A few days ago, I was invited to sit in a
panel and discuss issues of media, western perceptions, and the future. It was
an interesting session, and my co-panellists were some of the most accomplished
names in the business, including Caroline Mutoko and Daniel Kalinaki. The most
interesting thing about the session was the venue. It was an international
school in Nairobi, and our interlocutors were the students themselves.
The average age of the audience was 17, and
of course at that age they know everything. I also still think I know
everything, and this led to a very lively exchange of ideas. The young men and
women were irreverent, inquisitive and leery of received wisdom. Some still
spoke in clichés, but these were no worse than the conventional opinion fronted
by the chattering classes in Kenya.
The interaction got me thinking about the
future that these young people will inherit, and what kind of world they will
lead when they are in the right positions. They will be living in a world that
will be remarkably similar, yet markedly different, from this one, and how they
prepare to interact with it will determine how successful they will be. So I
took out my crystal ball, and came up with some prognostications. Some will obviously
be wrong, but hear me out all the same.
The first one is that we have no idea how
the world is going to change, and thus how to prepare for it. If you had lived in
and observed the last fifty years (the years of Kenya’s independence), here is
what you would have seen: a world of steadily incremental change, and then a
sudden wrenching disruption in the last fifteen years. Technology was easy to
adapt to, since it came at you so steadily. If you were in the secretarial pool
of a government department, this meant learning how to use a Dictaphone, and
then an electric typewriter. The skills remained largely the same, and only the
tools differed. Now, there is no longer even a secretarial pool any more. He
bosses write their own e-mails, often painstakingly pecking out a message on a
tiny smartphone screen.
Time was when a journalist needed to know
all the public relations officers in the institutions she covered.
Increasingly, though, the journalist and the PRO have become redundant.
Audiences are reaching directly to the companies, and often the CEO, Cabinet
Secretary or President is answering his or her own Twitter messages. It can
lead to uncomfortable outcomes (over the last couple of weeks, two Presidents
have publicly told off their subordinates on social media – President Paul
Kagame countermanding his health minister on the country’s plans for Ebola
screening; and President Yoweri Museveni sacking his social media handler publicly
and humiliatingly on the same medium).
However, the notion that this velocity of
change will hold forever may not necessarily hold true in the coming decades.
The world has gone through wrenching technological change before, only for this
‘progress’ to be slowed down by social and political circumstances.
This means that the best skill that these
young people can learn is adaptability. Prepare for a career that could change
or disappear even as you’re learning it. At the same time, though, there are
several sets of skills that will hold up regardless of what the future holds.
Financial skills; how to deal with customers and deal with them well;
negotiation; and technological skills, however rudimentary.
The second big lesson, especially in Kenya,
is that these young people don’t have as much time as they think. Two of the
most dynamic CEOs in Kenya today – Joshua Oigara of KCB and James Mworia of
Centum – are in their thirties. The idea that one will have decades to climb
the greasy pole of their careers is long gone.
Add to this the fact that today’s teenagers
will have to change careers entirely throughout the course of their working
lives, and what you have left is either the cause for a great deal of angst, or
the thrill of possibility. The coming decades will mean that workers will
become like movie stars: going from one multi-year project to another, while
curating one’s career to ensure that this trajectory represents growth. Loyalty
to a particular company will be deep and intense, but momentary, and companies
and employees need to adapt to that.
As a matter of fact, this is already the
case. Witness the itchy feet of journalists as they skip from one media house
to another. CEOs are increasingly being recruited from outside the company, and
what has developed is a cadre of professional managers who parachute in and out
of organisations. Even governments are recruiting top people for the short and
medium term, with experts being lured from academia and the private sector for
three-to-five year stints. This will reach lower and lower into organisations,
and almost everyone, from CEO to the maintenance staff, will have to be the
managers of their own careers.
It is a brave new world, which is
surprisingly like the current one we live in now. If you’re seventeen years
old, it is the world you will have to navigate. Bring along a good map.
Also published in the Business Daily on 4 November 2014, at http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Opinion-and-Analysis/When-presidents-sack-you-on-Twitter-and-what-it-means/-/539548/2509484/-/item/0/-/qlpyt1/-/index.html
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