How to avoid becoming obsolete as a leader in the 21st century

Am I the only person who starts to get a headache when today’s tech buzzwords come up? As soon as I hear things like “Web3”, “Crypto”, “Metaverse”, “Blockchain”, AI, or Machine Learning, it’s like someone is speaking Greek and I often get lost. If you have the same reaction, you’re probably close to or above 40, and it will take patience, head-scratching, and intense listening? to get to that lightbulb moment.?

Listening to who- you wonder? The younger generation obviously!

The talent needed to drive the most critical innovations in the 21st century is trending younger. Gone are the days where older, experienced people controlled the destiny of companies or entire countries. While the current crop of leaders were learning languages like French and Spanish to boost their CVs, the young leaders of today are learning Python and Java as early as possible. Many countries are embedding coding in their primary school curriculums and the average Gen Zer can work their way around a tech product faster than we can say “blockchain”. The reason is pretty clear- they are digital natives and we are simply digital immigrants. So in order to understand the languages and cultures in their digital world, we must ask them.?

From a strictly business perspective, the only way we can continue to grow and scale our companies in this 4th industrial revolution, is to understand the new skills that are powering the world. Software engineering, Data science, Cybersecurity, Cloud Computing, UX design, Product, Web3.0, etc., are some of the most important competencies that companies need to be successful today, and these fields are largely dominated by young talent. In fact, one study on something as basic as remote working showed that 65% of Gen Zers prefer communicating online instead of in-person! The difference is clear.

So what does this mean for us? For me, it’s 2 key things:

1. That some of my teachers and mentors are about a decade or two younger than I am: We must get comfortable with this reality.
2. That I’m in a constant state of redeveloping myself:? I’m reading a lot of material on the 4th industrial revolution, learning how things like IoT work, spending time with product managers, data scientists, and software engineers on my team to understand concepts like microservices, ‘virtual machines’ and how they can be managed using containers and ‘kubernetes’. I join relevant conversations on concepts like Web3. In all these situations, I take copious notes and think about how they can be applied to accelerate growth, deliver better outcomes to customers, and create impact.

At the end of 2021, I stood on the stage at Amazon Web Services’ re:Invent summit, an annual conclave in Las Vegas that brought together 30,000 developers, engineers, and business leaders to understand the latest trends in cloud computing. I described how we had levered AWS to build The Room’s data infrastructure and power our machine learning, and announced how we would be building a technology platform to connect top talent to opportunity. If you spoke to me that week, you would have thought I was a software engineer-turned business leader. But the reality is, around the same time in 2019, I didn’t know much about cloud or data science.

The pandemic accelerated the impact of technology around the world, and the adaptable leaders adapted. In this 21st century, the students have become the masters and we must in turn, learn.