I’m a hopeful pessimist. Ask any of my friends or family and they’ll share endless stories of my glass is half empty approach, and yet, I’ve devoted my professional life to helping individuals and organizations be better and do better. So, when I was asked to write about how businesses can collaborate to prepare talent for technological disruption, I rubbed my hands in glee and set forth to bring on the doom and gloom.
But, I can’t.
Or rather, I won’t. Instead I find myself energized and optimistic by the final paragraph in Klaus Schwab’s excellent essay in Foreign Affairs, when he writes:
In the end, it all comes down to people and values. We need to shape a future that works for all of us by putting people first and empowering them. In its most pessimistic, dehumanized form, the Fourth Industrial Revolution may indeed have the potential to “robotize” humanity and thus to deprive us of our heart and soul. But as a complement to the best parts of human nature—creativity, empathy, stewardship—it can also lift humanity into a new collective and moral consciousness based on a shared sense of destiny. It is incumbent on us all to make sure the latter prevails.
To Mr. Schwab’s notion of shared destiny, I’d like to expand the notion of shared value which Michael E. Porter and Mike K. Farmer outlined in a 2001 Harvard Business Review article. In it they define shared value as creating economic value in a way that also creates value for society by addressing its needs and challenges. The march of progress is inevitable, and much of the work of today, including knowledge work, will be automated and probably at a scope we can’t yet even grasp. But, what if individuals and businesses were able to shift from traditional human capital measurements (such as retention, utilization and productivity) to articulating and measuring the value an individual can contribute to an organization and its societal purpose? If you add individual value to the shared value principle that Porter and Farmer put forth and enable it through internal and external talent marketplaces then you create a fungible asset as roles, structures, business units and even whole industries are disrupted.
If businesses can collaborate to define a new value of talent that is more holistic and accessible (beyond academic qualifications, economic class, gender or geography) and then utilize that value in fulfilling their purpose, both financial and societal, then we will truly have a chance at that shared destiny.
Lisa Zarick is executive vice president of Global Organization Development at Edelman.