CHAPTER 1

Ramping Up to Full-Spectrum Thinking

More Clarity, Less Certainty

SOFT DRINK CANS, HALF OF THEM STILL BOUND TOGETHER with plastic collars, were scattered across a coffee table in the small family room when we arrived in the early afternoon to visit Peter Drucker in his 95th year, about a year before he died in 2005. We were there to talk with the famous management guru1 about the future of work and the human resources function.

I walked into that room with AG Lafley, then the CEO of Procter & Gamble; Dick Antoine, P&G’s head of human resources; and Craig Wynett, a visionary P&G thinker. I felt fortunate to have been invited and was impressed by the fact that the CEO of one of the world’s best companies had flown across the country in his corporate jet to spend the afternoon with this remarkable 94-year-old.

We were told in advance that we would be meeting in a simple setting with no staff support, but Peter Drucker welcomed us warmly to his modest ranch-style house in Claremont, California—just a short walk from the Drucker School of Management at Claremont Graduate University. Peter Drucker was slow in body by that time in his life, but still very active in mind. My brief time with him was mindset altering and has become the anchor story for this book.

He told us that for the first half of your life, you should try many different kinds of work and make it a point to work with many different kinds of people—since you won’t yet know who you are or what you want to become. Try out a spectrum of possibilities, he taught us.

For the second half of life, Drucker said, you should only work on things you are passionate about and only work with people with whom you love to work. Focus is good, he said, but don’t focus too early. Categories of work aren’t necessarily bad, unless they lock you into a categorical cage.

By “first half of life,” since he was approaching 100 years of age at the time and still thinking strong, I took him to mean about 50 years. Now, more than 20 years later, I realize that Peter Drucker was encouraging us to have a full-spectrum mindset about work and life—especially at key milestones. I realize now that he was thinking across all levels of aggregation: individual, organizational, and societal.

Look beyond Binary Choices

Peter Drucker was encouraging us to see beyond the caging and coercion of categories. Try many kinds of work while you are less than 50 years old. Don’t allow people (like your parents or your friends or your professors or your first boss or your company) to categorize you too soon or label you as this or that. Don’t box yourself into a job or a career trajectory that is not a calling for you. Search for a vocation, not just a job.

Many parents I know just assume that their kids will go to college. Many of their kids, however, aren’t so sure. Many young people are not sure what they want to do, they are not sure about the value of a college degree, and they don’t want student loan debt. Stalemated by the binary choice of college or not, a growing number of families are choosing a gap year when a young person can explore. The gap year is a simple example of broader-spectrum thinking.

Parents often have more specific expectations than their kids. My young colleague Gabe Cervantes became my research assistant after graduating from Williams College as a first-generation college student and first-generation American-born (his parents immigrated from Mexico). When he joined me, he had already done a few different things since graduating and was on his way to law school when he decided instead to join Institute for the Future (IFTF) and work on this book with me. His family was shocked: they wanted a lawyer for a son—not a futurist. In fact, they had never heard of a career category called futurist. Gabe had a goal that he had shared with his parents: go to law school and work his way up to the point where he could advise senior executives at corporations. He chose working with me so that he could have the experience of working with top executives sooner, but this was not a path that his parents understood or could even imagine. Gabe may still go to law school, but he wanted a wider experience before making that choice.

Peter Drucker urged those P&G executives to offer their workers many options and assist them in navigating obstacles and choices. Don’t assume that people will follow those career tracks routinely. Encourage people to go off the rails now and again.

Most people do not find a calling early in life. Many people never do find a calling. Many people work for long hours and many years in jobs they don’t even like, let alone love. Drucker himself began as a journalist and had at least six distinct careers in his life. He had definitely found his calling long before we met him that sunny afternoon, but it wasn’t until his mid-60s that he settled down and focused on his true calling.

Just after AG Lafley first became CEO of Procter & Gamble, his first official speech was in Chicago for the P&G alumni network. Up to that point, P&G—a bastion of employment from within—hadn’t even acknowledged the existence of the P&G alumni network. The alumni were often viewed as an annoyance. In that speech, Lafley embraced the alumni as part of the global family of P&G and a powerful network that included both full-time employees and alumni. This message was very well received.

The common wisdom outside P&G was that working even a few years at the company was a terrific resume builder—perhaps equivalent to an MBA. The common wisdom within the company was that employees had to move up or out. P&G promoted from within and rarely recruited senior leaders from the outside. I have worked on projects with P&G since just after I got out of graduate school, but I learned early on in my work with them that when someone left the company, I wasn’t supposed to talk about them anymore. When they left P&G, it seemed to me, it was as if they had died, or at least their lives were somehow diminished because they left the mother ship. AG Lafley changed that feeling.

AG Lafley was very attracted to Drucker’s notion of experimenting widely in life. He told me, when I showed him a draft of this chapter, that he had changed majors every year in college: math to English to French to history. He once invested 47 weeks just to become fluent in Hebrew. He loaded freight cars for the railroad, ran punch presses and riveting machines in a metal fabrication factory, and taught several different courses as a substitute teacher in high school. He didn’t start at P&G until he was 30. In an e-mail to me, AG Lafley reflected back on our afternoon with Peter Drucker: “I believe Drucker was right about not settling, not getting trapped in a category or a career.”

Employment vs. Employability

When he became CEO, Lafley observed that P&G could no longer promise lifelong employment but that the company could and would offer lifelong employability. This was a major shift toward full-spectrum thinking about work and life.

The P&G diaspora of former employees (the “lost children,” as longtime employees sometimes called them with a wink) was finally recognized by the new CEO. P&G is still largely a promote-from-within company, but it is a more inclusive network now. There is a full spectrum of possibilities for how you can work and how you can stay engaged with the P&G community, whether or not you are a full-time employee. Even though I have never been a P&G employee, I feel very much a part of the P&G diaspora.

This giant company has gradually shifted from thinking of P&G employees as either in or out. It is no longer a binary choice. Once people become part of the P&G diaspora in any way, they are in for life.

It seemed like bad news at the time for workers who had hoped for a job for life, but it turns out that—in the long run—it was good news. Being employable for multiple opportunities in life is much better than being locked into a job you don’t like for life. There is now a full spectrum of ways to work with P&G, including the possibility—not a promise—of a full-time job for life. Being associated with P&G is a good thing.

I’ve learned a similar lesson with employees at Institute for the Future. I invest a lot in the young people we bring into the Institute, and I used to find it very painful when they decided to leave. Now, I’ve learned that leaving IFTF doesn’t mean the end, it means the beginning of a new kind of relationship. Sometimes, former full-time employees become clients, and other times they become new kinds of colleagues. I had a limited view of what it meant to be an employee.

Categories limit our vision. Categories coerce. Categories can be cages.

What categories should you be using to describe yourself? What categories do you use to describe others? Over the next decade we will move gradually from rigid categorical to flexible full-spectrum thinking for individuals (yourself and others), organizations of all kinds (including businesses, nonprofits, religious organizations, and governments), and societies. Here are some examples of the broader-spectrum shift that is coming as we ramp up to full-spectrum thinking.

Full-Spectrum Thinking for Individuals

As shown in Table 1.1, each individual is shifting toward multiple identities that will become increasingly important as the next generation of the internet scales globally and virtual identities become as important as in-person identities. Each person will in fact be many different identities at different times and different places.

Adopting an identity for yourself can be an important way to develop community with others. Categorizing is one way to develop an identity and sense of self-worth. For some people, it is also important to categorize who you are not. For many people, their sense of self is defined by a category: I’m Black or I’m a Christian or I’m a Jew or I’m queer or I’m a professor. Identities, however, will become more fluid and multilayered.

TABLE 1.1 Full-Spectrum Thinking for Individuals

Categorizing others is much more problematic and risky. It can be judgmental and demeaning. Gradually, people and institutions are becoming more aware of how they categorize others.

In the past, advertising was often based on segmentation, breaking consumers down into target markets. The consumer of the future, however, will be much harder to categorize. Each person will be multiple identities in mixed virtual and in-person worlds. The consumer of the future won’t even like being called a “consumer,” because that term will be way too passive. Each person will be an identity of multiples. Fortunately, new digital tools will help us think across a continuum of possibilities—not just force people into categories.

Instead of labeling the people who buy their products as “consumers,” companies will call them “people” and will seek to understand the different identities that people adopt actively at different times in their lives. At Walt Disney World and Target, for example, consumers are called “guests.”

Full-Spectrum Thinking for Organizations

How do today’s organizations categorize? How will this range of possibilities change in the future? What types of organization attract you the most?

As Table 1.2 shows, organizational forms will become increasingly fluid.

TABLE 1.2 Full-Spectrum Thinking for Organizations

Rigid hierarchies will still work in slow-moving predictable environments, but that kind of stability will be rare. For most of us, we are in a continuing rotation of being leaders and followers.

Command-and-control hierarchies just don’t work as well in fast-changing unpredictable environments. In Chapter 8, I will discuss how the military has developed more flexible forms of hierarchy that still have clear commander’s intent, but much more flexibility about execution.

People will play multiple roles within these dynamic organizations of the future. Leaders will morph into followers as the projects change, then morph back into leaders again. Organizations will encourage and reward this kind of behavior. The boundaries of the organization will be more porous as people come and go. On special forces teams in the military, for example, people play multiple roles depending on the circumstances, while still applying their areas of expertise in varied ways.

TABLE 1.3 Full-Spectrum Thinking for Societies

Full-Spectrum Thinking about Society

What categories do societies and cultures use to describe their citizens? As diversity increases, demographic categories will break down, with many more people who categorize themselves as “other.” When they are asked if they are members of a church, which used to be an easy question to answer, many people now say that they are “spiritual, but not religious.” Comfortable categories are breaking down, and that makes some people uncomfortable. They want to know who is in and who is out. Table 1.3 shows the direction of change over the next decade.

As migration grows, negative stereotypes will abound and the need for full-spectrum thinking will grow. Some countries and cultures will cling to the comfortable categories of the past, but the future will require full-spectrum thinking and action.

Peter Drucker was a full-spectrum thinker without the digital tools that are now emerging. The tools for full-spectrum thinking will be so much better over the next decade, just as the need for full-spectrum thinking grows. Constraining categories will yield to full-spectrum thinking, but it won’t be an easy shift.

Youthquake is one of the terms I’ve adopted for describing the young people who grew up with digital media and have very high expectations for the world around them. These young people will have the vision and the tools to think across full spectrums of possibility and make the world a better place. After the Parkland shooting in Florida, for example, high school students organized themselves quickly into a national movement for gun control action. These young people cannot be categorized as a cohort; they are way too diverse. They are truly different, but we don’t yet know how different they will be as they become adults.

I write this entire book through the lens of foresight. If you read it now in 2020, full-spectrum thinking will give you an early advantage. Later, full-spectrum thinking will be a prerequisite to success.