How To Navigate Decline In Your Career As You Age With Experience?
#Edition 134
Introduction
Welcome to The ContraMind Code.
The ContraMind Code provides you with a system of principles, signals, and ideas to aid you in your pursuit of excellence.
The newsletter shares the source code through quick snapshots for a systems thinking approach to be the best in what you do.
The Code helps you reboot and reimagine your thinking by learning from the best and enables you to draw a blueprint on what it takes to get extraordinary things done. Please share your valuable thoughts and comments and start a conversation.
Take a journey to www.contraminds.com. Listen and watch some great minds talking to us about their journey of discovery of what went into making them craftsmen of their profession to drive peak performance.
What It Means For Companies To Act Their Age.
The recent edition of the MIT Sloan Review carried an interesting article by Aswath Damodaran on how companies or businesses that are ageing can fight through revamp, rebirth, renewal and learn to navigate decline!
Here are some snippets from the article that can give you food for thought:
Companies can reverse ageing through renewals, where they try to fix the existing business to make it grow again.
Or they can reverse ageing through revamps, where they extend into new markets and new products.
Or they can reverse ageing through rebirths, where they change the business, hoping to restart the corporate ageing clock.
Renewal efforts tend to be successful when change is real rather than merely cosmetic, based on operating changes that add value.
The New York Times’ expansion of digital offerings and Adobe’s switch to a subscription model are examples of successful revamps.
Some factors that led to their successful rebirths were an acceptance that the old ways no longer worked. After the dark days of 1997, when it lost market share in personal computers, Apple climbed back to the top of the market capitalisation table in 2012, riding the success of the iPhone.
If companies are mature or declining, run by managers with little skin in the game, and face little pressure from investors to change their ways, those companies will likely refuse to act their age.
Read the entire article here.
Rewire Or Retire.
Sagar Goel leads BCG's work in digital reskilling and leadership development. In this podcast, he discusses the importance of developing new skills or even changing occupations to keep up with technological change. However, are people even getting the training they need? According to BCG research, just 14% received any form of training to cope with the change that is happening around them.
Here are some key highlights for you to think about from this conversation:
“50 per cent of your skills become redundant in five years.”
You need to reskill yourself rather than upskill.
IKEA reskilled 8,500 customer service representatives to become interior design consultants, which generated incremental revenue of $1.4 billion.
As old jobs disappear and new jobs emerge, knowing how to reskill to access those new jobs is essential.
What skills are essential in the future:
Learning agility - The ability to unlearn and relearn constantly.
Analytical thinking, business judgment, and the ability to collaborate with your peers.
The ability to understand biases and where you should have a human in the loop, or even trust and bring in experts versus trusting your AI.
Self-awareness - the ability to be aware of your strengths and weaknesses.
Staying ahead of the curve in your domain, digital or technology skills.
By the time you graduate, a significant portion of your skills could become irrelevant to the industry.
Keep replenishing yourself with more micro or short-term programs or courses.
You need to take the time out and invest in your own skills.
Combine your exercise or morning walk routine with a learning routine.
You can also listen to this episode on:
Inside Mark Zuckerberg's AI Era.
In this interview, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg in Bloomberg Originals discusses his long-term bets on artificial intelligence and the metaverse.
Here are some thoughts that he shares in this interview with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang:
Zuckerberg talks about why MetaAI will be the most used AI assistant in the world and how Meta is building AI with an open-source model, unlike OpenAI and Google.
He believes there will be millions or billions of AI models out there. There are currently about 200 million creators, and they will have AI-generated influencers and captions. Ultimately, this could lead to a first-of-its-kind, AI-generated social network.
He also discusses why he is building AGI( Artificial General Intelligence) and defines what AGI means to him and Meta.
When asked what kids should be learning these days, he mentions they should learn to think critically and understand values when they are young.
Zuckerberg reveals his hiring philosophy, stating that it is vital for somebody to go deep into one thing and achieve excellence as an indicator of applying it to other things.
How does he find the time to do so many things? His answer is fantastic: “ Having the balance between the different things that you do, helps you do all the things better.”
According to Zuckerberg, he looks at what he is building as 10-15 year chapters, like AI will take 10 or 15 years to materialise fully, as well as the next computing platforms they are doing.
His vision of the future of tech is interesting where he mentions when he started his company, he needed to know all the stuff about coding to build the idea that he had, but the future would be like expressing the idea to an AI system to build it!
You can watch the entire video by clicking the above link.
How To Navigate Decline In Your Career As You Age With Experience?
Aswath Damodaran’s article on how ageing companies or businesses navigate decline triggered thoughts on how the same framework or model can be applied to people, too. It was further reinforced by listening to the podcast ‘Rewire or Retire’ on the need to reskill and not just upskill. Mark Zuckerberg’s conversation pushed the idea deeper, as he mentioned that he looks at what he is building in 10 or 15-year chapters. What does all these mean to you, personally?
As an individual pursuing any career, you must consider building your career in 10- or 15-year chapters. What’s more, you will often assume mindlessly that your job in a company will take care of your career growth by itself - either in the same company or in a new company within the same industry. That, unfortunately, may not be true. Suppose the company you work for is not managing its own business lifecycle very well - through renewal, revamp, or rebirth, or the industry you work for is not constantly reinventing itself, it will put you in a spot later in your work life. If that is the case, you will be personally left behind with skills that don’t matter or are valuable in the future. What may look like a stable and comfortable job now may make you a liability either in the company you work for or in the industry or as somebody with not-so-relevant skills for any emerging new industry or company. You need to assess this constantly.
Also, when things look too comfortable and smooth in your job, it may be the time for you to get worried. You must factor in some volatility and unpredictability in your job, as these situations typically present you with new skill-building capabilities and new experiments in your career, which allows you to learn and stay adaptive to changes and disruptions.
Therefore, to navigate decline in your career as you age with experience, you must apply the same principles outlined by Aswath Damodaran to yourself and your career.
Break down four or five decades of your work life into 10- or 15-year blocks.
In the early phases of every 10-15 years of work life, constantly strive for renewal by taking up new responsibilities or opportunities that you see at work that can add value to your existing skills.
In the middle phase of your 10-15-year work life, strive for a revamp of what you have been doing by taking up adjacent roles in any diversification or greenfield opportunities your company is pursuing. It may or may not succeed, and it could jeopardize the smooth career trajectory that you may be currently having, but if it enhances and expands your skills, it will be worth its weight in gold later in your work life.
In the late phases of your 10-15-year work life, strive for a rebirth of your own career by building a solid self-awareness of what is working and not working for you in the current workplace and market environment. You must be ready to accept which skills are no longer working. Also, think deeply about which of your strengths you can leverage further, along with new skills you will need to acquire for the future. Work on these by reinventing yourself by constantly learning and unlearning during this phase.
Remember, experience no longer means expertise. Get uncomfortable when you become comfortable.
Some lessons we learnt from this week’s missions:
To navigate decline, companies or businesses must fight their ageing through revamping, rebirth, and renewal. This framework applies to people, too.
You need to reskill rather than just upskill yourself to keep pace with the technological change around you.
Finding time to do different things helps you do all the things that you do better.