor of coffee. Thus, Nestlé managed to "grow" itself a new generation of coffee lovers. Now, this Asian country is one of the largest buyers of coffee beans in the world.

That’s a perfect example of how sometimes, to achieve a complex goal, you have to work not only with yourself, but also with the environment where you expect to operate. And when I think about, it gets clear that on the execution level it can be translated into 2 things:

1. building the right leverage
2. and creating optionality which will help you to generate favorable events.

Let me explain both things and how I apply them both in my personal life and my work.

Building leverage.

“what should I do know to have enough leverage in 10 years?”

This is something that is usually intuitively understood by individuals: in order to have leverage on the job market, you have to become expert in something, specialize, sharpen and deepen your skills. You don’t have to be a “one subject expert”, and in fact, the so-called T-shaped and tree-shaped people are also in high demand. But in any case, you need a coherent, wholesome and simple story about yourself, which can convince people that you can get stuff done.

What can you use as confirmation of being an expert in a subject? I formulated it the following way for myself: once you have your own framework of working with the subject, you can think that you understood it up to a certain level. By framework I mean a set of rules that you learned the hard way, and which you can use to navigate in a situation of uncertainty. The framework can arise only when you have understood the principles of working with something, and that’s exactly how knowledge works: knowledge of a subject is for me not remembering some facts, but understanding the principles of how to work with these facts.??

The algorithm of creating such framework can look the following way:

→ start doing something (learn a technology, programming language, a theory, a method of doing something);

→ apply it in diff. circumstances or domains (diff. kind of projects, industries, etc.);

→ abstract away (to understand the logic of it, fundamental strengths and weaknesses, etc.);

→ create your own framework for using it (when is it good to apply, with what other components, what limitations does it have, with what kinds of tradeoffs you have to deal with, what are the best practices of working with it, etc.)

So, being an expert in something definitely is one way of building leverage for an individual. But not the only one. To be “safe”, one needs to think not only about their direct work, but also about the environment in which they will operate. The following things can also be considered a leverage nowadays:

• Knowing how to boost your productivity with digital technologies, especially AI-powered applications. That would allow you to win more spare time, or to work as a freelancer.
• Financial literacy, which will help you to get income after retirement, or to be your own accountant if you want to work independently.

What can be considered a leverage for businesses? Many things, but I would like to focus on one aspect that is both obvious and misunderstood: let your people grow and stay competitive. If you have a framework for growing your own seniors and principals, you will have a very strong leverage. But that’s easier said than done. In theory, such thinkers as Peter Drucker, William Edwards Deming and Tom Peters already described how to achieve that. In practice, that’s what I personally do to grow people in the AppDev practice that I am leading:

• approach people individually, be curious about them and try to understand what interests and motivates them. Listen carefully. And then try to match their interests to the interests of the company - it should be a win-win. The nice thing is that people are really different, and want to grow in diff. directions: somebody wants to be more involved in the process of portfolio development; somebody wants to get hands-on experience in one specific subject and needs shadowing for that; somebody has fun speaking publicly.
• Make sure that your people understand the economics of their roles. Sounds obvious, but many workers don’t understand what economic effects their actions might have. Most people don’t fully understand their place in companies they work: they don’t know colleagues from other departments; don’t know the right interfaces for the issues and questions they can have; are not sure how to leverage the internal communities. That’s why I try to expand the network of the people that I am working with, make them talk to non-technical people; try to make sure that they have access to our reference cases and portfolio descriptions; listen to their insights from the projects and make sure that people can actually do something with this information, get it. That’s how my text about economic effects of trust was written .

The great thing about the second point is that it not only helps to build leverage (the quality of people’s work increases when they understand the economics of their role and their company), but also helps to create optionality! We will talk about that in a minute.

But for now, let’s summarize the section:

to prosper in 10 years, I need to start building leverages that will help me to navigate in any possible future environment.

Gaining optionality.

People like feeling control about their life. That’s why the idea of building their skills is very appealing to many people. But often the most interesting things in our life come unexpectedly: for example, my promotion 2 years ago, which helped me to discover the facettes of my personality I didn’t know about. However, instead of hoping for good events to happen, you can rather increase the possibility of such events if you understand the concept of optionality, which means opportunity to choose . My idea is that the more touchpoints with the outside world you have, the more optionality you gain, by getting to know new people, hearing information you could have missed, getting new experiences that can change your understanding of yourself and the surrounding world.

For example, building a personal brand can help you to position yourself, attract the right people, spread ideas that are important to you. Or maintaining good relationships with your ex-colleagues and selected recruiters, who know what you are capable of, can pay off, when you will need to find a new job - which can happen in 5 years, or next year, or maybe tomorrow (by the way, it is proven, that “weak ties” are much more effective in helping to find work opportunities).

I already spoke about upskilling people being the right way to build leverage for companies. The good thing is that upskilling your employees also helps you to get optionality: when they learn about the economics of their company and have extensive network within the company, not only the quality of their work increases, but also the chances of synergies between people with different mindset.

So,

to prosper in 10 years, I need to take care not only of building the leverage, but also systematically creating conditions for occurrence of favorable events.

To prosper means much more than that.

Just ask this question one more time: what do I need to do now to prosper in 10 years? You will recognize that there is much more in it than “only” work:

• You can’t prosper if you don’t care of your physical and mental health. That’s why I don’t believe in a story: “I work too hard now to be able to rest later”.
• You can’t prosper if communities around you don’t do well.

By asking myself this question, I keep remembering how important it is to maintain relationships with people, to make the right investments that help building a sustainable future, to have a balance between work and life. That’s exactly what makes it so powerful.

Happy new year! ??