Today is April 4 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “In today’s radically changing world, what have you done lately to remain relevant?”
There is a good deal of talk surrounding technology replacing lower level jobs like bank tellers, fast food workers, and even truck drivers.
Doctors, lawyers and accountants often feel as though they are exempt from the encroachments of innovative technology.
Many people go into these jobs because they feel as though they will have a secure future.
Recent research published in the Harvard Business Review suggests otherwise and believes “within decades the traditional professions will be dismantled, leaving most, but not all, professionals to be replaced by less-expert people, new types of experts, and high-performing systems.”
There is plenty of evidence that radical change in professional work is already under way.
There are more monthly visits to the WebMD network, a collection of health websites, than to all the doctors in the United States. Annually, in the world of disputes, 60 million disagreements among eBay traders are resolved using “online dispute resolution” rather than lawyers and judges — this is three times the number of lawsuits filed each year in the entire U.S. court system. The U.S. tax authorities in 2014 received electronic tax returns from almost 50 million people who had relied on online tax-preparation software rather than human tax professionals.
English novelist and screenwriter Ian McEwan noted “one could drown in irrelevance,” while former General Electric CEO Jack Welch said "If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near."
Tower Records, a top performing retailer in the music industry is just one example of a business that had to close in 2006 after over 40 years in business because it failed to shift when the market shifted. Its rate of change on the inside failed to compete with the rate of change going on around it. In McEwan’s words it drowned in its own irrelevance.
What have you, and or your organization, done lately to remain relevant?