Are We Relevant?
Having the pleasure of completing a Harvard course currently, I was hit in the face when the facilitator challenged us with the question of how relevant we are in this fast-changing world. The result of such a challenge encouraged as all to keep up our learning. Such is the pleasure, for me, being neck deep in this environment being the Chair of one of The CEO Institute’s Syndicates. Here, in this pic, I share learning with 12 CEO’s running a business of circa $50 to $150 million annual turnover. We learn continually from each other. Needless to say, the Harvard brains dumped some 2024 facts on us, alerting us (with lights and sirens attached) that in the 1960’s we’d lose 1% of our knowledge annually, In the 90’s this rose to 7% annually, and the forecast for 2028 is that we’d lose 15% of our knowledge annually. And this was the prediction before the pandemic, and AI, expedited our world. Our challenging Harvard lecturer said “we used to depreciate like houses, now we depreciate like cars’. And in summary, the facilitator jabbed up with a final red hot poker, by stating that we should consider ‘graduation’ as a thing of the past. The phrase, ‘life long learning’ to be used as a replacement. Makes us think as to employing people based on a ‘graduation’. The number one factor to increase relevance is the ‘team’, thus setting a tone of candid conversations and regular feedback is a supporting input to keeping your relevance. As far as us, as leaders go, to maintain our relevance, we are to have each of the four buckets below in action. As soon as one bucket runs dry, we are out…. • Producers in the field • Experts in something • Lead in something (visionary) • Manage or execute something Here’s to working on investing in ourselves and our teams, to ensure our sustainability.
