Skills for the Road Ahead

In businessThink: Rules for Getting It Right--Now, and No Matter What, the authors write about the skills you need for the future.

Skills You Need for the Future
The authors write:

When Accenture recently interviewed 500 executives around the world and asked "What workforce skills are in most demand and will be the most needed over the next two to five years?" this is how they answered:

Business Skills: 68 percent

Technical Skills: 42 percent

Flexibility and adaptability: 33 percent

Self-motivation: 18 percent

Leadership: 6 percent

Functional: 3 percent

Self-Motivated Leader or Flexible, Adaptable Businessperson
The authors write:

So the question is, would you like to become a functional, self-motivated leader, or a flexible, adaptable businessperson with great technical skills. People who can independently think on their feet, work cross-functionally, learn new skills quickly, and work to make great business decisions that are customer focused (for both internal and external customers) will be indespensible to their companies and in high market demand. By the way, executives not only said they expect to need these skills shortly, they also expect these skills to be very difficult to come by (good demand news for you in the supply and demand of labor economics -- if you live by the rules).

Key Take Aways

• Leadership ranks lower than technical skills. The surprise for me is how low the leadership ranks. I guess you only need so many leaders in comparison to the overall workforce. On the other hand, if you consider influence in its many forms, an aspect of leadership, then I think leadership belongs much higher. Influence is a way to get results more effiiciently and effectively. Put it another way, if you can't influence, you'll have a tough time getting the support you need to get things done.
• Business skills and technical skills go hand in hand. I'm not surprised that business skills and technical skills are a priority and they go hand in hand. One without the other can be ineffective. If you have business skills, but you don't use today's tools or understand the changing landscapes, you won't be as effective as those that do. Similarly, if you have technical skills, but you can't turn them into business value, you won't be as useful as someone who can.
• Flexibility and adaptability are key. I'm glad to see flexibility and adaptability explicitly called out. I'm a fan of continuous improvement. I think a big part of today's success is adapting to changes, and finding ways to make the most of new opportunities.

My Related Posts

• Eight Rules of businessThink
• Calculating Impact

Eight Rules of businessThink

How do you make more effective strategic business decisions?  How can you build more effective business cases?  How can you more effectively analyze business decisions?  How do you figure out what the impact of your decisions will be?  In businessThink: Rules for Getting It Right--Now, and No Matter What!, Dave Marcum, Steve Smith, and Mahan Khalsa have eight rules for more effectively building and analyzing business cases.

The Eight Rules of businessThink
According to Marcum, Smith, and Khalsa, the eight rules of businessThink are:

• Rule 1: Check Your Ego at the Door. Check your ego at the door. Work delicately with the egos of others to keep dialogue open. Change yourself to lead to a change in the business.
• Rule 2: Create Curiosity. Ask questions and gather perspectives from your company's collective intellectual diversity.3.
• Rule 3: Move Off the Solution. Get to the underlying business issues. Make sure you're not guessing. Focus your attention on the vital few issues.
• Rule 4: Get Evidence. Collect the soft evidence to prove that the business problem or opportunity exists. Turn the soft evidence into hard evidence that the business can measure.
• Rule 5: Calculate the Impact. Convert the hard evidence into a financial equivalent to make sure that there is a worthwhile impact or payoff.
• Rule 6: Explore the Ripple Effect. Carefully consider who or what else in the company is affected by the problem or opportunity. Consider the relative weight of the importance of the issue compared to other intitiatives in the company.
• Rule 7: Slow Down for Yellow Lights. Know what has stopped the company from successfully doing something about this before now, or what might stop you in the future. If the impact of a problem or opportunit is big, ask "What has stopped you (or the company as a whole) from successfully resolving these issues before now?" If this is a new opportunity with no history, the yellow-light question is "What, if anything, might prevent the successful implementation of this solution from going forward?"
• Rule 8: Find the Cause. Identify the cause producing the symptoms that are showing up. Treat the cause of the problem rather than the effects.

Why businessThink ?
The authors claims that applying businessThink will help you:

• Make winning strategic business decisions.
• Have colleagues trust your judgement and leadership.
• Leverage and utilize your talents.
• Become highly influential and relevant.
• Create business value.

Key Take Aways
What I like about businessThink is that it's a distillation of what the authors have put into practice. What I also like about the approach is that it's something you can put into practice yourself (i.e. I don't have any bottlenecks to start using businessThink on the job). The more I apply it, the better I'll get.

I think creating compelling business cases is a key to effectiveness. Whether you're competing for resources, time, and budget, or simply trying to convince others that your idea has merit, the business case is key. I see some of the best ideas never get put into action because the owner never created a compelling business case. If there's one skill to master for today's competitive landscape, I think it's creating business cases and businessThink is the tool to help you do it.

My Related Posts

• Calculating Impact

Calculating Impact

In businessThink: Rules for Getting It Right--Now, and No Matter What!, the Dave Marcum, Steve Smith, and Mahan Khalsa use five questions to convert hard evidence into impact.

The Five Golden Questions
According to Marcum, Smith, and Khalsa, you can use the following five golden questions to convert evidence into impact:

• How do you measure it?
• What is it now?
• What would you like it to be?
• What's the value of the difference?
• What's the value of the difference over time (months, years -- the appropriate management horizon)?

Key Take Aways
At work, I tend to ask the questions, "how big is the pie?" and "how big is our slice?" While they're a start, I think The Five Golden Questions above help add dimension and depth when you're trying to understand and articulate potential impact.