BRIEFING By Mark Shayler
Mark Shayler is a Founding Partner of the Do Lectures and author of the book Do Disrupt.
5 How can we reap the rewards of thinking smaller? For too long we’ve thought big is beautiful. Mark Shayler tells us how to harness the agility and speed of a smaller business mindset.
R
ight now, this moment – and this one – is the most exciting time to be alive. Okay, knocking around with Ebenezer Howard in 1898 would have been pretty cool – so too would hanging around the Cavern Club in Liverpool in 1963, or Covent Garden’s Blitz Club in 1980. But right here, right now is a great place to be. Why? Brexit? Hardly. Political certainty? Errr no. Global stability? Probably not. No, the reason that this is the best time to be alive is because there’s nothing we can’t do. Web 2.0 and Capitalism 2.0 have placed creativity in our palms. Literally. Everyone is a designer now. Everyone is a creator now. University has never been more expensive and less relevant. This is not a problem. It is an opportunity. When talent is priced out of university it goes somewhere else; it goes to its bedroom, to start-up spaces, to the park, to gardens, to the greenhouse.
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Talent goes where it can grow, literally.
two things remember – a work thing and an out-of-control thing.
The future isn’t like the past; the way we build our careers is changing so quickly and this is difficult for everyone. It is difficult for those building their careers and it is as difficult for organisations looking for great talent. One of the biggest obstacles to growing our businesses is how we attract and retain the best talent in the world/ country/ county. We are only as good as the people that we employ and – if we continue to look solely for people with the skills that we have – then we risk missing the future, missing great people and great opportunities. The problem comes when things change and we don’t.
2 We have democratised creativity with web 2.0 (and even more so with the coming web 3.0) and we have democratised enterprise. Embrace that, use these new channels, new tools and new approaches to grow your business.
There are a few lessons here:
3 Stop thinking about graduates alone. Let’s be frank – many degree courses are alarmingly out of date. There are other routes to excellence and some of them come without a £60k debt. I’m not saying forget graduates, but I am saying embrace people who have taken other paths. You want to recruit potential, not just exam passers (noted that these two things are not mutually exclusive).
1 Don’t be baffled by Gen Z. They have grown up in a different world to you. Not worse; just different. They aren’t (as commonly repeated) entitled, they just have no certainty or rules in terms of career. Career means
4 Just because they don’t look like you, it doesn’t mean that they won’t be brilliant. Study after study has shown that the most diverse companies are the most successful. Embracing diversity makes you stronger.
