The adaptation advantage
Individual career strategy has evolved in much the same way as company strategy. Companies used to have five-year plans that posited a stable set of variables in the competitive landscape, a specific aspiration for revenue or market share, and a coordinated set of actions to accomplish the plan. Career strategies sounded very similar. You visualized yourself in a stretch role, then systematically planned your promotion steps to earn that dream title.
None of this makes sense in today’s, or tomorrow’s, knowledge economy. The combinatorial possibilities of knowledge work are infinitely varied. Companies like Amazon could not have foreseen the logic of acquiring a grocery chain at the time it was largely a book retail business. Steve Jobs could not have predicted the utility of taking a course in calligraphy years before he designed the user interface for the first generation of Apple computers.
The starting point for company and career strategy is to embrace a core consequence of growing information complexity: the future is unknowable. Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian-British economist who was an early advocate on this point, said it best when he observed, “the curious task of economics is to demonstrate how little we really know about what we imagine we can design.”
A primary principle for modern companies and careers is adaptation, no longer prediction, and a great reference is a book called The Adaptation Advantage by Heather McGowan and Chris Shipley. Whether we’re talking about companies or careers, there are three foundations for an adaptation advantage:
Purpose (the Why): Amazon set out to become the world’s most customer-centric company, sensing from the beginning that technology would transform the retail value proposition. Individuals can be similarly guided by a transformational purpose, based on their temperament, background, curiosities, and obsessions. There is usually a governing interest that directs our attention.
Process (the How): Amazon makes 14 leadership principles explicit in vetting new talent, ensuring they cultivate a consistent level of capability across the team. Individuals can likewise commit to systematically expanding their skills and relationships over time, making themselves more valuable as they increase the depth, variety, and interconnections among people and ideas in their orbit.
Product (the What): Amazon’s “Everything Store” has become a fluid manifestation of its underlying purpose and process. The company has gone from online bookseller to global marketplace to web services provider to Academy Award-winning entertainment producer. Individuals, too, can refuse to be tied to a single career identity. Like companies, they can be agile and adaptive in matching their emerging value with emerging needs.
Before we are salespeople or consultants or executives or entrepreneurs, we are knowledge workers. This means we are deeply embedded in macro information trends. McGowan and Shipley contextualize the current era as the 4th phase of human evolution: Stage 1 (The Agrarian Era) required generalist skills for subsistence and survival. Stage 2 (The Industrial Era) promoted specialization for production and trade. Stage 3 (The Information Era) involved a shift from physical labor to knowledge work, demanding even more specialization.
Now, for Stage 4, we are at the dawn of The Augmented Era. As we increase our reliance on machines, to whom we can outsource the retrieval of knowledge stocks, we are becoming more like “neo-generalists,” pursuing lifelong learning in disparate realms to remain relevant in even ostensibly narrow areas.
For companies and careers, the ability to learn fast, to cultivate multiple specializations, may prove to be the most important competitive advantage of our time.