The work you do matters.
To your team.
To your family.
To your customers.
To the world.
1.
Meta Skills That Help Us Adapt To A Fast-Changing World
In 2020, we all learned firsthand just how crucial it is for leaders and businesses to adapt quickly.
And we won’t know what tomorrow’s challenge will be, but we can know that we have what it takes to tackle it.
That’s why we believe in mastering “meta skills”—skills that help us adapt, rather than rules that break when the world changes. Skills that we can apply in all areas of our work and lives—not just today’s current challenge.
We’re talking about skills that help us process information critically, that help us solve problems more cleverly, that help us think before we react, and that help us approach confrontation and complexity with intellectual humility, emotional intelligence, and wisdom.
2.
Innovation Skills That Help Us Think & Work Smarter Than Before
A wise man once said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking that created them.”
To that, we might add, “We cannot solve tomorrow’s problems with the same thinking that solved yesterday’s different problems.”
So if we’re going to solve the problems of tomorrow and build a brighter future for our teams, our families, our customers, and the world we have to learn to think like innovators.
Skills for lateral thinking and innovative problem-solving aren’t just for hackers and inventors. Our teams and families and customers—and the world—need us to wield them.
3.
Human Skills That Help Us Bring Out The Best In People
The most unnecessary problems in the workplace—and the world—are a result of people thinking differently than one another.
And yet, every great innovation in human history was the result of different people combining their ideas, pushing one another to get better, or standing on the shoulders of thinkers who came before.
So instead of avoiding our differences, or learning to deal with our differences, what if we learned to appreciate and even harness our differences?
It takes human skills to work together with people of diverse personalities, backgrounds, perspectives, and ideas. Skills for communicating and presenting and including and solving problems with emotional intelligence. Skills of productive confrontation and depersonalization, healthy debate, culture-building, micro-inclusion, and more.
These are the skills that will make us smarter than the smartest of one of us.