Learning

In 2018, I went scuba diving in Indonesia with my then 80-year-old dad. One morning before our first dive, I took an online longevity quiz that said I’d likely live to 98-years-old. I asked my dad how long he thought he’d live. He mused for a moment, and then to my great surprise, said, “98!” What’s miraculous about that is...

Want to see what massive change looks like? Check out the table below, which depicts how economic power has evolved in the U.S. from an industrial to a high-tech economy. No surprise, right? What is a surprise is how little we are prepared for that change. How does learning keep up? More accurately, where do people repurpose themselves to keep up with the changing times? “Life-long learning” may be a trendy phrase, but they’re hollow words without a home.

A wise person can distill down the essence of a business or a person’s mastery. Long ago, we created an exercise in my boutique hotel company, Joie de Vivre, in which we asked management theorist Peter Drucker’s favorite question, “What business are we in?” five times in sets of dyads (you sit two people facing each other). The value of this repeating question meant the answerer, who couldn’t repeat an answer, needed to act like a miner in digging deeper into what’s their core differentiator. This approach led us to discover...