Re-inventing Ourselves

I've spoken to about five different friends in related businesses over the past few months who all had essentially the same thing to say, they all said they were looking to "re-invent" themselves in an attempt to make their businesses more lucrative and to just get more business in general.

I've spent a lot of time contemplating that buzzword, re-invent. Inferred by that word is a recognition that what it is that you are doing or have been doing, is no longer working for you. It isn't providing you with the income and or satisfaction that you desire from it. After you realize what you have been doing isn't working, where do you start to make changes and how do you know in what direction you might go? Most of all, what do you keep and what do you "throw out"?

First, I think we have to define the problem we all seem to be having.

A lot of us are mid to late career professionals who have slowly found our skills becoming obsolete, as technology marches on, replacing hard won skills with computer hardware and software that can do what we spent years learning how to do. These computers can do it cheaper and faster and yes, better than we ever could. Some of us adjusted to this technological onslaught by simply adopting the new computer based tools just as fast as we could, attempting to stay ahead of the pack, adding value where a human was still necessary. In my field humans are always necessary because it is about visual communication and creativity, so far no one has developed a computer that can originate human creativity.

Then came the cheaper humans. All while computers got faster, cheaper and more powerful the Internet also made the world a whole lot smaller so it became almost as easy to hire a human operator half a globe away as one next door. In countries like India, whole businesses cropped up that did a good job of bridging the cultural divide that made Americans more attractive creative workers. We all know the rest of this story, we're expensive people to hire in comparison to other people around the globe. So what do we do, how do we re-invent against this kind of two pronged attack on our ability to make a living? Historically, Americans have dealt with cheap labor and technological obsolesce by marching up the value chain. By abandoning those jobs that have effectively become commodities and branching out into fields that require more; more risk, more education, more capital.

Unfortunately most of us chose the "more risk" route to making more money. It clearly worked out for some, but backfired for the country as a whole. The "more capital" route has also been pretty heavily exploited by the larger companies. So that leaves the "more education" route. I don't necessarily think quanity is as important as more specialized education. We need skills for the current and future workforce. The education we got 30 years ago isn't going to cut it. I know, I don't like the idea of going back to school either but what choice do we have? I can't see myself working in some dead-end retail job like the scores of the middle aged people, desperate for any kind of work who have been slowly replacing younger entry level workers in the past decade. I want to at least use some of the skills I acquired over 35 years of running my own business.

So back to school I'll go.