The 10 Key Business Survival Skills for Today

Technology is now assuming mental tasks, just as it assumed manual tasks during the agricultural and industrial revolutions. Back then, people who were displaced could move up to knowhow work. But what's left to move up to when knowhow-savvy systems encroach on our turf?

What's left is a subset of mental functions, those that people inherently do better than machines and that aren't likely to be automated any time soon. Success in a world that "runs on automatic" will hinge on getting really good at --

1. Symbolism (agile word and number manipulation)
2. Observation (seeing what's there; perception, with motor control)
3. Creativity (innovation, dreaming up new things)
4. Decision making (choosing rationally between possibilities)
5. Planning (determining what is to happen and when, and anticipating problems)
6. Action (having the guts to "just do it," come what may)
7. Emotional adjustment (managing emotions; venting bad ones and facilitating good ones)
8. Discovery (analyzing to find why things went wrong, or why they are as they are)
9. Social skills (getting along, managing, leading, following, collaborating)
10. Responsibility (assuming stewardship for self, family, company, community, county, world)

These 10 things are very hard to automate because they all hinge on being self-consciously alive. That is, with these "hyper-human" traits, you must not only be conscious but know you're conscious. It is this meta-consciousness that gives us the power to be in charge. We can then do things on purpose, based on values -- a uniquely human capability.

These 10 skills form the foundation of the emerging very human economy. (See my article in the Sept/Oct, 2004, issue of The Futurist: "How to Succeed in the Hyper-Human Economy." See also "Top 10 Forecasts from Outlook 2005" from the World Future Society.)