{"id":2282,"date":"2018-02-12T11:42:00","date_gmt":"2018-02-12T11:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/projects\/horsesforsources\/digital-worker_021218\/"},"modified":"2018-02-12T11:42:00","modified_gmt":"2018-02-12T11:42:00","slug":"digital-worker_021218","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.horsesforsources.com\/digital-worker_021218\/","title":{"rendered":"The digital worker survival guide: it’s much more about attitude than skills"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/p>\n
Yes, people, as we inch towards the dreaded singularity, we will continue to be bored silly with arrogant diatribes describing how “humans can stay relevant”.<\/p>\n
Do we really need to hear this daily splurge of pontifications from business leaders in Davos about reskilling the workforce, without any real practical advice on what that reskilling<\/em> is? I would argue this is more about culture and attitude, than training students to learn new programming languages and data analyst skills. The latter will come naturally as the needs of the workplace change, my view is that it’s the former which poses the real challenge: how can we enlighten people to change their working attitudes to make them much more valuable and irreplaceable to their employers? Anyone can fix a line of code within hours, or slam in some new software, it’s what you actually do<\/em> with the tech that really counts. <\/p>\n
It’s what you do when your boss isn’t looking, that makes you less predictable and more valuable <\/strong><\/p>\n
It’s not just about performing predictable tasks, it’s also about helping your firm devise new ways of doing things – that is the magic that makes staff valued. The truth is the singularity is a gimmick to jazz up advances with intelligent computing capability; the reality is the present and the future of the workplace are converging<\/em> before our very eyes, and the survival of the digital worker depends on our ability to be looking constantly at where our firms are going, and being part of that journey.<\/p>\n
The future of every type of ambitious<\/em> commercial business, whether it’s a factory making products, a bank loaning money, an IT support shop helping users, a grocery store selling goods, a law firm prepping available information for its client cases, an analyst firm producing insight… is to perform its business operations with the optimum balance of talent, so it can maximise its immediate profits, with an eye on the future <\/em>to stay ahead of the competition. As soon as someone’s output is predictable<\/em>, taking inputs from various sources to produce outputs, you can start to figure out how to program software and machines to perform said tasks – and computers will always be cheaper than humans, once they are functional and can do the job. So our goal has to be about furthering our abilities, not only to get the basics of our jobs done, but to immerse ourselves into helping our colleagues and bosses figure out the what next. <\/em>Because if we only focus on the now, we are eventually going to render ourselves predictable and replaceable.<\/p>\n
Xerox and Zume: Two ends of the comfort\/innovation spectrum<\/strong><\/p>\n
However, not all businesses are ambitious – some just want to milk what they have, squeeze as much as they can out of their current product and then exit. Just look at Xerox – the firm developed a tremendous product for many years (and was the most patented and innovative workplace technology alongside the emergence of the IBM computer back in Don Draper time), which literally dominated a market in such a way that their brand became a verb. However, Xerox just couldn’t find a way to become something else<\/em> as copying documents became a commodity practise, and recently took its final payday before becoming part of Fujifilm<\/a>. <\/p>\n