According to the world economic forum, we're faced with four major risks
- systemic risk: it brought us the actual credit crunch
- energy risk: it's linked to the climatic problems as we have to shift away from fossil and nuclear energy to alternative, sustainable and renewable energies in order to reduce global warming
- demographic risk: the baby boomer had in the 17 years after WWII more births than the following 37 years which means that in 2028 when the last boomers, born in 1963 will retire at age 65, one third of the actual work force will lack in the developed western word
- education-gap risk: do we have enough universities to educate our kids properly?
You find more about these four problems here and here
Skill-gap risk in action
Over the next five years, roughly 45 percent of electrical engineers in the United States of America will be eligible for retirement, according to a 2008 survey by the Center for Energy Workforce Development. That translates into the need
- educate,
- hire and
- train 7,000 power engineers.
And while many of those eligible to quit working will continue on either because they choose to do so or because they cannot afford to stop, the same survey shows that the schools can't crank out enough graduates to fill would-be openings. More >>>
McKinsey & Company has favored a mercenary OK world where O stands for Only and K for Knowledge that brought us KO in a global economic crisis through the publication of their 1997 book
the war for talents!
As early as July 22, 2002 and article from the New Yorker,
The Talent Myth asked an interesting and challenging question: "
Are smart people overrated?". Gladwell mentioned how the McKinsey & Copmany study that merged in the book
the war for talents was generated by an assumption from the sample of ENRON's recruiting model, a company that paid particularly well its talents, but a company that went bankrupt four years after the study has been published through the book.
What we need for the future and what we have to go through social business networking is more LUCK employees, where L stands for Location, U for Understanding, C for Connections and K for Knowledge, and less OK talents.
Charles Handy in
The hungry spirit: beyond capitalism: a quest for purpose in the modern world suggests to develop citizen companies with citizen employees that cannot be fired as they will get life long contracts or contracts between 10 to 20 years.
I think that the "hire and fire" policy will almost certainly disappear because the reputation of the companies that fire thousands of employees will be so strongly damaged in the future that they won't find any more employees, simply because there might be the same type of embargoes against bad companies that was against South Africa under Apartheid.
What will come in the future are much more opportunities of crowdsourcing and bottom-up options, simply because, thanks to social networks, thanks to a much better availability of the
Wisdom of Crowds people can contribute to the success of a project without even being personally known by the project manager.
Will we start to create the anonymous crowdsourcers, the anonymous employees, after having created, two centuries ago the anonymous companies?
We will enter into an era, where the actual corporates might lose much of the power they still have and where individuals will be strongly empowered, where much less available work force will exist, where the crowdsourcers will define the value of their work and where LUCK and creativity, not the OK talents from the McKinsey perspective, will have the say, I think.
Employees have to empower themselves, to create their own personal companies even when they are working with great multinational companies and to start crowdsourcing whenever they can in order to mitigate their personal risks to get suddenly unemployed by stupid top-down decisions, stress situations and lack off balanced communication.
