i3 - July/August 2019 - 45

By Scott Steinberg

Business

FO RWA R D ST R AT EG I E S

The Smartest Investment
is in Your People

Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images

n an industry known for its reinvention, business leaders
will need more than well-funded R&D to ensure continued
growth. Such growth also depends on cultivating worldclass talent and creating leaders at every level.
Why is investing in human capital key to
sustaining growth? For companies, investing in employees shows strategic foresight
and planning. As the world's most innovative companies show, having more time,
money or manpower is no longer the
secret to getting ahead in business.
Instead, the most accomplished organizations stay ahead by encouraging disruptive thinking in hires and giving their
employees more opportunities to experiment with creative solutions. In other
words, they constantly strive to encourage
entrepreneurial thinking, listen more
closely to target audiences, and find better
ways to tap into the power of their people
to adapt to new market evolutions.
What's more, cultivating a growth
mindset across the board will become
more important since it's predicted that
the next 10 years will bring more
change than the prior 10,000. The big
theme in the next decade will be unpredictability. Many business leaders
believe uncertainty is now the only certainty, and confidence in enterprises'
ability to achieve both short- and
medium-term growth is at a record low.
There is a huge shortage of workers
who possess the skills needed to translate
the mountain of data that is being gathered into actionable business results.
Even more eye-opening, despite investing
billions in digital upskilling, business
executives say they're struggling to get
the key data they need to make intelligent choices. At the same time, exponentially more complicated technologies,
such as blockchain, artificial intelligence
and virtual reality solutions, are bombarding us from every angle.
C TA . t e c h / i 3

In essence, the surest way for your
workforce to succeed in a fast-changing environment is to take chances
while things are going well. If profits
are up, for example, try investing in
initiatives that drive continuing learning through constant trial and error. In
uncertain times, counterintuitively, you
must take more risks to move your
business forward. However, these risks
can be smart, cost-effective bets
designed as ongoing learning experiments that help gain deeper insights
into changing customer needs.

Keep Innovating

Likewise, start to be more deliberate
about putting systems and solutions in
place to help frontline employees more
effectively respond to shifting cultural
or market landscapes. Risky is the new
safe, so to speak -
and make a point to
both your
The surest way for your prepare
organization, and
workforce to succeed your people, to start
in a fast-changing
taking more risks
environment is to take going forward.
Fortunately, the
chances while things
CT
business has a
are going well.
long history of innovating and partnering with organizations
in other fields. The more the industry
encourages collaboration, the more
resources and capabilities it can bring
to solve challenges and remain a
global powerhouse. But to achieve this
goal, enterprises need to keep raising
The Result?
Odds are that the way things have "always the high-tech bar. They also must
been done" is no longer the best way. And invest in tomorrow's leaders and give
them the tools, support and runway
organizations of every size need to
needed to keep delivering gameactively promote meritocracies when it
changing advancements. ■
comes to decision making. Companies
must champion cultures of learning and
growth and empower the collective
Scott Steinberg is the author of Millennial
workforce to make change happen.
Marketing: Bridging the Generation Gap.
JULY/AUGUST 2019

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i3 - July/August 2019

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