As a new week begins, I would like to offer my readers a conceptual and contextual approach. Enough of me talking about the markets every single day.
The pandemic has caused us all to take a different look at our business methods at personal, corporate, national, and global level.
On the one hand, there are baby boomers who say, “All you need to do is to know one thing very well, instead of know some things about everything.”, and on the other, there is Gen X and Y, understanding that boomers’ concept is doomed to fail, so trying to develop different sets of skills. And finally, we have Generation Z who believes that none of these efforts will achieve success in the face of rapid change. As a person who worked with different generations, even acted like their supervisor, I have adopted this principle of reconciliation instead of coercion, persuasion instead of giving orders. I am happy I could show that I was right to those who have said for 28 years that this method has failed.
As a matter of fact, the process we are currently in, that we might call contextual fragility, inadequacy or, in harsher words, crash, has begun a long time ago. However, it became even more apparent with the pandemic outbreak.
Here’s a very simple example: The fact that we could watch sports on our mobile phones was a quite comfy experience, after putting up with restricting platforms like television. This experience had showed us that a design’s accessibility is as important as its excellence. It was an important milestone from centralisation to anonymity. I guess I could say, “Smartphones is the ancestor of blockchain and cryptocurrencies”. But we failed to see it because we were blinded by the things that happened over the last two-three decades.
You might find this interesting, but since my 20s, I have avoided steeping myself only in a discipline because I quickly understood the difference between competence and “corporate blindness.” When we place our focus on only one discipline, it is not easy to see mistakes that we do in our career or to accept whether our specialty will be valid in the future as well. So, all my life, I tried to gain experience in music, art, economics, management, and other social sciences and put my experience into practice. This is something I call my survival reflex that I had all my life and it helped me make a living. Let me share with you some things I learned from my experience:
First of all, individuals, social groups, and countries have to get out of their comfort zones so that they can survive, since they might become the victim of this sense of grandeur and extreme comfort. You have to have your inspirational powers alert and alive at all times, because not every inspiration is capable of creating a flawless design. So, we need to try to have more of these rare moments. And this could only be possible by embracing and ensuring proper implementation of justice, freedoms and quality education in all domains of life.
More importantly, you can’t choose the timing sometimes. The timing chooses you. That’s why you need have your interdisciplinary skills readily available when the time comes.
Our arrogance and our egos are two reasons why we are trying to give a new meaning to ourselves today. In a world where the oppressed think they are entitled to oppress others, a world where people give priority to their personal gains over serving the community, we can only develop contextual skills and capabilities by defining ourselves correctly.
“How to overcome the problems?”
In today’s world, countries, political organisations, and international institutions do not recall their founding principles. It is apparent that there is lack of strong and ethical leadership in the world. Today’s leaders are rising by the power of majority, mathematical calculations and they are corrupt and blinded by envy, arrogance, and self-interest. But we all know that a leader must never give up the most basic principles, which are ethical behaviour, rationality, and justice.
So, I have one important advice for young people: You ought to be doing now the right versions of all the things you were once lecturing about. Otherwise, you won’t be convincing at all.
Also, you need to have democratic qualities to achieve contextual strength and become able to make something extraordinary, outstanding, and ground-breaking. When leading others, you have to know that democracy is not a solo performance, it’s a chorus.
Always remember that you are not the only ones who got upset by all these pandemic-related problems, you are not the only ones that are looking to find a solution. A lot of people are experiencing the same things. In democracies, big changes are made by the majority. You don’t need to convince anyone that some things are not right.
But, sadly today, most political leaders are trying to increase their popularity by opposing to something and they are attempting to impose the idea that diversity does not offer us a richness of collective intelligence. So, we need to avoid fatalism and use our minds instead to discard such unhelpful, outdated, and detrimental perspectives.
In short, without having a set of different skills, it’s simply not possible neither to lead a self-sufficient life nor express our contextual power.
The pandemic revealed a very promising trend towards awareness of oppression. People saw with their own eyes how wrong it is to prevent society from having access to art and science, how wrong it is to impose restrictions on people, to oppress them. Now, it can be clearly seen that societies with poor digital infrastructure, outdated human resources practices, incapable of distinguishing between wants and needs are equally incapable of being self-sufficient, and they are also suffering financial bottlenecks both at individual, corporate and national level.
So, what we need to do is to ask ourselves “What should we not do?” instead of “What should we do?” As a scientist and author of numerous books, my ultimate goal is to help you not make the mistakes we made.
