Jim Carroll- Futurist, Trends & Innovation Keynote Speaker

Take a look at this kid.

He’s your next employee. How are you going to recruit, retain, manage, interest and amuse this fellow? What’s your workforce going to look like in 2012, 2020, or beyond?

There’s quite a bit of focus on trends relating to the future of the organization — and organizations are seeing innovative strategies to cope with the world of high velocity change that we find ourselves in.

Last week I was the opening keynote speaker, and a panelist later in the day, for an offsite of one of the world’s largest professional services firms. Tomorrow, I keynote a get-together of key clients of a multi-billion insurance/financial services company. A few months ago, I ran a Board of Directors/CEO level meeting on the issue for a major industrial company.

If you don’t have this issue figured out yet, you’d better start thinking about it in a hurry.

There are certain things we know for a fact that relate to the future of the organization.

• there is a huge amount of expertise walking out of the economy. In 2010, 3 people will leave the economy for every person that enters it; by 2012, 4. By 2016, 6 people will leave for every new worker that joins. Those are staggering realities.
• the current generation entering the workforce is completely rejecting the concept of a traditional career. More than 50% of young people in a US survey indicated they believe self-employment to be more secure than a full time job. They don’t want to work for big organizations. They’ll be nomadic, contingent workers, entrepreneurial and global.
• skills are fragmenting and specializing at a furious pace. Knowledge half-lives in most industries are compressing to a matter of just a few years. Knowledge extinction is real, and massive skills fragmentation is occurring at an extreme velocity. The result is that most organizations will find future failure will come from an inability to get specialized skills. A strategy that is focused on global access to extremely specialized skills will be a transformative factor for winning.

The whole issue is massive, and is one of the areas in which innovative thinking is needed now. It’s a CEO / Board level issue. It’s transformative. It’s urgent.

More information

• What’s Happening with Our Workforce: Achieving Competitive Advantage Through Skills
• Critical Trends: 10 Unique Characteristics of 21st Century Skills

Tenrox, a company that provides companies an intgelligent infrastructure for rapid workforce management, has invited me to keynote their September 2007 user group conference in Bloomingdale, Illinois.

The title we’ve worked out, based on a story I often tell on stage: “Don’t Mess with My Powder, Dude: Managing People and Projects in the Flat World.” It’s related to the number of talks I’ve been doing within the overall theme of “What’s Happening with Our Workforce.”

• read the Tenrox press release
• previous blog post, “What’s happening with our workforce?”
• Critical Trends: 10 Unique Characteristics of 21st Century Skills here

Organizations are coming to realize that talent management is going to be a critical issue, and I have a wonderful track record in positioning this on stage.

I’m keynoting the annual IHRIM (International Human Resource Information Management) professional association in about an hour here in Houston, TX; I’ll have an audience of about 1,000 or so.

My talk today broadly revolves around the issue of “what’s happening with our workforce.” I’m taking the audience on a tour of the key drivers which impact organizations today, whether business or government,

• velocity: business is just plain fast, and our workforce must cope with that
• change capacity: there’s a big disconnect in how quickly some people can deal with rapid change compared to others
• idea instantaneity: we’re in a new world in which ideas or issues can quickly speed out of control, or work to our advantage
• knowledgeability: in which global insight is increasing at a furious pace, leading to ever larger pools of knowledge
• innovation opportunity: such rates of discovery lead to massive new opportunities with bringing new products and services to market
• idea discovery: our interconnected world now allows unique ideas to gain a global audience in a flash
• consumer spontaneity: the low attention span consumer is fleeting when it comes to loyalty to brand
• business intensity: operational excellence is the name of the game, given an economy which simply runs “fast”
• skills availability: all these trends that it is going to be more difficult to access skills

My key point for the audience: When we are thinking about deployment of skills , we must be thinking about:

• Attracting the right skills …… at the right time … for the right purpose
• Providing for business flexibility in a time of rapid change
• Establishing a constantly shifting, evolving “workforce on demand”
• Enabling this with sophisticated tools, infrastructure and skills access capabilities – managed by folks such as the IHRIM

These are issues I’ve covered extensively in my analysis, Critical Trends: 10 Unique Characteristics of 21st Century Skills here

My latest CAMagazine column is out ; in it, I focus on the role that financial executives should be thinking about in the context of the massive rates of change occuring in the global financial economy.

My observations come from a talk and research I undertook for a global financial conference in Grand Cayman back in January.

In the article, I note that “….there is a subtle and distinct shift in the location of “global money,” due to oil wealth and the industrialization of Asia. A recent article in Barron’s suggested that there is now about $1 trillion in excess reserves in these two regions. The likely result is that while more of the world’s wealth moves away from North America and Europe and into these new economic centers, the skills will follow.”

I also go on to note that “a recent comment in Asian Banker in December 2006 is instructive of the impact of this trend, noting that in the future, “…outsourcing will become less about cost containment and more about accessing the best skills and expertise….”"

The issues are important, because it is all part of the increasingly complex war for talent occuring in every industry sector.

You can read the article

Last week, there was a common theme to my keynotes for the University of Oklahoma and for the national Blue Cross Blue Shield Association : “what’s happening with our workforce?”

There is an intense degree of interest amongst executives as to the extent of the looming skills shortage, how to retain and attract critical skill sets, and how to deal with the challenges of the next generation.

I’ve rolled this into an overall keynote topic: “What’s Happening With Our Workforce: Achieving Competitive Advantage Through Skills Agility.” In these types of talks, I’ve been taking a look at a wide variety of trends:

• every organization is faced with an increasingly complex, restless, age-diverse disloyal, and highly specialized workforce — and a workforce that will have the longest life-span ever, from hyperactive 15 year olds to wizened, not-ready-to-quit 85 year olds.
• with the coming “end of retirement,” most companies will come to realize they’ll need a lot of telephones with big buttons for members the 70+ folks who are still a part of their workforce — and a lot of innovative workplace practices as well
• the arrival of “Gen-Connect” — the kids who have been wired with a mouse since birth — will lead to the question of whether “good luck” will be the only possible response to the question of “Managing Gen-Y.”
• this workplace weirdness will only be compounded by the ongoing rapid evolution of knowledge and skills, such that most organizations will find it impossible to find the highly specialized skills needed in the economy of the future
• The “War for Talent” will be the new competitive battleground, and organizations that can attract, engage, retain and amuse an increasingly complex workforce will be the ones who find success in the rapidly evolving global economy.
• in an era such as this, firms are faced with a future that requires a new form of human capital agility: the ability to deploy the right skills at the right time for the right purpose — regardless of where the skill might be required, or where the skill is sourced
• at the same time, organizations are faced with an increasingly global talent base, a reality that demands new forms of collaboration, insightful project management, and deep insight into the effective utilization of those skills. The way to the future is clear: the no longer about managing time: it’s about successful skills deployment

I’ve captured these thoughts on the workplace challenges of the future in a recent Trends Overview: 21st Unique Characteristics of 21st Centuries Skills, available here.

Given the number of calls that I receive, this is certainly one of the hottest topics for 2007!

An article on my perspectives on the future of the career has run in a wide variety of papers across the country.

The full article can be found here in Adobe Acrobat format.

Some of my key observations, as quoted within the article:

• Recognizing the disappearance of a one-job career, workers will need to be flexible, capable of instantly adapting to new processes and able to absorb stunning amounts of new information and knowledge…..
• the next generation of workers will be far different than any which has gone before. They will be far more entrepreneurial because many already think self-employment is more secure than a corporate job.
• one segment of the workforce will be expected to be far more specialized to deal with this explosion of new information
• others will be expected to be flexible enough to shift between careers and jobs
• there will also be those who help people deal with the complexities of everyday life and their workplace.

The latter point links to the trend I’ve identified of the emergence of complexity partners, brand new careers (or entire organizations) which simply involve the management of complexity.

The article caught my comments on this particular trend:

• “One of the hot new jobs created by the fact that medical knowledge is doubling every eight years is the “hospitalist” — someone who not only helps patients navigate their way through the medical system ……
• While the term didn’t exist before 1996, there are now more than 10,000 hospitalists in the United States.”

All of these observations tie into my Trends Analysis, “10 Unique Characteristics of 21st Century Skills,” posted a few weeks back, and also available here. There are massive changes underway within the global workforce, which makes talent, not money, the new corporate battlefront.

Here’s a trend to think about : Companies will soon be accessing needed skills from all generations: from bright, knowledge aggressive 15 year olds to active 80 year olds.

We are soon going to have the longest life-span economy that has ever existed. Preparing for that shift both culturally and organizationally will give companies a strong plan for dealing with the skills challenges of the future.

That’s but one trend I outline in my latest trends overview: “10 Unique Characteristics of 21st Century Skills.”

What people are witnessing right now in terms of the “skills crisis” is just the tip of the iceberg, and a key factor for future corporate success will come from how well the skills issue is managed. The war for talent in the 21st century is going multi-dimensional, because there are a variety of trends that are forever changing the nature, loyalty, accessibility, and half life of skills.

A big part of the battle will involve “human capital agility”: the ability to deploy the right skills at the right time for the right purpose — regardless of where the skill might be required, or where the skill is sourced.

As skills become more specialized, everyone will find that they need to draw upon an increasingly global talent base, a reality that will demand new forms of collaboration, rapid human capital and project management skills, and deep insight into the effective utilization of those skills.

That’s why skills management strategies that focus on agility, insight, and execution will be critical. I have a number of keynotes focusing on the issue of global skills, notably one high profile presentation in Grand Cayman in two weeks. More to come…..

Access the Critical Trends: 10 Unique Characteristics of 21st Century Skills here

Everyone is talking about Gen-Y.

I’ve come to call the next generation, Gen-Connect. Their attitudes towards careers, which is very unique, is caught in this video clip.

As I posted previously in this blog, “This next generation is completely different in terms of how they think. Kids today 15 and under coming into the workforce are not going to want to have a job, they’re not going to want to have a career path, they’re not going to want to work for a company. They are the ultimate entrepreneurs. You’re not going to be able to hire them. You’re going to be able to contract them at best.”

Their attitudes are part of what is driving 10 very unique attributes of 21st century skills, which was captured in a blog post here.

At this point, I’ve been working at home for close to eighteen years. When you’ve been doing it that long, and you’ve built up a thriving global business, you gain some real insight into how the economy is shifting. Not only that, but you have a remarkable relationship with your family, with some unique visits into the home office through the years.

Business Edge magazine is now running a “20 questions” interview with me in which I’m talking about a variety of stuff.

Inevitably, talk turned to the next generation, the workplace, and the change occurring with careers. This is a topic that I’ve frequently been talking about on stage, under the title, “Hyper-boomers, Gen-Connect and Manure Managers: How the Heck Do We Manage the Workplace Challenges of the Future?”

The interview highlights some of my thoughts on what is happening with the future of the workplace.

• “This next generation is completely different in terms of how they think. Kids today 15 and under coming into the workforce are not going to want to have a job, they’re not going to want to have a career path, they’re not going to want to work for a company. They are the ultimate entrepreneurs. You’re not going to be able to hire them. You’re going to be able to contract them at best.”
• “Everybody’s talking about the retirement of (Baby) Boomers. That’s one aspect of it. Everybody’s talking about how difficult it is to attract the next generation. And you’ve got all these employers running around and asking, how do we become the employer of choice and how do we make people like us? But I don’t think that’s the issue. The big issue is that skills are becoming extremely specialized. There’s so much knowledge happening and so much stuff happening so fast. I’ve got a certain set of skills, but increasingly, those skills become narrower and narrower.”
• “…the concept of nine-to-five will have just absolutely disappeared. It doesn’t mean that we’re going to become a nation of home offices, but I think there will be a lot more choices that people will be making as to where and how and when they’re going to be doing the work and what constitutes the organization. You talk to senior managers and CEOs today and they talk about how they have to become more collaborative and team oriented. I think the generation of 15- to 20-year-olds just look at that talk and go, ‘duh.’ They say: ‘We do that, we’re on instant messaging, we’ve got webcams, we’re just collaborative by nature and we don’t give a heck whether we’re in the same room or not. We know how to work cross-country, around the world, globally and how to form instant teams. We come together to form some function, then disband and move on to the next thing because we’re the generation that gets bored so darned easily.’ I think they’re just going to shake up the concept of the workplace to a huge degree. The reason that hasn’t happened is because of simple Boomer resistance to change.”

You can read the full interview here.

There’s been a lot of talk about the skills crisis lately. Most of it is focused on the wrong thing — people seem most worried by the fact that a lot of baby boomers are set to retire, and are taking their skills out of the economy.

That’s a big issue, but that’s not the big issue.

If an organization is to survive the high-velocity economy, it needs to be doing a lot of innovation with the 10 Unique Characteristics of 21st Century Skills:

• skills are more specialized. Rapid knowledge growth means that it is increasingly difficult for people to keep on top of what they need to know. That means people need to specialize; knowledge niches are the reality for most professions and careers. As they specialize, simple supply/demand reduces skills availability, leading to skills inflation. It’s going to cost more to get the right specialized skills — that’s a big problem.
• skills are disloyal. A recent survey out of Belfast indicated that 36% of people indicated that on their very first day on a new job, they were already thinking about looking for another job! I don’t think that’s unique to the Irish — (and I am of Irish descent….) — I believe that it confirms that a massive philosophical shift towards a “job” and “career” is underway. The death of corporate loyalty means an increasing difficulty to get the right skills.
• skills are degradable. The half life of knowledge is decreasing at a furious rate. Most organizations are discovering that the skills they do have are becoming increasingly useless as knowledge obsolesence takes hold. Skills are ready to walk out the door as soon as they arrive — and if they hang around, their value decreases rather quickly!
• skills are renewable: Fortunately, out of date skills can be given new life. if people and companies can develop the ability to generate just-in-time-knowledge — a phrase I coined over a decade ago — they’ll learn how to adapt and evolve.
• some skills have no urgency: The challenge is that a lot of skills don’t really worry about the points above. Some professions, and many staff in organizations, simply don’t think about the reality of skills extinction as a real trend. They have no desire to upgrade, enhance, or change their capabilities. The lack of urgency leads to a sclerosis that impacts the overall ability of the organization to change, innovate and create.
• skills are disposable: The unique thing about skills today is that companies clearly don’t need staff anymore — they simply need the right skills at the right time for the right purpose. After that need has gone, they will need different skills for a different purpose. In the high-velocity economy, the idea of a permanent skills base is a quaint concept from the 20th century.
• skills are increasingly portable. That’s the good thing we’ve learned with globalization: with the depth of the emerging skills crisis, it doesn’t really matter anymore where the skills are — as long as you can get them, that’s all that counts!
• skills can be transferable: the boomer retirement issue is real. Smart organizations are spending big money to ensure that important knowledge is captured, retained and archived.
• skills should be experiential. This goes back to my ’21st century capital’ post: I think that one of the most important assets a company requires is the depth of it’s experiential capital — that is, the knowledge is has learned through innovation, risk, failure and success. Boost that skills capability and you’ve done something that flows onto the bottom line.
• skills are generational: We’re going to have a lot of active 80 year olds in the economy as the end of the concept of retirement draws near, at the same time that companies seek skills from bright, knowledge aggressive 15 year olds. We are going to have the longest life-span economy that has ever existed. If we prepare for that culturally and organizationally, we’ve got a good strong plan for dealing with the skills challenges of the future.

Some months back, in an entry I wrote a blog entry on the concept of “21st century capital”. One item I included was the concept of capital including a “strong skills accessibility capability”, noting that “talent, not money, will be the new corporate battlefront …. “

That’s an important battle, and it’s going to require a lot of innovation and creativity in terms of solutions.

I don’t think the current corporate structure will last 20 years; it might be difficult to see it lasting even 10 years. In the meantime, companies are trying all kinds of band-aid solutions to try to attract and retain the first Internet-generation. Over at The Repository of Canton, Ohio, in an article about unique workplaces, I’m quoted as saying: “Companies are struggling to figure out: OK, what do we need to do to attract and retain and create a work environment for this generation who is just so totally unique and different and rejects 9-to-5 and rejects the concept of a cubicle office and completely rejects all the traditional corporate structure that we’ve had in place for so long.”

Read the full article Is Your Work Like This?

Today I provide the opening keynote for the annual Monster Government Solutions Human Capital Management conference for government HR folks in Washington, DC. I’ll be focussing on a look at “human resource issues of 2010″, and how we need more flexibility as we battle the depth of the looming skills crisis. I’ve framed my talk around these themes:

1. Rapidity, not rigidity: we need to prepare for rapid skills evolution
2. Science, not technology: the root of HR change is found in the rapid rate of scientific change, and it is causing rapid, rapid change with ever trade, career and profession
3. Complexity, not simplicity: a key result is that for everyone, “what you need to know to do your job is increasing at an exponential pace
4. Volatility, not normalcy: we also need to ensure we are ready for a future in which the unexpected and unknown can have a dramatic new impact on skills issues
5. Transformation, not training: we need to adjust our HR thinking for the “just in time knowledge skills”
6. Continuity from flexibility: the depth of the boomer skills exodus if of such a degree that we’ll need a lot of flexible work policies in order to retain them
7. Attraction, not retention: at the same time, we have to play into the unique career attitudes (i.e. there are no careers, only stepping stones) within Gen-Y
8. Variability, not structure: Hollow companies will form the basis for all future corporate success due to the skills crisis
9. Lifestyle, not loyalty; statistics show that most everyone in a full time job is stunning unhappy. We can do better
10. Imagination, not administration: solving the emerging HR crisis requires new ways of thinking and a willingness to do things differently

HR professionals today must prepare for a skills future that is going to be far more challenging thing we’ve ever seen, and need to think dramatically differently — that’st he focus of my human resource trends keynote today.