Yo 🇺🇸 and Salut 🇫🇷
Lately i've been reflecting on the future of work and refreshing my mind on two important things that have a direct impact on company culture: competencyand ability to learn.
First let's talk about competency. From EQ vs. IQ, the 80/20 rule aka the Pareto Principle to The Peter Principle, lots of scholars In management and social science have analyzed and correlated the effects of competency to a business culture and success.
We have all experienced this one way or another and we have all put this under the broad umbrella of "office politics". I have myself for long thought that political animals at work were evil, more or less sociopaths, and the higher you get in the ladder, the more sociopathic. That may be true to a certain extent however there is another point of reference that I recently rediscovered: the Dunning-Kruger effect.
In a nutshell, Dunning and Kruger estimate in their study that incompetent people don't know they're incompetent. So then you might think that you're in "compassion" territory. Absolutely not. Listen to "the 10 commandments of startup success" and hear the thoughts or Reid Hastings and Patti mcCord about this .... the company is not a family because family is unconditional ❤️. View your work as a sports team: if you're not a good player, you don't make the roster. In other words, eliminate the incompetent. That concept was early verified by Jim Collins in "From Good to Great" (it's a good read!) with is bus analogy.
Now about the ability to learn. Gone are the days when a fancy diploma was the guaranty to be set for life: today with a global competition and the addition of AI, to stay relevant you must learn faster than any other human and smarter than any other machine.
Today the bad news is that the world is turning ultremely fast so you need to keep up at the speed of light, but the good news is that there is true universal access to knowledge outside of schools and universities, so your ability to learn something quickly and effectively is now coming at a premium, in addition to the basic training that you get during your formative years. Yes we must re-think our education system (Ecole42 by Xavier Niel in Paris is a fantastic step towards this) but we as individuals in teams must do our own part and truly understand that lifelong learning is the #1 skill of the 21st century. (and remember you can't make it on your own, without a team you won't go very far! I'll expand on that soon).
Have a good week + later!
-Phil
