New Heroes shall emerge

Organizations today are continually challenged by the changing environment to do more and more with less and less resources. Changes under globalisation such as, technological advances, catastrophic crises, frantic competition and demanding customers, are happening in the external environment of every organization.  Managerial efficacy has taken the center-stage and human resource management is the litmus test for ensuring managerial success. The last couple of decades in the twentieth century have seen an unprecedented race for enhancing the quality of people by the best business organizations. The worker who was assumed erstwhile, to be ignorant, stupid and easily replaceable with little bit of training, in the peak of the `assembly line era’, has evolved into a potential genius in the ‘information era’.

The quest and race for substituting stupid-workers with genius-super-brats has begun, with the rise of Software and Internet, and the battle turf has engulfed the entire globe. The human resource is finally calling the shots and is really making all the difference between success and failure today. Technology is of critical importance but is no longer the decider. The microchip revolution has made technology development affordable and accessible for all. Designing, experimenting and developing ‘new applications’ have become a mind-game. Thus, the competition is all but restricted to acquisition, development and retention of people who can play the mind-game successfully and systematic purging of the people who can’t play in the new turf to add value. Mass scale job displacements and relocations are anybody’s guess. But, at current rate job creation, in a new job-sphere, the new job opportunities in info-commercial and techno-commercial job spaces, are likely outpace the rate of job obsolescence.

It is strange but true that technological and market obsolescence of even the new products and services are getting faster by the day. The central challenge for human resource planning is how to ensure collaboration of the very same people to run the business today, who knows that they may have to be shown the exit door the very next day.  The traditional concepts of motivation, employee engagement and performance management look misfit for the future. Employees as Individuals have to protect themselves, take charge of their careers, by taking initiatives for learning new competencies proactively before getting knocked off as the   Organisation will have little choice but to close shop or stay competitive. The organization’s will not have the luxury of time to train or patience to carry redundancy of product or people.

Postscript

The signals were already there. The solutions were already there. But the inertia of comfort did not allow the ‘stupidity of indolent mind-set’, to switchover to the ‘intelligence of the action-oriented mind’, and the paradigm of ‘collective complacence’, proved to be a ‘deep slumber’, when Covid-19 struck the most lethal blow mankind has ever faced in history. By May 2020, within three months of the declaration of the pandemic, 30 million jobs have been wiped out. Worse is yet to come. Only those who take the initiative and voluntarily upgrade their skills, shall survive, and may also reap a fortune. New Economics of the New Market has created a new level playing field. Old reputations won’t matter much, and new heroes shall emerge.