Tag: future

A Session on Innovation, Design Thinking & The Future of Work

A Session on Innovation, Design Thinking & The Future of Work

Earlier this week, I was invited to conduct a session around ‘Innovation, Design Thinking and the Future of Work’ at the Indian School of Management & Entrepreneurship, for a batch of about 170 grad students from Vaze College. The most enjoyable session I’ve had so far.

 

An ideation exercise I conducted, had the students thinking of ideas to replace the irreplaceable smartphone. And what innovative ideas they were!! Absolutely impressive! I barely heard 6-7 ideas for fear of running out of time. If only there was enough time to hear all the ideas.

 

 

The session started with about 4-5 students believing themselves to be creative and innovative. By the end of the session, over 80% of them believed they were innovative and creative. It was a truly humbling experience. With these brilliant folk entering professional life soon, the future looks promising!

 

 

While I’d really like to list out some of the ideas that the students came up with during the session, I’ll resist the temptation. In the hope that at least some of them would pursue their idea and make a world-transforming business out of it in the near future.

 

 

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Recruiting in The Future

Image: source

Recruiting in The Future

For the longest time, there were distinct industries, and reasonably well defined job roles. And of course, an education system that did a brilliant batch-processing job of creating products people, that fit those roles.

However, as people grew smarter, some of them worked hard to revamp the education system. They have been making it more flexible to innate individual talent and skill. However, how has the HR community been evolving to this change? Because at least from the outside, it looks like an increasingly difficult task to match requirements iwth candidates.

In the past, with no disrespect to people of the times, it was almost like fitting a circle or square into its slot. Relatively similar and standard positions across the industry. And now, average job descriptions read more like a position for a superhuman, or for a mother. With experience ranges sought, being as wide as a decade or more. And with the broad skillsets demanded, one would think they’re trying to replace 10 people with one.

But in coming times, while requirements themselves might not be as simple as ‘PHP Developer with 3 years experience’, neither will candidate profiles. With people thankfully opening up to a lot more varied learning experiences in the last decade, resumes are becoming increasingly interesting.

I’ll end this with a question for HR professionals. How is the selection process and mapping evolving to keep pace with candidate experiences?

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To Drive or not to Drive?

50 Years of the Mini, Goodwood Revival 2009

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To Drive or not to Drive?

There was an extremely interesting article on Business Insider recently about the future of driving. Transport saw one huge jump when horses as modes of transport were replaced, barely a century ago. And now. we are at another crossroads. The big question is about whether to replace the driver or not.

The article approaches the subject of drivers and cars themselves, from multiple points of view. One, being that of Morgan Stanley’s auto analyst who sees a future that works on an Uber kind of model, where you and me don’t own cars, but merely use them as a service when needed.

The next view comes from that of a Citi analyst, who feels owning cars is an irreplaceable part of our lives. Even if, for most part, they’re just sitting there doing nothing.

Into the mix, come companies of the future, like Tesla and Google. Google, with their Google Chauffeur (the software that runs their self-driving cars), seems future-safe, whichever direction the future approaches from. And Tesla, which might seem to prefer selling cars to individuals, with the total numbers being more than it being offered by companies as a service. Especially with the company’s ginormous capacities for manufacturing rechargeable batteries. When looked at in totality, reducing future car transport to a service might not be too bad after all.

While this shift will take some time to come, what, according to you, might be a better way to go forward? Would it be the Uber kind of model, where you can hire a car (self-driving or otherwise)? Or would you rather own the car, and the costs that come with it, and use it only for a fraction of the time?

You can read the whole Business Insider article here: Tesla is in the middle of a debate about the future of driving

Mercedes self drive

Image: A Mercedes-Benz self-driving prototype

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