James Drogan

Of late I have been commenting on change in the world; accelerating at an increasing rate, complex, and often opaque.  How does one survive, let alone thrive and ultimately change the game played in this environment?  In 2003 I wrote a small bit, Forces, that considered these questions.

The hypothesis is that the human requires new capabilities (i.e., knowledge, skills, experience, and attitudes) if the comment on change is correct and one is to survive and thrive in the emergent world.

Related to this comes Transient Advantage (McGrath, R. G. (2013). Transient Advantage. Harvard Business Review, 62–70) echoing, in many ways, the observation of Charles Darwin that, “It's not the strongest who survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most adaptable to change.”

I'm in the  higher education business with the mission to "...prepare graduates for the external environment.  The effectiveness of the program is the degree to which successful completion has prepared the graduates for their chosen career as measured by their uptake by industry."  As the external environment changes, higher education must change or risk Darwinism.

I've been particularly taken by two of Tom Friedman's op-eds.

The first, How to Get a Job, from the 2013, May 28 edition of The New York Times, contains this rather pithy line.

It is best summed up by the mantra from the Harvard education expert Tony Wagner that the world doesn’t care anymore what you know; all it cares “is what you can do with what you know.”

The second, The Internship - Not the Movie, followed on June 8 with some advice as to how to acquire the ability to deliver value using what you know.

Internships are increasingly important today, they explained, because skills are increasingly important in the new economy and because colleges increasingly don’t teach the ones employers are looking for. Experience, rather than a degree, has become an important proxy for skill, they note, and internships give you that experience.

However high one's GPA, however long the set of intials after one's name, whether or not one is a "Bard-man," matters little if these attributes cannot be translated into value appreciated by the employer.

What knowledge, skills, experiences, and attitudes (yes, attitudes matter -- a lot) do you need to deliver value?

Think about it.