Via the Toronto Globe and Mail.
When I get a moment I will compare and contrast to the 2001 presentation on the same subject (2001 Workplace Odyssey) that I recently pulled out of my archives.
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In the words of a business guru
If you feel like work is getting harder, it’s not just your imagination, says Malcolm Gladwell.
The bestselling author of Blink and The Tipping Point says the mental demands of the workplace are steadily growing — and we’re all going to have to smarten up if we want to succeed.
"I’m quite prepared for the possibility that the next revolution is not going to come from a machine," says Mr. Gladwell, 44, a staff writer for New Yorker magazine, who has carved out his own niche as a business guru. "It’s going to come from creating a more thoughtful work force and giving people the opportunity to be thoughtful."
Among his recommendations: Business leaders should get more involved in education policy debates, Canada should consider other countries’ models for teaching advanced mathematics, and hiring managers should stop looking for a perfect fit when scouting for employees.
A native of Ontario, Mr. Gladwell is returning home this month (Oct. 14-16) for the University of Waterloo’s "Workplace 2017" conference, where he will interview Research In Motion co-chief executive officer Jim Balsillie about the future of work. In a recent interview, Mr. Gladwell talked about the challenges ahead for businesses as the nature of work evolves and the baby boom generation retires.
Imagining the workplace in 10 or 20 years is tough … How do we think about the future in a way that’s helpful and not just an exercise in futility?
Probably the wisest course is to stay away from the areas where there’s the greatest uncertainty. So I don’t think we can predict what the hot areas will be 10 to 15 years from now; that’s just a sure path to embarrassment to try to figure out what the much-needed technology will be. But we can have a pretty good sense of things like demographic trends. We know with absolute certainty that the cognitive demands of the workplace will be greater, not less; we know that Western industrial nations are unlikely to be regaining manufacturing jobs. We can be reasonably certain of those kinds of broad trends.
When you say that the cognitive demands of the workplace will be growing, what do you mean?
We will require, from a larger and larger percentage of our work force, the ability to engage in relatively complicated analytical and cognitive tasks. So it’s not that we’re going to need more geniuses, but the 50th percentile is going to have to be better educated than they are now. We’re going to have to graduate more people from high school who’ve done advanced math, is a very simple way of putting it.
Unfortunately, it seems like we’re heading in the opposite direction in terms of test scores and math literacy. How do we turn that around?
There’s a cheap solution, which Canada has actually excelled at, which is simply to import your brains. As the son of an Englishman who came to Canada to teach math, the Gladwells [and myself] are part of that earlier cheap solution. So that’s one route, and we can continue to do that, there’s nothing stopping us.
And Canada will not become less desirable over time; I suspect that 10 years from now, Canada will be an even more desirable location for lots of people from less-developed countries.
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Tags: Malcolm Gladwell, workplace of the future, literacy, learning, innovation and change, diversity, Canada
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