For most of this book, I’ve spent time showing how transient advantages have implications for strategy, for corporate choices, and for how organizations need to operate. In this final chapter, I’d like to shift the focus to what this all means for individual people. In a world of sustainable advantages, you could actually plan a career path and expect a relatively long employment relationship with companies. With transient advantages, as I’ve said earlier, the metaphor is more like making a movie, putting on the Olympics, or working in a political campaign—the organization itself comes, goes, and changes as competitive needs dictate. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, as I noted in an earlier chapter, has found that companies are using more temporary labor. In some industries, such as retail, the employer/employee relationship has completely turned on its head: where most workers in years past were full-time employees, today most are part-timers with unpredictable hours.1 The transient-advantage concept has relevance for people, too—just as a company can’t cling to an advantage that is becoming obsolete for too long without repercussions, so too individuals can’t assume that the skills that were valuable at one time will ensure them a high-quality, productive life thereafter. Let’s consider, then, how individuals should be thinking about their prospects in a world of transient advantage (table 7-1).
TABLE 7-1
The new strategy playbook: making it personal
| From | To |
| Organizational systems | Individual skills |
| A stable career path | A series of gigs |
| Hierarchies and teams | Individual superstars |
| Infrequent job hunting | Permanent career campaigns |
| Careers managed by the organization | Careers managed by the individual |
One somewhat surprising result of transient advantages is that people with the skills and capabilities to help organizations surf successive waves are being rewarded more richly than they ever have before. In previous generations, such individuals would have been groomed and developed from within and would have been less valuable to other organizations (other things being equal) because their talents were embedded in a particular company’s operations.
Ironically, the very pressures that led organizations to free themselves from the constraints of owning assets permanently have created a new form of dependency. Firms now put themselves in the position of being beholden to people who have the rare, valuable knowledge, skills, and connections that help to create new advantages. Indeed, for individuals with those capabilities, sustainable competitive advantage at an individual level endures, despite the particular organizational structures it serves at any one point in time.
Fellow strategist Anita McGahan got her start in strategy by looking at industries and how they change.2 Of late, however, she’s been doing some rethinking, even to the point of considering that competitive advantages can only be understood at the individual level. She remarked to me that “there is a floor in a building down in Wall Street, which houses the trust business. They have securities that they are holding in trust. Activities that continue behind this door have not changed in twenty-five years. It’s the same people doing the same work, and they have been there with no interruption in the normal course of career progress. At the same time, they have been affiliated with five or six different organizations—the Bank of New York, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and so on.” In other words, these people are not dependent on the organization to create the advantages that pay their salaries. Rather, the organizations are dependent on them; otherwise, they can’t compete.
Anita suggests that “when you start thinking this way, your view of what competitive advantage is changes. The resources that underlie competitive advantage are increasingly embedded in the relationships between people. People have the knowledge and the embedded relationships and uniquely know how to manage these assets. Those connections are much more persistent than companies that own these resources. They become expert within their community at finding ways to extract value from those resources, sometimes through salaries, stock options, sometimes through compelling M&A deals. We’re looking at the wrong level of analysis.”
Transient advantages mean that certain employees, certain privileged investors, certain contractors, and others benefit from corporate earnings disproportionately from the success of the underlying organization. Moreover, as Anita points out, the “assets” that employees build over their careers are far more durable and valuable than many corporate assets. As is well known in Silicon Valley, employees can change firms with equanimity. “I changed my job without having to change my car pool” is a frequent observation. The individual, in other words, rather than the corporation, is where certain kinds of durable competitive advantages lie, and where they get paid.
Consider this interesting statistic. In assessing the performance of the Fortune 500 corporations, the magazine reported that the historical return on sales of this group of large firms in 2010 was 4.7 percent (in 2009 it was 4 percent, up from 1 percent the preceding year).3 According to the Census Bureau, median pay in the United States was $44,410 per person. So if one takes that as the base sales case to do the calculations, one gets some pretty interesting “return on sale”-type numbers. The average corporate CEO in the United States (which includes CEOs of many small businesses) earned $204,650 in 2010, according to the Census Bureau, a 78.2 percent return. If you compare the total compensation of the average S&P 500 CEO, which the AFL-CIO calculates at $11,358,445, you get a 99.6 percent return.4 A typical senior partner at a large consulting firm earns over $1 million. A leading business speaker can command $50,000 or more per appearance, and so on. Now, I make no claim that these numbers are all that meaningful, nor do I wish to wade into the debate over CEO compensation. What is clear, however, is that in non-sustainable-advantage situations, many individuals have the opportunity to do very well indeed, even if the organizations they are affiliated with come and go.
This book started with the argument that the way we think about the concept of strategy needs to change. Where we took for granted in years past that the ultimate goal of strategy was to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage, we really need to be thinking about transient advantage—when individual advantages come and go—rather than believing they will be with us forever, or at least for a long period of time. The best organizational strategies in such an environment are those that promote reconfiguration of the business rather than having drastic layoffs or downsizing. Learning to be competent at disengagement will be important. Mastering the resource allocation process and wresting control away from powerful vested interests within the organization will be significant. Being systematic about innovation will not be optional. The executives and leaders who succeed will bring a different mind-set to their businesses, one that favors candor and is unafraid to confront bad news. The consequences are that the rules for personal success are being rewritten.
For decades, at least in most Western countries, the orthodoxy for success was fairly well accepted. Hard work, investment in education and skills, and commitment to a good employer were generally thought to be the way to get ahead and stay ahead. Similarly, employers took on a somewhat paternalistic role. In addition to offering career progression and development opportunities, the classic benefits of health insurance and defined-benefit pension plans provided buffers against economic uncertainty.
Many of those old-style firms have disappeared or been swallowed up. Those that remain—think IBM, for instance—have totally transformed the way they operate. Risks, such as retirement risk, that used to be borne by companies as legally defined obligations are now carried by individuals. Although unusual companies such as the growth outliers continue to offer lifetime careers and a measure of employment stability, the very fact that they are outliers suggests that this is no longer the norm.
The consequences of these changes for those people pursuing a traditional career path have in many cases been dire. For decades now, one outcome has been the steady rise of income inequality.5 Although you might think that this would be good news for those in the upper tier, pervasive inequality has actually been associated with slower growth overall and fewer opportunities for everybody, even those doing relatively well.6 Whole swaths of the Western economies have been hollowed out, as companies grappling with transient advantage find cheaper resources elsewhere. Further, the barriers to competition that created cost buffers that in turn allowed organizations to be relatively benevolent employers have collapsed. Faced with threats from low-cost competitors, companies have been pulling back for years. In a world of transient advantage, the only employees a company will keep are those its leaders believe to be indispensable to its future.
An alternative is to abandon the idea of a more or less linear career path altogether. In ambiguous and uncertain settings, it’s not clear what skills are going to be valuable, which connections will matter most, or what the business model in which you’ll eventually participate will look like. As the journal Fast Company has been exploring, “flux” is increasingly the norm for the careers of more and more people.7 They will find themselves moving from gig to gig rather than moving up a ladder. More moves will be horizontal. And the organizations that create these opportunities may be temporary themselves.
Just as I would encourage companies to anticipate that their competitive advantages may go into decline, I would encourage people to anticipate this, and to plan their careers accordingly. What this means from a practical point of view is that permanent career management is here to stay. Just as companies need to be investing to discover the next wave of advantage, individuals need to be investing to maintain their skills, stay relevant, and have compelling stories of accomplishment to market their value to others. If you think of yourself as permanently looking for the next job, and prepare accordingly, you are much less likely to be caught by surprise without having done the appropriate amount of homework.
So where do you start considering your own career in light of transient advantage? Let’s start with a diagnosis. Complete the self-assessment in table 7-2. If you answered “no” to any of the questions, that’s an area of possible vulnerability and a place to consider addressing a weakness. If you answered “no” to five or more of the questions, it’s time for immediate action! In the rest of this chapter, I’ll walk you through a process for developing your own personal strategy for transient advantage.
There are two questions you want to be thinking of here. The first is how likely it is that your own organization is going to run into the buzz saw of a fading advantage and that you will be on the losing end of that transformation. (See the sidebar for signals that an existing competitive advantage is under threat or beginning to erode.) The second is whether the skills you have today are going to be relevant somewhere else, even if your organization can’t at the moment utilize them.
TABLE 7-2
How prepared are you for the transient-advantage economy?
| Question | Answer |
| If my current employer let me go, it would be relatively easy to find a similar role in another organization for equivalent compensation. | Yes/No |
| If I lost my job today, I am well prepared and know immediately what I would do next. | Yes/No |
| I’ve worked in some meaningful capacity (employment, consulting, volunteering, partnering) with at least five different organizations within the last two years. | Yes/No |
| I’ve learned a meaningful new skill that I didn’t have before in the last two years, whether it is work related or not. | Yes/No |
| I’ve attended a course or training program within the last two years, either in person or virtually. | Yes/No |
| I could name, off the top of my head, at least ten people who would be good leads for new opportunities. | Yes/No |
| I actively engage with at least two professional or personal networks. | Yes/No |
| I have enough resources (savings or other) that I could take the time to retrain, work for a small salary, or volunteer in order to get access to a new opportunity. | Yes/No |
| I can make income from a variety of activities, not just my salary. | Yes/No |
| I am able to relocate or travel to find new opportunities. | Yes/No |
If you believe that an advantage in your company is likely to fade away, with negative implications for yourself, you then have two choices. The first is to try to mobilize the powers that be in the organization to tackle sustainable-advantage thinking and begin to put in place the practices that I’ve described previously in the book. You’ll need to convince a critical mass of people that change is necessary and begin to consider how the organization might begin to move toward finding the next-generation advantage. The previous chapters in the book discuss what needs to be done.
Early Warnings of Fading Advantage
The More of These, the Worse Things Are
- I don’t buy my own company’s products or services.
- We are investing at the same levels or even more and not getting margins or growth in return.
- Customers are finding cheaper or simpler solutions that are “good enough.”
- Competition is emerging from places we didn’t expect.
- Customers are no longer excited about what we have to offer.
- We are not considered a top place to work by the people we would like to hire.
- Some of our very best people are leaving.
- Our stock is perpetually undervalued.
- Our technical people (scientists and engineers, for instance) are predicting that a new technology will change our business.
- We are not being targeted by headhunters for talent.
- The growth trajectory has slowed or reversed.
- Very few innovations have made it successfully to market in the last two years.
- The company is cutting back on benefits or pushing more risk to employees.
- Management is denying the importance of potential bad news.
Let’s say that for whatever reason you don’t think it likely that you’ll be able to get the organization to change fast enough to adapt, or that powerful people’s vested interests make it nearly impossible that change will take place without a major crisis. At that point, it makes sense to prepare yourself to create alternatives. You’ll need to do an unflinching audit of where the skills and capabilities you have today may be relevant outside your organization. If you are personally tied to a whole category of activities that are going to disappear, then it’s time to make some serious investments in upgrading those skills and seeing where else they might be useful (more on this below).
The advantage of developing an early warning of your organization’s being trapped by past competitive advantages is that it can often give you valuable time. That’s time you can spend networking, exploring alternatives, building new capabilities, and otherwise making yourself more valuable. The last thing you want is to be surprised. Far too many executives at once-thriving organizations were left behind when competition eroded their advantages.
Being well prepared for an engagement to end means much more than dusting off your résumé. It means being ready to start a permanent campaign for a new and better position (or being willing to start a business or go into consulting). Before you can do that, however, you need to come to grips with the emotional challenge of leaving the past behind—the whole cycle of mourning for what was, which usually includes emotions of sadness, anger, loss, and the like. Give yourself the opportunity to grieve a little—it’s only natural.
After pulling yourself together, the next step is to do some strategizing. I’d start with putting together a set of what career consultant Ford R. Myers calls the “job seekers tool kit.”8 He advises that such a toolkit include the following:
- A written list of accomplishments
- A positioning statement
- A professional biography, which is a one-page narrative of your career in the third person
- A list of target companies that you would like to work for
- Your networking lists
- A set of professional references
- Letters of recommendation
- A networking agenda
- A tracking system
- Finally, a résumé
As you can see, being prepared to make a move is no small undertaking, but it is critical to be able to shift your career even as the underlying businesses you are working in change. There are many excellent resources, including Myers’s website, that can help with the details of how to prepare yourself for a career transition.
The other point to remember, particularly in those early mournful days when the bad news is first presented, is that almost everyone who ended up being very successful has had setbacks, been fired, or otherwise run into a rough patch. J. K. Rowling lost her job as a secretary for Amnesty International because instead of focusing on secretarial work, she daydreamed about a world of wizards. Her severance pay provided the resources on which she supported herself while writing the fabulously successful Harry Potter series. Michael Bloomberg was fired from Salomon Brothers in a political dustup and went on to found Bloomberg, which grew into a media empire. He became a billionaire and a three-term mayor of New York City. Salomon Brothers? It no longer exists. Vogue editor Anna Wintour was fired from her first job in fashion for being “too edgy.” A Baltimore TV producer pulled Oprah Winfrey from a slot anchoring the evening news, proclaiming that she was “unfit” for the job.9 And so it goes—it is virtually impossible to tell in advance where you are going to end up, so the best thing to do is learn from past experiences and prepare for what comes next.
Since careers today are unlikely to be spent within the confines of one organization, having contact with and connections with multiple types of organizations can give you a lot more options. As Fast Company reports in its “generation flux” article, a great many people have reworked the idea of what a career is in the first place. Instead of a progression in which deeper and deeper skills are developed along a given trajectory, people work instead on gigs, each one of which might be relatively short but which give them skills, network contacts, and capabilities that can enrich the next engagement and which in turn make them more valuable to the next employer.
Having exposure to a number of different organizational environments is helpful in a transient-advantage economy because it broadens the number of opportunities you might find. Consider the fascinating career path of Japan’s Masayoshi Son, currently a part owner of Softbank, which has big stakes in one of our outlier companies, Yahoo! Japan. He was born to an ethnically Korean family on an out-of-the-way island of Japan. His father was a pig farmer who sold illegal alcohol on the side and eventually went into the pachinko parlor business. He decided, according to the Wall Street Journal, that his chances as an ethnic minority in Japan were not good and persuaded his parents to allow him to attend high school in the United States. He eventually attended the University of California at Berkeley. He started his entrepreneurial career while there, with an initial product that he talked one of his professors into designing, then licensed it to Sharp Electronics for $500,000. He went into the video-arcade business and several other ventures, some of which never got off the ground, before returning to Japan to found Softbank, initially a software distribution company, in 1981. This was followed by interests in a variety of internet companies, the Comdex computer show, Ziff-Davis Publishing, and Yahoo! Inc. China’s Alibaba also was an investment target for Son. With the bursting of the dot-com bubble, Softbank’s market value in 2002 was off 98 percent from its earlier peak, and Son took a beating in terms of his own personal wealth. He eventually moved into telecommunications, first with broadband and later with mobile phones. Today, he is proposing to do a deal with Sprint that has the potential to destabilize competition in the wireless market in the United States.10 Although his career is certainly unusual in both its entrepreneurialism and his later success, the principle of making sure you have exposure to a number of different organizational settings could apply to anyone.
One clear implication of the transient-advantage economy is that a lifelong accumulation of new skills is imperative. Another is that you simply never know when a particular skill will turn out to be valuable, even if you didn’t acquire it ostensibly for business. Steve Jobs of Apple fame liked to tell the story of how he audited a class in calligraphy at his university. Calligraphy didn’t have much to do with technology, but later on, Jobs’s understanding of calligraphy influenced the way computer characters on WYSIWYG screens would look. That’s a great example of a skill or bit of knowledge that one didn’t know in advance would come in handy but that eventually paid off in an unexpected way.
Rare skills can also be significant differentiators. I was talking to one of my participants at a Columbia executive education class as he described the difficulty his firm (a pharmaceutical company) was having penetrating certain markets in China. “In the end,” he said, “do you know who the most highly paid salesperson in our entire global company is?” I said I didn’t. “It’s the guy who is not only a great salesman but also has great English!”
New skills can be gained by formal training, of course, but it is also worthwhile to think of contexts you might work in that could offer some ways to build skills that are a little untraditional. Volunteering and working on community projects are often great ways to practice doing new things. The key thing you want to push yourself to do is to keep adding skills—tools, if you will—to your personal toolbox. You never know when they might come in handy.
One of the most exciting new areas in the skill-building arena are the free, online courses offered by organizations such as the Khan Academy. The academy famously began in 2004 when a Bangladeshi-American named Salman Khan, with degrees from MIT and Harvard Business School, was asked by his cousin Nadia to give her some math help. He began tutoring her using drawings done with Yahoo’s Doodle notepad. Other relatives asked for help, and Khan posted the lessons to YouTube. The idea took off, and in 2009 Khan quit his job in finance as a hedge fund analyst for Connective Capital Management to focus on the tutorials. Today, the academy offers bite-sized video lessons on a breathtaking number of subjects, together with many ancillary offerings such as scoring and keeping track of progress. Among the impacts the academy has had is to reverse the traditional method of teaching. In traditional teaching, teachers deliver the lesson, and students do homework at night to reinforce it. With Khan Academy tutorials available, students do the lesson at night and then practice putting the material into use the next day, with the teacher’s help. It’s a completely new way of teaching and learning. As of this writing, there are over 3,600 tutorials available. They are free, and they take ten to fifteen minutes. Why not spend some time learning a new skill?
To me, one of the most exciting developments in the transient-advantage context is that education has become far more accessible, democratized, and personal than it has ever been before. With the advent of digitization and brand-new forms of learning, just about anyone with an internet connection can enhance their skills and understanding dramatically. This is going to reshape the education business in new and significant ways.
One of the best parts of my job at Columbia Business School is that I am regularly in the role of designing or teaching in our executive education programs. These are mostly short (a week or less) non-degree-granting programs whose goal is to synthesize the very best of management thinking and share it with practicing executives. For the executives who attend, the programs are a rare opportunity to take a break from the rush of normal business, meet with people from other industries, create new networking opportunities, and, most important, gain some perspective. It’s been interesting to me to observe how our executive education classrooms have changed, since I joined Columbia’s faculty in 1993, to reflect the changing needs of executives in the transient-advantage economy.
Executive education courses used to be a lot like conventional classroom experiences—professors would get up and give inspiring lectures or lead vibrant case discussions, and that was about it. Today, although we still do some of that, many more elements have been added to the mix. In Columbia Business School’s flagship senior executive program (CSEP), for instance, coaching and feedback figure prominently throughout the design, with input from faculty, professional executive coaches, and peers from other industries and sectors. Participants are guided through the development of a personal leadership statement—which they practice—and helped to resolve a personal case involving a strategic issue they are struggling with. Highly interactive sessions are supplemented by opportunities for peer-to-peer team leadership. In that course, a segment entitled “Executive Well-Being” is included to help people focus on their health. Competing in a transient-advantage world is stressful and can take a toll on people, physically.
The senior executive program is four weeks long, so it is quite a commitment. The rewards, however, can be substantial. Marco Mattiacci, a senior executive with Ferrari of North America, made the decision to join in 2011, saying, “It is a great opportunity at this stage of my career to stop for a few weeks and fine-tune, update my knowledge, plus have the opportunity to confront myself with other colleagues from different industries and bring new ideas coming from different areas of business.” It must have worked pretty well—Marco received the Automotive Executive of the Year award in February of 2012. The release announcing his award credited him with growing sales in his areas by 20 percent, allowing Ferrari to hold a top position in the exclusive automobile segment. He in turn credits what he learned at CSEP with helping him achieve these results. Oh, and I should mention that while I do teach in CSEP I am not the faculty director—credit for its innovative design really belongs to Paul Ingram, Bruce Craven, and to Schon Beechler, who preceded them.
Creating a Learning Community in the Columbia Senior Executive Program
Executive education was once focused mostly on the content of the courses, and the model was very much professor-driven. Today’s best programs have changed this model entirely, with a far greater focus on process and values and learning driven largely in a peer-to-peer manner, with professors taking the role of facilitators within a learning community. In CSEP, a considerable amount of time is spent on creating this learning community, beginning before the participants arrive—with telephone interviews, exercises as the participants come together for the first time, and explicit structuring of the values that the CSEP community chooses to work on together. In a recent class, the following values were selected by the community: 1) Encourage your colleagues, 2) Optimistic listening, 3) Have fun, 4) Trust and respect others, and 5) Take personal responsibility for the success of every session at CSEP. Participants work throughout the course with a “learning journal,” which facilitates deep reflection and the capture of core ideas. Participants are also encouraged to take the time they spend at the course to refresh themselves emotionally and physically and to build and maintain peer networks that can continue long after the end of the course.
I do direct a shorter, one-week program on leading change and growth, in which a key element of the program design is the application of all the concepts and frameworks to a real-life personal case, which serves to both reinforce what people are learning and to help them make progress on an issue involving growth or change that they are concerned about. As one of my participants, the director of strategy and business development for Philips Electronics Middle East and Africa, told me, “One year after LSGC [Leading Strategic Growth and Change], an enduring lesson in our organization is that our growth strategy is nothing more than the initiatives you drive and how you manage them … For us, LSGC translated into a system to manage initiatives for growth: with more discipline, more granularity, better assumptions tracking, clearer consequences, and therefore stronger internal commitment (i.e., funding via the yearly budget cycle) to pursue growth.” As I said, today’s executive education courses are moving toward real-world application much more aggressively than they did in the past.
Executive education is not for everyone. There are, however, many other options for continuing your own development and investing in your capabilities. I mentioned the Khan Academy previously. Community colleges, local arts organizations, vocational schools, and other institutions are also places to pick up new skills.
Entrepreneurs everywhere have started to develop learning that can be delivered in a variety of ways, some of it very cost effectively. University Now, for instance, is a social venture based in San Francisco whose mission is “Making higher education available for everyone by building the most affordable and accessible universities in the world.” Gene Wade, the cofounder and CEO, felt that traditional systems of education were failing far too many people, and he launched the organization to address these flaws. In particular, University Now makes higher education, whose cost has become prohibitive for far too many people, affordable.
What Should You Look for in an Executive Education Program? An Opinionated List
- A dedicated faculty director or designer who is on-site throughout your learning experience
- The opportunity to apply what you are learning to your own situation
- A diverse mix of participants from different countries, regions, and industries
- An appropriate level of participant experience (you don’t want a huge disparity in experience levels)
- An up-to-date curriculum with current examples
- Appropriate use of technology to support your learning (web pages, apps, etc.)
- Help in getting prepared for the course and in following up afterward
- A mix of learning styles in the content—some action oriented, some more reflective, some designed with a specific goal in mind
- Enough downtime to reflect and apply new knowledge
- Diversity in the faculty presenting
- Experience of the institution offering the course (there is a pretty steep learning curve)
With the advent of massively open online courses (MOOCs) being pioneered by universities such as Stanford and MIT, online education is going to become an affordable reality for an increasingly large number of people.
In a transient-advantage economy, one of the few things that will endure are relationships. Access to a network is one of the most powerful ways in which people can maintain their value to others, find new opportunities, and create opportunities for others in exchange. Indeed, the growth outliers put a huge emphasis on the stability of their relationships with employees and with customers. FactSet boasts that its client retention rate has been 95 percent over the past ten years. Analysts observe that both Infosys and Cognizant have strong client retention (with Cognizant boasting of a 90 percent client satisfaction rate on a recent survey, and Infosys reporting retention of 95 percent in a recent interview with us). Indra Sistemas observes in its annual report that “Indra considers its suppliers and knowledge institutions to be partners in value creation and allies in innovation, and that is a major responsibility.”
Smart companies also realize that when layoffs or firings are necessary, it is still important to husband the networks to which these people are tied. Nancy McKinstry, the CEO of publisher Wolters Kluwer, has had to confront this problem as the company makes a difficult transition to a digital world. I asked her how she deals with the people side of transitions. Interestingly, the company has a well-thought-out and conscious process for doing this. A team of people examines options for redeploying the staff elsewhere in the organization as the first choice. McKinstry reports that they have been mostly successful in this regard.
Rudy Lobo, COO of the temporary office company Regus, is clear that parting ways in a reasonably friendly manner is important both to the individual being released and the company as a whole. He describes how it typically might proceed. “Well,” he said, “at first people go through a whole irrational phase. They get the news, they get angry, and eventually they calm down. I go through a whole process of bringing them with me. I talk to the husbands, the wives, and try to talk them out of the 30 percent of the bad advice they get … I try to set it up so that we part friends.”
Relationships are important at work, but other types of network ties matter as well. You’ve heard it a thousand times from career self-help books, so I won’t belabor it here, but it does bear a short reminder: join in. Join alumni groups, neighborhood groups, the chamber of commerce, a book club—any place where you might meet people who could bring you news of an opportunity.
Lately, a new trend is for a network to seek you out because your participation adds value. Social networks, such as Facebook, become more valuable as more people use them. Advice sites, review sites, sites for sharing expertise—these are all places to engage in some networking behavior because it adds value for everyone else.
The reality of a transient-advantage economy is that you will sometimes find you’ll need to invest in yourself before you can make the next move, and that is going to require resources. Therefore, one of the general principles of competing in this way is that you need to create that buffer capacity so that you don’t get stuck in a place that is unattractive, or find that you can’t make the next leap you would like to because of constrained resources.
Part of the skill of doing this is to always be thinking of creating spare capacity. Barter instead of buy, keep expenses variable, and try to limit the burden of your operating costs as much as you can. The fewer other obligations, such as debts or fixed commitments you have, the easier it will be to conserve resources. Sometimes you can approach transitions with the support of a partner. In my own case, a difficult but ultimately satisfying transition from running an information technology group for a government agency to spending four years in a PhD program was only possible because my husband was willing to both give up my income and pay for day care during that time.
One of the big new developments in a transient-advantage world is that today it is entirely possible to generate multiple income streams beyond simply earning a salary. The more you are able to tap into these, the less vulnerable you are to a shift in that underlying job.
You can be a virtual assistant and sell your administrative capabilities part-time. You can take over jobs other people would like to outsource (and you can outsource everything these days, from menu planning to putting together a one-year-old’s birthday party). You can sell things for other people on eBay once you’ve exhausted the contents of your own closets. You can design apps with handy-to-use developer tools. You can do “tasks” on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk system. You can teach. You can consult.
Markets are also emerging in which providers will actually pay you to participate. Skilled gamers, for instance, can be hired by others to play, sometimes converting virtual currency into real currency. You can be paid to provide an opinion or to provide an endorsement.
Opportunities, unfortunately, may pop up in arenas that are not located near you. It is helpful, therefore, if you have some flexibility about either relocating entirely or being prepared to travel to where the opportunities are. As I interact with executives, I am often struck by how many of them lead peripatetic lives. Living in one place with an office in one or more different locations—often a plane ride away—has become quite normal.
Rudy Lobo, who, as I mentioned, is the chief operating officer of the Regus Group, is representative of this breed. He’s a man in a permanent hurry. Intense and energetic, he tells me that he is finally considering establishing a permanent home in a semirural part of England after “thirty moves in thirty years.” All that momentum is not accidental. Lobo’s company “gets” transient advantage. It was founded in 1989 by Mark Dixon, a colorful serial entrepreneur from the United Kingdom who had run a sandwich business, sold hot dogs from a van, and ventured into bread baking before he had his “aha” moment about a major gap in the market. Sitting in a café in Brussels, where he landed after having already had quite an eventful career with many ups and downs, he had a moment of inspiration. All around him were businesspeople awkwardly taking notes and trying to work amidst shoppers, students, and housewives, because they were not near their offices. At that time, if you were working and on the road, the local coffee shop or diner was about your only option for a meeting. The idea for a business center that could be rented on an as-needed basis was born.
Since then, Regus has both benefited from and exemplified strategy when competitive advantages are short. Today, it is present in 95 countries, with facilities in 550 cities. It’s listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250. It’s had a turbulent history, with setbacks in the dot-com era and again in the early 2000s, but nonetheless has shown a steady growth trajectory, expanding both its geographic footprint and its services. Today, it offers a vast number of services, from disaster recovery to virtual offices. It moves into and out of geographies and businesses with rhythmic regularity.
This book began with the premise that strategy, at least as it has been practiced for some time, is stuck. Stuck in ways of thinking that may have made a lot of sense when industries were stable, when trends were more or less predictable, and when the pace of technological evolution seemed to be slower. The idea of strategy then was to achieve stability via a sustainable competitive advantage.
Today, that way of thinking about strategy is in tatters. It would be easy to bemoan the loss of so much security and stability, and it is indeed important to be candid about the downsides and the social adjustment costs. But I think it’s just as important to be excited about the opportunities so much dynamism in our economy creates. There will be more room for people to be entrepreneurial. There will be much more variety in how we cobble together our careers, meaning there will be many more on-ramps for people who need to step away for a while. There will be a need, yes, but also tremendous opportunities for more people to obtain the skills and education they will need to be effective in the transient-advantage economy.
Like it or not, the transient-advantage economy is here with us now and shows no sign of retreat. My hope is that in reading this book and learning about the extraordinary people and organizations who have figured out how to thrive in this new landscape, you will be inspired and excited.