Competing in a flat world means changing the way we live, work, and learn

by Art Murray

To compete in a flat world, business as usual won’t cut it. Individuals and organizations need to change.  Dramatically.  We need to build the Enterprise of the Future.

This means radically changing the way we live, work, and learn.  We need to focus on all three in order to meet tomorrow’s challenges.

In the industrial age, living, working, and learning were separate stovepipes.  And it worked fine.  We kept our home life separate from our work life.  We punched a clock.  Even school was like an assembly line: chapter one this week, take the test.  Chapter two next week.  After so many courses, you got a diploma.

Fast forward to the knowledge age.  We work at home.  We learn at work.  All while trying to keep our life in balance.  It can be done, and that’s what the Enterprise of the Future is all about.

Let’s start with work.  The biggest change we need to make in our work is to start sharing knowledge.  I don’t mean sharing information.  There’s plenty of information going around.  Probably too much.  I mean sharing secrets.  The knowledge we always keep to ourselves, because we think it makes us more valuable.

The days of knowledge hoarding are gone.  In a flat world, holding back and not sharing actually makes you less valuable, even counter-productive.  That’s because the world has gotten so complex, no one person can possibly have all the answers.  It takes organizational knowledge, not individual knowledge, to solve today’s problems.

In the Enterprise of the Future, you become more valuable by sharing your secrets.  In fact, if you’re concerned about job security, you need to develop two critical skills.  These are the ability to:

1. learn quickly
2. share what you learn.

Learning quickly begins with knowing what you know.  That may sound obvious, but in my classes and workshops, I have found very few people who have actually taken the time to do a personal knowledge inventory.  When we do go through the exercise, people uncover a treasure trove of hidden, unused, and forgotten knowledge assets.  This exercise alone will increase your personal worth significantly.  Once you know what you know, you can start growing it.  And very often that growth comes as a result of the second step – sharing what you know.

The most effective way to share what you know is to know your network.  Go back to your knowledge inventory.  This time, be sure to include everyone you know.  By doing that, you will have expanded your knowledge base by at least an order of magnitude.  Harvey Mackay says it best: “It’s not what you know.  It’s not who you know.  It’s what you know about who you know.”

What about living?  On a very basic level, we have seen that the amount of protein in our diet is directly correlated with intelligence.  And intelligence is directly correlated with GDP.¹  As knowledge workers, knowing what we know and growing it impacts how we live.  And how we live determines our capacity for learning.  Breaking the cycle of poverty is one of our greatest challenges.  By nurturing the development and growth of knowledge throughout the world, we will be better equipped to deal with the many problems and opportunities we are facing.

The bottom line is: organizations can no longer focus strictly on work, while ignoring living and learning.  Neither can we as individuals.  The Enterprise of the Future must bring all three of these areas into balance.

¹Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, IQ and the Wealth of Nations, Praeger Publishers, 2002.

©2006 Applied Knowledge Sciences, Inc.  All rights reserved.