Entries Tagged 'time' ↓

News on Coping with Email Overload

John Hagel, reflecting on the main messages from the World Economic Forum in Davos:

Jobs

There was a lot of talk in Davos about jobs – especially how to continue to create jobs in the West to compensate for slowing economic growth and offshoring trends. I participated in one of these sessions, where I suggested that framing the issue in these terms tends to miss the point.

Of course, we are all concerned about the availability of jobs, but the more fundamental issue is talent development. If people don’t develop appropriate talent and don’t continue to refresh that talent, there will be no sustainable jobs and certainly few, if any, high value jobs. Reframing the issue as talent development also highlights the increasing importance of talent as a source of comparative advantage in global markets.

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No one has time. The pace of life goes faster, faster, faster. We are inundated with information, showered with technological innovation, and pestered by multiple media 24/7. Business is a blur. Life is uncertain. People are stressed. Work is hell.

A woman with a watch knows what time it is, but a woman with two does not. Most of us wear some watches set to agrarian age time, others to industrial age time, and yet others to internet time. Our bodies, our workgroups, our families, our employers, and our world are out of sync. Our lives are incoherent because everything around us is changing at different speeds than we are.

I am in the midst of writing a book on Informal Learning that’s taking me on a trip through humanistic psychology, network effects, culture shocks, complexity theory, and a bunch of other whistle-stops on the pathways through our deeply interconnected world. Sometimes I go into a state close to automatic-writing mode and learn from what pours out.

A few minutes ago, pondering humanity’s journey along the path of evolution, my fingers tapped out:”This goes back to Adam & Eve, to the dawn of consciousness. Since our species appeared as babes on the savannah, we have been growing up, ever so slowly. Homo sapiens have been reading What Color is Your Parachute: Eternal Edition, and doing their information interviews for the last 50,000 years. Now it’s time for humanity to take the next step on the path, commit to a direction for the future, and start to work.”