For over 30 years, I’ve traveled the globe, from Dubai to Moscow and Johannesburg, Singapore to Shanghai, and Istanbul. I’ve studied the world’s best businesses and the people that run them. But something is very different now, from the boardroom to the break room, there’s a growing realization that our relationship with work is broken, but it’s not too late. You have a choice to hold onto the past, struggle to survive or join the willing. Those who are willing to change and thrive in the world of tomorrow, that’s already arrived. So if you’re willing, willing to think differently, willing to work differently, willing to change at the speed of now, then you’re willing to win.
The very beginning of this dates back to 1970 when Alvin Toffler wrote a book called Future Shock. In it, he described a world that would be quite different from the one we all knew. I was far too young to read the book at the time, but when I was old enough to pick it up and read it, it resonated with me. In the book, one particular theory said that the world that we knew would change; it promised a whole new world that was unlike anything that we had seen before. His theory is really simple.
If you take all the time we have been on this planet as humans and stood upright and are recognizable as the species that we are today, that’s been about 50,000 years. If you consider that each person or each generation lived for an average of about 62 years, then you can say that there have been 800 lifetimes. You take 62 years, and you divide that into 50,000, which comes out to 800.
Imagine a number line from zero to 800, representing all the time that we’ve been here. You could start to understand the big points in history that changed everything. We lived in caves for the first 650 generations and didn’t even communicate from generation to generation. Every time there was a new generation, we had to learn everything all over again.
It’s only been in the last 70 generations that one generation has communicated effectively with the next generation. It’s only been in the last six generations that a wide variety of people have seen the written word, not read but seen the written word in their lifetime. It’s only been the last four generations that we’ve had the use of the electric motor, and that’s changed everything.
But the big change happened in the 1950s when the United States became the first world power to use less than 50% of its population to make its nation’s food. Now, why is this so important? It’s so important because it freed people up from being out on the farm, allowed them to do other things, and to have other pursuits. With that, we had an explosion of technology, and we had an explosion of this thing called change. Organizations and careers and families, that were once built to last all of a sudden, were built for change.
Today, we are starting to see his prophecy. His belief that change would be the primary characteristic of the future. We’re starting to see that all come to life. We are in a world right now where every single day is unpredictable. It’s unanticipated, and we see it in the news all the time. We need to build organizations, and we need to develop careers. We need to build relationships that are built for that change.
Our work is centered on the belief that our relationship with work is completely broken. To repair our relationship with work, we need to repair five unique relationships starting with our relationships with how we get things done in organizations. I don’t know about you, but most of the people I work with are not super excited about the way their organization’s run. We need to find different ways to do that in the future.
We need to change our relationship with what we value. Money is not the primary source of value going forward. There’s a whole litany of new opportunities to create value in new ways using technology, and we need to explore that.
We also need to change our relationship with our customers. We need to change our relationship with our careers. If you’re in a career right now and depend on your organization to put you into a development program and help you rise in your organization and get a leadership role, think again because organizations are not doing that anymore.
We have to take control of our careers. And finally, and most importantly, we have to change our relationships with each other. And I think that’s what we’re all about here at Willing to Win.
