I was horrified, when arranging a job shadowing opportunity for a friend of mine’s son a short while ago, and she remarked to me that the job I had lined up wasn’t a ‘real job’; it got me thinking, what did she have in mind with a ‘real job’ – an accountant, a lawyer, a doctor? Then I realized again how desperately we need to constantly reinvent – starting with our thinking, as this outdated, traditional and narrow view of the world (and in this case, a career) is dangerously myopic and seriously needs to change as we should purposely encourage and develop more self-starters in SA, more risk-takers, more entrepreneurs and innovators, more lofty dreamers and realistic doers…
But guiding and allowing people the freedom to craft their own futures isn’t easy as it necessitates change and reinvention – and a lot of people resist this, for a range of reasons. There is such a large body of work on change but one of the best questions of self-examination that I heard is ‘do you change like a butterfly – slowly and completely transforming into a new shape’ or ‘like a bull – when you hear change, you charge?’.
Innovation will not take place without some sort of Reinvention – a changing state, risking the unknown, constant movement, agility, adaptability and making sense of chaos. And in many cases, even change itself is changing!
Reinvention is urgently needed in so many industries that are stuck in the ways of the past. Looking at the marketing discipline; is the curriculum teaching what is needed for the future, do marketers really understand the power of technology and its application (aside from the buzzwords), can they convincingly explain their ROI, and do they even deserve a seat as the discipline continues to lose functions to other areas of the business (customers, strategy, distribution, digital, etc.)? So, what is marketing’s state of readiness to change and to reinvent – and stop blaming external factors like the iceberg (taken from the Titanic Syndrome that is an exercise to Anticipate, Design and Implement Change).
In so doing, we need to look for the non-obvious opportunities, the constant questioning and seeking – to reinvent in both small, incremental ways as well as bigger, more fundamental ones. Change your perspective on the fact that change rarely happens, that things are mostly stable, that black swans are indeed very rare events – as ongoing and accelerating disruption is all around us and the best thing is to condition yourself and to constantly reinvent for the future you want to live in.
In case you are wondering what job I was referring to at the beginning of this piece – it was to shadow highly-skilled staff at a truly innovative SA facility that manufactures, sells, and races Dakar cars (featured later in this book); I wish that I had someone showing me these career options when I was 16.
Dr. Doug Mattheus is a former marketing executive, where over his 30-year career, he worked on some of SA’s most visible brands, and with his team, headed the marketing for SA’s fastest-growing brand in 2018 with a 48% year-on-year growth (Brand Finance). Today, he is a Business Consultant, Certified Reinvention Practitioner (one of only a few in SA), Authorised Blanchard Channel Partner, Co-host of The DOC & The GURU Podcast and Adjunct Marketing Professor at the Nelson Mandela University.
Some of the examples and references used are with kind permission of Dr. Nadya Zhexembayeva and The Reinvention Academy.
