“The world is moving so fast that we have few true experts on tomorrow. All we have are experts on yesterday.”
What do companies like Walt Disney, Apple and Google have in common? How did Apple go from near bankruptcy to becoming the richest company in the world in just fourteen years? How is the nascent success of Airbnb rewiring Marriott’s business model?
For businesses to distinguish themselves from traditional competitors, they must adopt a renewed outlook to deal with volatility, growth and new skills. A business needs to let go of everything it identifies with, before building a new identity to emerge from the remains of the old one. It needs to examine every assumption and repeatedly question the status quo.
In the book The Future Ready Organization, author Gyan Nagpal explains why Dynamic Capability Management, built on a robust talent framework, is the way forward.
Transformations cannot happen in safe spaces or on the margins, in functional agendas or areas of underperformance. They happen at the heart of a business. The author identifies nine sources of human capability and maps them on an electromagnetic spectrum representing the relational dynamics of modern business to create the Dynamic Capability Spectrum. These are broadly categorised under three heads as shown below:
Sources of Dynamic Capability:
Internal Capability
This is the heart of the framework – the significant and critical individuals who monitor the day to day activities in a business. As future businesses grow to become more digital, and geographically untethered, it is imperative that internal talent represents new competencies and skills as opposed to a cosmetic restructuring.
External Capability
This is the support arm – the densely packed, microscopic, need based tasks that are potentially outsourced to external talent. These can vary from the mundane to deep expertise.
Network Capability
This covers the big-picture institutional partnerships where two or more organisations choose to work together formally or informally in order to multiply value for everyone.
Intelligent Automation – The Tenth Source
Automation is not adversarial to humans. In fact, with the dynamic capability framework being collaborative in nature, it is expected that in the next ten years, human capability combined with the limitless ability of machines will completely transform the impact of both people and the organisations they work for.
Building the Future-Ready Organisation
With case studies of market leaders, the book outlines the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of Dynamic Capability before providing a road map to make your organisation future-ready.
In a world which is no longer a network of individual functioning silos but a composite, collaborative entity, cross-functional engagement encourages creativity and innovation. It prioritizes strategy over expertise and customer needs over structural hierarchy.
Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a start-up, or an established organisation, this book helps you identify your strengths and weaknesses and align them to future-ready standards. It also provides insight into optimal use of resources to achieve your goals as well as create a ‘talent recipe’ for your business.
The Future Ready Organization: How Dynamic Capability Management is Reshaping the Workplace by Gyan Nagpal. Published in 2019 by HarperBusiness, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Book 12 of 2021.
Aquamarine Flavours Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟.
Available on Amazon*.
About Photo: A key feature of future-ready organisations is the flattening of traditional pyramid models into collaborative entities to create symbiotic relationships.
This papercraft arrangement of triangular prisms represents self-managed, cross-functional collaboration. The 3D prisms are cut from 210gsm cardstock in different colours.
About the Author: Gyan Nagpal is an award-winning talent strategist and commentator who has deep expertise in researching ongoing changes to the global talent pool. Over the last fifteen years, he has helped some of the most ambitious international organizations build significant business franchises across the Asia Pacific and EMEA regions. He is the bestselling author of Talent Economics: The Fine Line Between Winning and Losing the Global War for Talent (2013).
He lives in Singapore with his wife and their two children.
*Disclosure: This post contains an affiliate link which means, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a small commission if you click through and make a purchase.
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