I was glad to be invited to speak at this event as the winner of The Economist-Innocentive challenge on proposing a new human potential index (my winning proposal of a “creative sharing index” can be downloaded here). This also gave me the opportunity to listen to a number of outstanding speakers on emerging issues around human potential – here are my selected highlights of the first day.
On the Future of Jobs:
The wider availability of individual freelancers from worldwide global labor market, as facilitated by both the new technologies and the emerging countries development (more educated people, etc) is way more disruptive than anticipated by the developed countries. It makes people redundant. (Matthew Bishop)
To survive that, you have no choice but to:
- be smart,
- develop your social network; build a brand, create something of outstantding value, you need to MASTER it
- rely upon your personal network basement to keep on developing and grow as a person: your posse, your challengers, your regenerative community
- think about your relationship with money (probably the most challenging part!)
(Lynda Gratton)
On Education:
UK and US may have too much focused on the services industry, such as banking in the UK, at the expense of maintaining high quality manufacturing competences, compared to Germany and South Korea. German economy in particular has continued to educate their young people through their apprenticeship system. (Lynda Gratton)
All over the world, people complain education system fails to deliver ready-to-work people. 75 millions of Americans only have a high school degree or even less for 25 millions of them. There’s no choice but to engage into lifetime learning. (Matthew Bishop)
On woman workforce:
There are more women at executive levels in emerging countries than in developed countries. They get more domestic help, in particular from family (Sylvia Ann Hewlett)
(My personal take on this: this may be just a side effect of transitioning into a developed country. How many of those executive women in emerging countries will provide direct family support to their own daughters in 30 years? Moreover, when there is no public funded retirement in place, parents depends on their children lifelong. That probably forces a stronger dependency on supporting their children to financial success, in particular in countries where you’re only have 1 or 2 childrem such as China.)
Women have enough mentors (3 times more as men, in fact) but not enough sponsors (that really engage themselves in supporting them) in developing their career (Sylvia Ann Hewlett).
On our Aging Population:
In one of the most outstanding sessions of that day, Sonia Harrison introduced us to the new challenges of aging longer – as will be more and more enabled by technologies such as tissue engineering. Sonia quoted Bill Gates: “If I was a teenager now, I would not get into software coding, but some kind of biology hacking” (personal take on this: that is exactly why the top engineering higher education school in Switzerland has re-oriented to life sciences 10 years ago, and we’ll soon see the outcome – the Geneva lake area is progressively turning into a biotech industry valley).
The 100+ aging population will revolutionize our societies at all levels, but in particular in the way we organize our work and personal development lifelong:
- Retirement at 65 will no longer stand
- There will be life-long demand for continuous education
- The “search for purpose” will drive more people into religions and spirituality than the fear of death; in managing your longer life, meaning will be a central driver
- Management of multiple generations will need to be re-thought
- There’s a significant risk that the 100+ lifelong be a privilege of the rich – creating a further aging divide than we already have today (life expectancy in Monaco: 90; in Angola: 38. But also significant differences in the US: South Dakota Indian men: down to 58; New Jersey Asian-American women: up to 91 )
On emerging education systems:
- Online tuition free, non for profit university education is developing as in the University of The People. Interaction (e.g. using Facebook) is much more intensive than in conventional classrooms. Quite a good alternative for nothing! (Shai Reshef).
- At Oxford, what happens around the lecture is becoming more important than the lecture itself (Angel Cabrera)
- Most of the University incentives today are non sense (Angel Cabrera)
- Traditional universities have an important role, but who will pay for them? In emerging countries, there aren’t enough university seats (Ben Wildavsky)
- If you’re pretending to be something else than you are, you won’t be happy and performing in your work. Passionate people do build trust instantaneously: but less than 20% of the US workforce are passionate about thier work. Self employed people perform better. (John Hagel)
- Freelancers may be the key to fuel innovation (Sophie Vandebroek)
- Talent search should focus on hybrid thinkers. From sculpting to designing biz plans, from a space degree to design… We prize Leonardo Da Vinci but still live in the world of John Ford! The problem comes from our education system, forcing people to a narrow focus. Journalism may be the only field allowing hybrid thinkers to survive (Dev Patnaik)
- Confronting people with different thinking is key to innovation. E.g. people from the arts vs engineers, but also people with a different mother tongue and cultural background; a different language means a different thinking (Amy Cappellazzo)
- Science is about analysis and number crunching, more and more, and that’s the same in the corporate world, but we’re missing active involvement, experimentation, breakthrough ideas. We need more design thinking (Hilary Austen)
I really enjoyed reading about the conference. Sonia Harrison’s talk does sound like it was especially fascinating. I’ve been thinking a lot about these issues myself lately, and I think we’re going to feel some profound effects of this in our lifetime.