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Where is the world moving out to? What do people and organizations want? It is funny how if you reflect mankind has been running after things everywhere with one thing at the back of his mind.. to find more time for himself. It is not a co-incidence we have come a long way towards specialization since Robinson Crusoe’s do-your-own-thing-live-your-own-life way of life. The concept of specialization picked up during the Industrial Revolution because that was needed by all these big factories – people who could keep working in a specialized job and seniority meant increased performance through repetitive and experiential job-based learning, hence, the concept of seniority-based pay. Once this revolution picked up, the next couple of decades were basically just an extension to it – the factory worker mindset was needed, so they had to inculcate discipline and then teamwork started to become institutionalized from an early age – from the earlier mentor-protege relationships in almost all sciences and arts studies, the concept of standardized learning approaches in classrooms were brought around. People started to get familiar and comfortable with the idea of standardized, institutional learning as a key to getting a safe, secure job.
Life was all about stability because that was what was expected of a factory worker mindset. However, now things have changed. Part of this change is the change in the platform – now, factories are only as important as mind-factories. So as this snapshot of the current top companies by market cap on NASDAQ shows, most of these sell products that are not as much related to routine work as innovative work. It is due to this innovative spirit need that companies are now talking about talent management, talent retention and organizational development.
We need to think loud, think out of the box and think different to keep exciting an audience that is ever more important and ever more reachable. Just do it! 🙂