STIMS Institute Celebrates 10 Year Anniversary – Part 1
On June 2021, STIMS Institute reached a significant milestone, its ten year anniversary! There have been many greetings and wishes for our continued success. We thank every one of our collaborators, friends and well wishers. To acknowledge this mile stone, we are pleased to publish a series of highlights summarizing the outcomes from the past ten years. Following is part 1 under the title: 5 significant lessons for any “Professional” in the 21st Century!
- Work and wealth Distribution are radically changing. Be aware and get prepared for it. Learn to swim through this sea change! The layers of work are increasingly separate, opaque and impermeable. The opportunity to grow from one layer of work to the next and thus climb the organizational hierarchy may no longer be valid.
- There is no “middle”, “learning curve” or “Safety net” unless you want to be dependent on the Government or Charity! Learn to deal with this critical reality of professional life. You can have the “Google jobs” creating a stream of new solutions or “McDonald jobs” which are low wage, plug and play activities. Every job will get pushed to either side, with a chasm in the “middle”.
See Thriving in the 21st Century: Transformational Skills for the “Binary Economy” model.
- Jumping across the chasm of the “middle” requires relentless practice of System Thinking for all professionals, at every level. Don’t do what you are asked to do (the task). Figure out what needs to be done, why and how? Then make it happen and rewarding!
- System Thinking can be at three levels. Professional life today is not getting a college degree and then coasting in the job. Instead it is a relentless search for new solutions everyday and in every job. Some professionals may not need that for their success or survival, if you have already made it or in a specialty area in hot demand. But your fellow professionals depend on you for your stream of new solutions for their success and survival! But, remember that the “hot area of specialty” don’t last as long as before. Their half life is increasingly short!
- Growth in job and career is no longer a matter of how long you worked in a company, job or field of activity. See point 1 above and the impermeable layers in the figure. Every professional at every level of their job or career needs to be focussed on life long learning, contributing through a relentless stream of new solutions. Transform any job / assignment (activity) into a series of goals and their impact. In turn pave the way for the means necessary for sustainability. These are the outcomes of System Thinking and Transformational Skills. Practice them relentlessly together with your academic education and industry/domain specific learning.
One final point: The Transformational Skills of End to End Innovation, Eco system Development and Emotional Intelligence rely more on the philosophy of thinking on behalf of others – using the heart and the mind in unison with that of every one and everything else. With this philosophic underpinning as a professional strength we can expect peace and harmony within each of us. It in turn will bring skills and resources to work with people and cultures across the globe. They can lead to solutions to meet the growing wealth gap, Climate crisis, racial and religious dissentions and other adverse effects of the 21st century society.
Will you be a System Thinking and Transformational technical professional as well as a Philosophic universalist? The power is well within each of us and collectively in all of us. Our decade of progress at STIMS Institute points out that there is indeed opportunity for both these pathways for evolution for all of us.
STIMS Institute 