Title: What Matters Now: How to Win in a World of Relentless Change, Ferocious Competition, and Unstoppable Innovation
Author(s): Gary Hamel

Are you FIT for the future? Is your work FIT for the future? Your processes? Your people? If you are curious about WHAT YOU SHOULD BE DOING to future-proof your work, then this book could be useful.

Here is a tip from the book: Encourage dissent in your teams! What? You might ask, “Why should I sow seeds of mutiny in my own business?”. Quoting from the book:

Because long-serving executives are often unwilling to challenge their own deeply entrenched beliefs. The solution: management systems that STIMULATE heretical thinking, legitimize dissent, and prevent powerful executives from killing discomforting ideas.

What next? Fire your managers, maybe even your CEO! Now, even though, you might be thinking that this is pure madness, hold your thought for a moment. Listen to Vineet Nayar, former CEO of HCL Tech, quoted in the book:

We must destroy the concept of the CEO. The notion of the ”visionary”, the “captain of the ship” is bankrupt. We are telling the employee, “You are more important than your manager.” Value gets created between the employee and the customer, and management’s job is to enable innovation at the interface. To to this, we must kill command-and-control.

Ready to cannibalize your beliefs?

Not sure? OK, here is one more food for thought. Do you think we are in The Knowledge Economy? That, we need to focus on helping teams learn more and acquire more knowledge and skills to beat the competition? Quoting from the book:

“In every industry there are huge swathes of critical knowledge that have been commoditized, and what hasn’t been yet commoditized soon will be. Given that, we have to say good-bye to the “knowledge economy” and wave hello to the ‘creative economy’. WHAT MATTERS TODAY is how fast a company can generate new thoughts and BUILD new knowledge…….”

If you could do that then you are eligible to be FUTURE-FIT, and, as the book title says, “Win in a World of Relentless Change, Ferocious Competition, and Unstoppable Innovation”.