Talent & The Future of Work

6 min readMay 23, 2017

A collection of good reads

As you probably know, We Seek is presented by e180, the company that invented and runs braindates at events — a way to facilitate the sharing of knowledge in new and meaningful ways. This year is the 5th anniversary of Braindate at C2 Montréal and also the launch of the new brand and platform for e180. We thought it would be a good occasion to try something new on the magazine; we normally write about learning but now we want to help you learn by providing the actual content. We are looking at three topics taken in part from the event’s Ecosystems theme, providing you with selections of articles as well as books and videos. The first topic; Talent.

“How can business executives develop a multicultural, multigenerational and multi-geographic talent pool for a business world that’s tricky to predict?”

We decided to look at this theme from a slightly different but entirely related angle; The Future of Work, how work is evolving, where it’s going, what are some of the trends, the skills you’ll need and the kinds of jobs and gigs that could survive AI and automation. It’s an especially good fit for We Seek since we write about learning, curiosity and creativity, all activities essential for resilience in this new future of work.

The Outlook

The Rise of The Useless Class
Yuval Noah Harari, 8 min read

The author of Sapiens and Homo Deus believes that there is no reason why any of the things we do can remain out of reach to AI. He wonders what will happen when (not if) AI renders millions of people “useless.” Quite bleak but certainly within the realm of possibilities, the timescale is probably where most disagreements rest.

AI is nowhere near human-like existence, but 99 percent of human qualities and abilities are simply redundant for the performance of most modern jobs. For AI to squeeze humans out of the job market it need only outperform us in the specific abilities a particular profession demands.

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The Future Of Work: It’s Already Here — And Not As Scary As You Think
Josh Bersin, 16 min read

Approaching the Future of Work from three complimentary angles; personal, organizational and societal. Includes references to multiple reports and statistics.

What matters is “what you know how to do” and your personal and professional reputation. This means we all must learn how to continuously reskill ourselves, market and position our skills and experience, and get comfortable taking new jobs and new roles which do not always go “up.”

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Questions on the Future of Work
Paul Higgins, 6 min read (analyzing a McKinsey report)

The way we work doesnt work anymore
Stowe Boyd, 4 min read

What Should Organizations Be Better At?

Seeing the World with Fresh Eyes
Kenneth Mikkelsen, 8 min read

Mikkelsen writes about our unsettled times, tradition, shocks (acute moments of disruption) and slides (incremental disruptions). He then proposes “four shifts leaders of established organizations must focus on.” One of our favorites in the last year.

Their leaders will not only have to ask if they are doing things right or whether they are doing the right things. They must also continuously ask a deeper philosophical question: what is right? The intention of exploring this question is not to arrive at a definite answer, but to stay curious and keep experimenting.

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The future of work is scalable learning
John Hagel (interview), 7 min read

How organizations should favour scalable learning vs scalable efficiency, performance pressure vs stress vs passion and the importance of developing the ability to connect.

There needs to be a shift to a fundamentally different approach to organising work. It is something that I call scalable learning: it is a commitment to the notion that if everyone in the work environment learns faster, performance improvement will increase more rapidly and the company will gain more benefits. But, it involves redefining the work environment at a fundamental level.

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The Skills We Need
Esko Kilpi, 4 min read

The Programmable Enterprise
Esko Kilpi, 4 min read

Work Across Silos & Disciplines

The Restless Multidisciplinarian
Kenneth Mikkelsen and Richard Martin (interview), 11 min read

“The neo-generalist is both specialist and generalist, often able to master multiple disciplines. We all carry within us the potential to specialise and generalise. Many of us are unwittingly eclectic, innately curious. There is a continuum between the extremes of specialism and generalism, a spectrum of possibilities. Where we stand on that continuum at a given point in time is governed by context.”

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The Golden Age of Autodidacts
Carlin Flora, 15 min read

A good long read on Psychology Today about autodidacts with quotes and opinions from multiple authors. It also covers learning styles, procrastination, structure and accountability.

The difference between self-directed learners and everyone else is as soon as school or work stops serving their life goals, they don’t stick around. They ditch the well-trodden path, bust out the map and compass, and cut cross-country to virgin territory…self-directed learners take full responsibility for their educations, careers, and lives.

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Future of Work and Multipotentialites: Identify Polymaths In Your Organization
Anupam Kundu, 9 min read

Why Cross-Pollinating Your Work, Works
Shane Parrish, 6 min read

Cultivate Your Skills

10 Work Skills Tor The Postnormal Era
Stowe Boyd, 13 min read

Riffing off of the WEF’s top ten skills for 2020, Stowe Boyd presents his own (excellent) list of skills. Some favorites; boundless curiosity, freestyling (learn to dance with robots) and deep generalism. Also includes some great quotes by Google’s head of People Operations, Laszlo Bock.

We can’t be defined just by what we know already, what we have already learned. We need a deep intellectual and emotional resilience if we are to survive in a time of unstable instability. And deep generalists can ferret out the connections that build the complexity into complex systems, and grasp their interplay.

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Let’s stop calling them ‘soft skills’
Seth Godin, 7 min read

How we should stop talking about soft skills and start calling them real skills, because “they work, because they’re at the heart of what we need to do today.”

Along the way, we’ve confirmed that vocational skills can be taught, while we let ourselves off the hook when it comes to decision making, eager participation, dancing with fear, speaking with authority, working in teams, seeing the truth, speaking the truth, inspiring others, doing more than we’re asked, caring and being willing to change things.

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The Rise of AI Makes Emotional Intelligence More Important
Megan Beck and Barry Libert, 4 min read

The Art of Finding Your Focus
Shane Parrish, 5 min read

Learn Constantly, Become Future-Proof
Patrick Tanguay, 5 min read

Be Curious

The Art of Curiosity
IanSanders, 9 min read

The author presents “a manifesto for living a more curious life.” What if you became more curious, how companies are born from it, taking licence to be, unplanning, listening and 6 ways to inject curiosity in your life.

But I had been in the right mindset: my curiosity senses were heightened and I took action to turn it into something tangible.

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Work skills for the future: Curiosity
Stowe Boyd, 3 min read

There’s a huge overlap between the words curiosity, creativity and learning. As Stowe Boyd puts it; “Curiosity can be repositioned as the desire to learn, to be open to the pursuit of digging into the unknown.”

I believe that the most creative people are insatiably curious. They ask endless questions, they experiment and note the results of their experiments, both subjectively and interpersonally. They keep notes of ideas, sketches, and quotes. They take pictures of objects that catch their eye. They correspond with other curious people, and exchange thoughts and arguments. They want to know what works and why.

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The straight road or the squiggly path? Choose the right one.
IanSanders, 3 min read

Never Stop Learning: How Self-Education Creates a Bullet-Proof Career
Paul Jun, 8 min read