SEVEN
THRIVING SKILLS of ENTERPRISE
WARRIORS
1.
Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
To compete in the new global economy, companies need their workers to think
about how to continuously improve their products, processes, or services.
Over and over, executives told me that the heart of critical thinking and
problem solving is the ability to ask the right questions. As one senior
executive from Dell said, “Yesterday's answers won't solve today's
problems.”
2.
Collaboration and Leadership
Teamwork is no longer just about working with others in your building. Christie
Pedra, CEO of Siemens, explained, “Technology has allowed for virtual
teams. We have teams working on major infrastructure projects that are all
over the U.S. On other projects, you're working with people all around the
world on solving a software problem. Every week they're on a variety of
conference calls; they're doing Web casts; they're doing net meetings.”
3.
Agility and Adaptability
Clay Parker explained that anyone who works at BOC Edwards today “has
to think, be flexible, change, and use a variety of tools to solve new problems.
We change what we do all the time. I can guarantee the job I hire someone
to do will change or may not exist in the future, so this is why adaptability
and learning skills are more important than technical skills.”
4. Initiative and Entrepreneurialism
Mark Chandler, senior vice president and general counsel at Cisco, was one
of the strongest proponents of initiative: “I say to my employees,
if you try five things and get all five of them right, you may be failing.
If you try 10 things, and get eight of them right, you're a hero. You'll
never be blamed for failing to reach a stretch goal, but you will be blamed
for not trying. One of the problems of a large company is risk aversion.
Our challenge is how to create an entrepreneurial culture in a larger organization.”
5. Effective Oral and Written Communication
Mike Summers of Dell said, “We are routinely surprised at the difficulty
some young people have in communicating: verbal skills, written skills,
presentation skills. They have difficulty being clear and concise; it's
hard for them to create focus, energy, and passion around the points they
want to make. If you're talking to an exec, the first thing you'll get asked
if you haven't made it perfectly clear in the first 60 seconds of your presentation
is, ‘What do you want me to take away from this meeting?’ They
don't know how to answer that question.”
6.
Accessing and Analyzing Information
Employees in the 21st century have to manage an astronomical amount of information
daily. As Mike Summers told me, “There is so much information available
that it is almost too much, and if people aren't prepared to process the
information effectively it almost freezes them in their steps.”
It's not only the sheer quantity of information that represents a challenge,
but also how rapidly the information is changing. Quick—how many planets
are there? In the early 1990s, I heard then–Harvard University president
Neil Rudenstine say in a speech that the half-life of knowledge in the humanities
is 10 years, and in math and science, it's only two or three years. I wonder
what he would say it is today.
7. Curiosity and Imagination
Mike Summers told me, “People who've learned to ask great questions
and have learned to be inquisitive are the ones who move the fastest in
our environment because they solve the biggest problems in ways that have
the most impact on innovation.”
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