CLO magazine, February 2006, p. 17. As usual, I’ll reprint my CLO column on effectivenss here. This time around, I’m going to add a few pictures — which is not the style of CLO.
Changes Ahead
Is your organization ready for massive change? Have your people learned how to cope with ever-faster cycle times, increasing ambiguity, and avalanches of incoming information? Do you have a Plan B if your current structure proves too brittle?
Futurists warn that were rounding the knee of an exponential curve of communications, business, and technology. Its hard to imagine change of this magnitude. Its sort of like what I saw on a recent trip to Abu Dhabi.
Camel stew is very tasty, so my right hand tore another good-sized chunk from the platter in front of me. The fellow across the table was eating Omani lobster. He was the first, and so far the only, non-native to be awarded citizenship in the United Arab Emirates. A British dentist, he had first come here in the late sixties, before the streets were paved. Fifty years ago a few scattered huts made from palm fronds sat on the land now occupied by row after row of snazzy modern skyscrapers.
Picture the Arabian Peninsula as a giant snow-boot. The UAE shares the toe of the boot with Oman. The island of Abu Dhabi is the seat of power. Dubai is vying to be the UAEs Las Vegas.
Abu Dhabi was settled in 1793. Life was hard. Camel herding, fishing, and small-scale agriculture were the primary economic activities. Pearl diving became lucrative at the beginning of the century but was knocked out in the 1930s by the one-two punch of global depression and the Japanese cultured pearl industry.
In 1958, oil was discovered. The UAE sits atop 10% of the worlds proven oil reserves. Founding father, the late Sheikh Zayed, put the UAE in the fast lane, and you can almost see it grow day by day. Today Abu Dhabi is one of the worlds most modern cities. It gleams.
Camel paths turn into high-speed freeways, dazzling skyscrapers sprout like weeds, and green trees and gardens abound. Dubai is about as far from Abu Dhabi as San Francisco from San Jose, and the roads through both the UAE and Silicon Valley are bordered with fancy buildings marked Intel, IBM, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, and HP.
I saw a woman at the Marina Mall covered head to toe in black, her face totally covered, but with a cell phone held to her ear. The sight of women decked out in black with facial coverings from slits to brass nose guards to half-veils to nothing at all makes me think how slowly things progress. But that is the wrong message. Things that look old-fashioned to my inexperienced eyes must appear like science fiction to locals my age. Ten years ago, this woman would not have been allowed out of her house alone.
Had I been born in Abu Dhabi, I would have grown up without electricity or running water in a house with a foundation. I wouldnt have gone to high school because the country didnt have any. My father would have herded camels, like his father before him, and his father before him, going back to ancient times.
When I reached 35, my life would begin to change. Our leaders were importing foreigners to build roads, buildings, and infrastructure. By the time I was fifty, I would have cell phones, a microwave oven, a condo overlooking the Gulf, a flat-screen television, a sleek Mercedes, a Philippe Patek wristwatch, a four-wheel drive dune buggy, a kid attending Oxford, and several million dollars in my personal bank account.
In The Singularity is Near, polymath inventor Ray Kurzweil shows that human evolution has been advancing exponentially throughout history. Until now, we havent noticed because weve been in the flat part of the curve. Culture is starting to change as if it had succumbed to Moores Law. More experience gets packed into every minute.
The 21st Century will contain a hundred calendar years but each one of them will contain more and more activity and evolution. In those hundred calendar years, we will experience the equivalent of two hundred centuries of progress.
Zooming up the handle of the hockey-stick graph of exponential change, were all going to face the disorientation of the older residents of Abu Dhabi. I suspect the UAE will be better prepared for what’s ahead than the USA.
Recent research by ASTD and IBM found that most CLOs are focused on efficiency, but their CxO peers take that as a given; their interest is in building capacity for the future. That means preparing your people for perpetual change. Its more important than the day-to-day. Ask anyone in Abu Dhabi.
P.S.
Last month, I asked seventy companies whether they agreed or disagreed with this statement:
“People in our company are not learning and growing fast enough to keep up with the needs of our business.” Only one company in four disagreed.
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