Apply key business lessons to your personal life and stay relevant after 55
There are four key lessons in Rishad Tobaccowala’s brilliant July 16th newsletter:
- Reinvent
- Increase your personal circle
- Invest in yourself
- Learn & Unlearn Skills
While Rishad’s weekly newsletter was, strictly speaking, addressing the issue of relevance from the professional side, I found many parallels to our situation as POA (People of Age)
Professionals across the world, across industries and across all levels (but particularly middle to senior executive levels) are grappling with the issue of relevance.
- Are our businesses and business models relevant?
- Are our organizational designs, incentive plans, and talent relevant?
- Are our partners, suppliers, and the way we tap into external resources relevant?
- Are our positions and roles relevant?
- Are WE still relevant?
It’s an easy shift to transform those five questions into five personal questions all of which boil down to “How do I remain relevant?”
To remain relevant, we must upgrade ourselves. So… how do we upgrade?
#1 – Reinvent yourself.
To Re-invent we should consider the blank sheet of paper exercise:
- Identify a challenge or opportunity.
- Assume we have every asset we currently have.
- Do not constrain our solution except that we need to keep within the law, what is technologically possible today and some goal to break-even or show results in x months.
#2 – Actively make your circles larger
No individual is an island and no company in a connected world can prosper without great connections to other individuals or companies whether they be suppliers, partners, sources of talent, technology, and other platforms.
Make an effort to connect with more people and have positive relationships with them.
#3 – Invest in yourself
All smart managers are asking if we are investing enough in upgrading and resourcing talent. (If we work for ourselves, are we investing enough in ourselves?)
Set up a budget for “Personal Investment” and don’t be shy to use it.
#4 - Learn and unlearn skills
In the corporate environment, competitors are different, the category dynamics are changing, the talent landscape and the workspace seem to be shape shifting in ways we do not recognize.
At the same time the workload is increasing, the expectations rising and change which sucks is coming so fast that we
- Cannot hope to wait it out till we retire
- Have the time to manage our today while preparing for our tomorrow
- Fake it with buzz word bingo
This places a premium on having to learn new skills while simultaneously unlearning skills.
The keys to being “employable” after 55 are complex but, bottom line you need to be seen as relevant and bring value to whomever is employing you.