Lynda Gratton: Everyone needs three posses

The need to build deep knowledge

Much of general management today is about shallow skills and capabilities - knowing a little about lots of things. This however is a precarious position to be in in the current and emerging business and global landscape. General managers should therefore be focusing on continuous skills and capabilities development to ensure their continued relevance and ability to add value in their environments.

General managers' value (to their companies and communities) in future will be based on three sorts of networks:
1. The posse - or the people who you can contact for wise advice and guidance. People to whom you have easy access, who know you and your situation well enough to enable them to quickly disburse the advice and guidance about general matters;
2. The "big ideas" crowd - completely different from the posse of close advisors/mentors, these are individuals who come up with ideas and initiatives beyond the current boundaries of your current environment/awareness/understanding;
3. The regenerative community - if we look at the likely fragmentation of work and how it is becoming more virtual, how families are breaking up, the greater mobility of workers, people are likely to necome increasingly insular (and lonely) and one therefore seeks to put in place communities that regenerate the cohesion, vibrancy and stability

In order to overcome the challenges and potentially disruptive impact of the envisaged fragmentation, a number of reponses are proposed:

1.Build deep mastery - build intellectual capital that will facilitate ongoing relevance through unique and value-adding skills sets and capabilities
2. Build real networks - build social capital that will enable the ability to develop networks and to collaborate with people beyond current/familiar networks
3. Build real relationships (local and extended) - build emotional capital to ensure the ability to overcome the issues and challenges associated with fragementation.

Fragmentation - losing the ability to reflect on matters as managers (and people in general) are increasingly connected and interconnected. This results in a practice/reality of continuous action/engagement in the ongoing activities, issues and challenges, rather than allowing the time to reflecct on events, the status quo, new information and new learnings. As a result of this fragementation, there is a risk that we are losing/will lose the capacity to develop deep understanding - we therefore run the risk "dumbing-down", which in turn increases the risk of obsolescence and replacement by "automation".