The Future of Personal Reinvention with Jim Lee
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The document discusses trends in personal reinvention, careers, and the economy. It notes that as automation increases, routine jobs are declining while non-routine cognitive and manual jobs are growing. It provides advice on reinvention such as focusing on passions, understanding finances, and networking. The document is presented by Strategic Foresight Investments LLC to provide information and advice, and notes various disclosures.
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The Future of Personal Reinvention with Jim Lee
- 1. The Future of Personal Reinvention with Jim Lee
- 2. The is no physiological difference between sheer panic and complete joy
- 8. Fortune favors the flexible
- 13. 1960’s 1 Million Employees 2016 115,000 Employees
- 14. $17b Market Cap 120,000 Employees $20b Market Cap (estimated) 1,600 Employees
- 19. Travel Agents, Telemarketing, Retail Sales Managers, Creatives, Engineers, Health Care Assembly Work, Farming Waiters, Security Routine NonRoutine CognitiveManual Source: U.S. Census Bureau
- 23. Think about what you can get excited about and what the world really wants. Get an understanding of your financial position Network before you need it. Get your team together.
- 24. Strategic Foresight Investments LLC ("StratFI") is a Registered Investment Advisor ("RIA"), registered in the State of Delaware. StratFI provides asset management and related services for clients nationally. Information contained in this report is for informational and educational purposes only and is not to be considered investment advice or a recommendation to purchase any particular security. One should not engage in a market timing strategy without professional guidance or training, monitoring tools, and the ability to bear losses. Market data, trends and other content in this presentation are based on generally-available information and are believed to be reliable. StratFI does not guarantee the accuracy of the information contained in this presentation. Information is also time-bound and subject to change over time. StratFI will provide all prospective clients with a copy of our current Form ADV, ("Brochure") prior to commencing an Advisory relationship. Existing clients will receive a copy on an annual basis. However, at anytime, you can view our current Form ADV, Part 2 online. This document also details our firm's Privacy Policy. In addition, you can contact us at jlee@stratfi.com If you have any questions regarding this presentation, please contact us.
Editor's Notes
- My name is Jim Lee, and I write and speak about emerging trends in culture and technology. I also run a boutique investment advisory and planning firm in Wilmington, DE. I’ve been a financial advisor for 25 years, and a professional futurist for about 10. What I’ve found over the years is that…. There are at least two types of smart people Smart people ask all the right questions. They go to good schools, get the right jobs, and go on to have successful lives. Really smart people ask all the wrong questions. They ask the all wrong questions for all the right reasons. These are the troublemakers of the world. They make great entrepreneurs, but often find themselves at odds with authority figures, resulting in either planned or unplanned career transitions. Some of you may have done this. Good news – you might be really smart! Here is my own story. A few years ago, I worked for a financial advisory firm that was bought out by a bank. I lost my job and was stunned – I didn’t see that coming. I was really smart guy. This resulted in lot of sleepless nights. For months, I really didn’t know if I was coming or going. I would walk around the neighborhood at 3 a.m. - like all the other crazy people. And then I had this insight…
- I realized that there is no physiological different between sheer panic and complete joy. The excitement and nervousness, and the sleepless nights are what all entrepreneurs go through. This was my moment to redefine myself. I could be a financial planner, portfolio manager, or…. a futurist. How cool is that? I took a year and a half off to learn, think, and write. 15 months later, I had a book, some magazine articles, few speaking engagements, and launched a new career as a financial futurist. I also had a graduate degree in foresight from a few years earlier (and this was really helpful). I will start with the caveat that there are a few occupational risks of being a futurist, as any statements made about the future may, in hindsight, appear to be obvious wrong or worse yet obviously wrong. Because the first thing that you learn is a futurist is that there is no single monolithic event called “The Future”.
- It is not a singular, unchangeable thing. To a certain degree, we are all making it up as we go along. So, it is a cooperative effort. We all have personal choices that we can make, and with the internet, we have more information and more choices to make than ever before. It is useful to think about the future as a decision tree…
- …some decisions are easier and more likely to be made than others. We all share a common past, and there are paths that we are likely to follow based on where we are born and our family history. But we always have the opportunity to branch out and do something different. Strategic foresight is about using what we know about the future to make better decisions today. What we try to do is extend our vision out to some of these branches and think about where they might take us. Today, we are going to talk about how the landscape for jobs is changing and why reinvention is becoming a career survival skill. The easiest thing to predict is demographics, and this megatrend has all kinds of implications.
- Trend #1 is Gray Boom. The first wave of baby boomers is hitting 70, and will soon be taking minimum distributions from their IRA accounts. And this is really interesting, because they are not necessarily retiring, and they are not aging in the traditional sense. Boomers are staying more active and engaged than anyone expected. My wife and I like to go mountain biking. When we hit the trails, we see far more active 50 and 60 year olds than we do 20 year olds. If you’ve ever participated in a marathon, you might have seen the same thing. This extended productivity has some surprising implications. Boomers are unintentionally creating a more entrepreneurial culture in the U.S. Because boomers they are staying in positions of authority for far longer than anyone expected, members of GenX are hitting a concrete ceiling in their professional advancement. In many cases, GenXers are leaving the organized workforce for smaller companies where they can obtain greater responsibility. We’ve got a donut hole of organizational knowledge that is going to create big problems when boomers eventually do retire. You’ve got the very experienced, and the very inexperienced, and nothing in between. This is going to create a lot of organizational amnesia in a few years. So, half of all Americans born today will eventually celebrate their 100th birthday. And there are a few implications of this. One implication is that we we’ll all be spending more time during each stage of our life. We are stretching out childhood, adolescence, middle age, and old age. My wife, Stephanie is a physician and she spent the first thirty years of her life in training before she obtained her first job. The irony is while human longevity continues to grow, organizational longevity is declining rapidly…
- Back in the sixties, corporate life expectancy was 50-60 years. By 2010, corporate life expectancy was halved and declining rapidly. Blue chip companies are only listed on the S&P 500 for an average of 10 years before they burn out or get bought out. Meanwhile, the average millennial is expecting to stay with his or her present employer for an average of just 3 years. So, this idea of working for a single organization for the course of your lifetime is pretty much shot. It’s not going to work well if you need to work for 40 years, and your employer is only around for 10. Shift happens. We all need to be ready when shift hits the fan. And we need to redefine retirement.
- Fortune favors the flexible. We are learning how to periodically reinvent ourselves. Reinvention is a basic survival skill. We all get a do-over and get to do something else, sometimes several times in our career. So, we really need to rethink how we do retirement planning. There are terrific tax incentives in place to save money in retirement accounts of various types. Unfortunately, you generally can’t touch these until the age of 59 ½. I’m seeing that people are often financially unprepared for the planned and unplanned transitions that they need to make earlier in their careers. Most people don’t have the flexibility of taking a year or two off without a paycheck in order to go back to school or start their own business, and we all need to prepare better for that.
- The second trend that I’m seeing is a rethinking of career patterns. A career used to be a ladder of opportunities within a single organization. For the post-war generation the concept of “lifetime employment” was a perfectly reasonable expectation. My father worked 33 years at DuPont as a research scientist and spent almost all of that time at a sprawling complex called the Experimental Station. That’s where they did experiments. Most of my friends’ parents had similar careers. Over time, they were gradually promoted and moved up the career ladder. At best, it was a steady progression. At worst, they found their careers stuck in neutral. The Boomers had a somewhat different career trajectory. They still managed to have a single career, but it more closely resembled a trellis than a ladder. After working for an employer for 5-10 years, they might find a better opportunity elsewhere and continue their climb. The successful ones cultivated networks at related businesses and continually found better opportunities for themselves. This is part of the reason why companies have cut back on employee training – they didn’t want to invest time and money to train their future competitors. Professional development is now largely the responsibility of individual employees. In this environment, the ability to learn is something of a survival skill. Education never stops, and the line between working and learning becomes increasingly blurred. The career pattern of today more closely resembles a patchwork crazy quilt, as people attempt to stitch multiple jobs together into something that is flexible and works for them. Sometimes these career elements match, sometimes they don’t. About a third of the workforce is seasonal, part-time, self-employed, or subcontracting. This means that we have a whole lot more people living on a variable income. And it is difficult to manage significant regular fixed expenses when your income is variable. This is part of the reason why so many millennials are putting of the purchase of a car or a house. I like to think of the millennials as the first “post-consumer” generation. They are very skeptical about accumulating debt. They don’t buy cars – they just rent an uber and or zipcar. They ‘re waiting to buy their first house, instead they are living with mom and dad or have roommates. They’ve seen their parents make some gut-wrenching changes when they were laid off from (what they thought were) lifetime jobs, and decided that this wasn’t for them. From a financial perspective, it makes sense to live well within your means, so that you don’t have to worry about making the transition from one career to the next. One of the safest and best investments that you can make is to pay down your mortgage and own the roof over your head. Cutting out mortgage and rental expenses does wonders for your cash flow. We are also starting to see people develop and maintain skill sets in multiple simultaneous careers. One trend that I’m exploring is the idea of hybrid careers. That’s all about being proficient in several complementary professions. For myself, this means being a futurist and financial advisor. I believe that the insights that I get looking at long-term trends helps me to find investment opportunities for my clients and protect against risks that other people aren’t even thinking about. If I was looking for a talent agent, I’d want to find someone with a legal background to help me to negotiate the best contracts. Similarly, it might be really helpful to have a personal trainer who could double a personal chef, or a web designer who could write both code and content. An alternative to this is being able to cultivate or develop team of professionals that are simply great at what they do. Here are some careers that are expected to grow. Software developers may experience 20% annual growth in demand over the next 10 years. Coding school might be a great investment, and often costs far less than a degree in business. We’ve spent the last fifteen years getting 5 billion people on the internet. The next fifteen years are going to be spent getting 50 billion objects on the Internet of Things. We’re going to need more statisticians to make sense of big data. We’ll need engineers to design and build things. And we’re going to need more financial advisors, more physical therapists, and more medical assistants to care of our aging boomers. So, while we are overbuilt in retail, the rest of the service economy is positioned to boom.
- Trend three is what I call the Donut Economy. The most interesting thing about a donut, of course, is that it has a hole in the middle. With the disappearance of the middle class, middle management, and the middleman, our economy now has more holes in it than a box of Dunkin Donuts. When there is a hole in the middle we all live closer to the edge. The 20th century was all about industrialization. The industrial era brought us mass everything. This includes mass production, mass communication, mass consumption. Companies became massive, along with everything else. Everything got very big and very physical.
- In a digital economy, we are experiencing what Buckminster Fuller referred to as ephemeralization. This is our ability to do more and more with less and less until we can do almost anything with virtually nothing.
- In the 1960’s, the largest company in America was AT&T, and employed 1 million people. Today, the largest and most influential phone company in America is Apple, and their employee count is only about 115,000.
- To use another example, Airbnb has an estimated market cap of $20 billion dollars and over 1.5 million rooms, yet officially they employee only 1,600 people. Marriott has the same market valuation, yet employs 120,000. This means that Marriott is employing 75 times as many people for the same market valuation. We are seeing digital companies get the same amount done as their industrial age counterparts with just small fraction of the employees. It means that personal productivity is skyrocketing, and that companies are not only moving faster, but doing so with far fewer people. And this has pros and cons. On one hand, we are seeing a much greater concentration of wealth in the digital era, but on the other hand, we are all learning how to get by on a lot less. You think about the average student now carrying around a lifetime of books, music, and memories in a backpack. My sense is that in the digital age, we are going to learn how to travel lightly. This is the postconsumer generation. We’re going to learn how to get very tough, very creative, very flexible, and very resilient.
- The final big trend that I’ll talk about is automation. This has been around for a while, but it is really speeding up. Let’s look at the investments being made by amazon.
- We’ve all bought stuff through amazon through their website. A few years ago, many of those orders were fulfilled by guys skating around in warehouses on rollerblades. Remember those? More recently, Amazon bought a company called Kiva systems. Kiva makes robots for inventory management, they roam around the warehouse floor and move stacks of shelves without human intervention. The also made a $15m early stage investment in ReThink robotics. This company makes a robot which costs about $30,000, has visual recognition, and the ability to pick and pack things. Finally, Amazon is pushing towards drone-based delivery, and is now has developed more than 20 generations of flying drones. If you look at the pattern here, Amazon is well on its way to becoming a pioneer in completely automated order fulfillment, from shopping online to delivering a package at your door.
- Tracking some of the technology innovations in fast food, there is now something called the Burger Bot, which can serve one freshly made hamburger every 10 seconds. The University of Texas employs a robotic barista (the “Briggo”) that serves coffee to 10,000 students a day. There is also a burrito bot, a pizza bot, and in airports now we are starting to see completely automated convenience stores. The U.S. Department of Labor has classified four different types of jobs that are at risk of automation.
- These include categories of Cognitive vs. Manual, and Routine versus Non-Routine. Jobs that are routine and manual were the first to be automated. These included assembly line work and many domestic chores, such as washing dishes and doing laundry. We still have people doing these things of course, but we just don’t have as many. Another area that has been heavily automated is agriculture. At the turn of the last century, roughly half of all Americans lived on a farm. Today that figure is closer to 2-3%. The next classification of job to become automated will be those that are routine and cognitive.
- So for the first time ever, we are going to see displacement in white collar jobs. This started out with travel agents, but may include telemarketing, accounting, retail sales, real estate agents, investment management, and technical writing. Almost every day, I read finance articles written by robots. They are also already common in sports writing. The point is that artificial intelligence and automation is taking over many traditionally cognitive jobs as well. The jobs that remain will all be nonroutine. We all gotta get really comfortable with being a little uncomfortable. Let’s face it. This is a scary thing. It is what futurists worry about most, not solar flares or bee colony collapse. Not grey goo or nanotechnology. But living with meaning and purpose in a world where there is massive technological displacement. There are two ways to deal with this. The first is to get more comfortable with technology and learn how to use it to your advantage. For decades, computers have been playing chess. But in competitions, what they are finding out is that the best chess players are not computers, and they not humans, but humans working in partnership with computers. It’s about combining creativity with rationality, and intuition with efficiency. If you are in a period of reinvention, it is a great time to bring your technical skills up to speed. The second approach is to hone your skills at simply being human. For the time being, technology is a lousy replacement for the people in your life. When you think about it, we almost all have three things. We have a head, we have a heart, and we have hands.
- In order to be successful, you need to be smart, empathetic, or good with your hands, preferably two out of three. If you are smart and empathetic, you will be tremendously successfully in the professional world. If you are empathetic and good with your hands, you will have plenty of opportunities, too. Now, if you lack social skills but are good with your hands and reasonably smart, people will still put up with you, so there is hope for all of us. What I find most interesting is that computers are teaching us to focus on becoming more human. To connect, to dream, and to share our stories. The future of work is nonroutine, flexible, heartfelt, and creative, and this is something that we can all get excited about.
- So, here are a few suggestions to consider before you embark on your own personal reinvention: The first step is to think about what you can get excited about and what the world really needs (and realize that these sometimes two different things). You should get an understanding of your financial position so that you can reconfigure as needed. We’re talking about tactical financial planning. This could involve positioning your assets for additional income, trimming expenses, and or managing debt. It is a lot easier to refinance your home before you quit your day job. Finally, network before you need it. Friends and family are your new social security. This is also about getting your team together, which might include having a CPA, a business coach, and a good financial advisor. Thanks again for coming today, do we have time for questions? Thank you and best wishes on your own reinvention.