March 6, 2023
The six skills managers will need for the future of work
Conversations around how work and leadership will change in the coming years have inevitably been accelerated by the pandemic. Companies all over the world have been urged to seek new digital tools, solutions and methods for communicating, making decisions, and activating projects remotely. The companies that emerged most successfully from the Covid era were those that, despite all the uncertainty at the time, decided to adapt and view the pandemic as an opportunity for change rather than an obstacle. When it comes to the future of work, we need new guidelines for building change-ready and vulnerable leadership. More →
The past year and a half should have served as a reminder of that tragic, unchangeable feature of the human condition, best expressed by Kierkegaard, that we are doomed to live our lives forwards but only understand them backwards. Retrospect is particularly important when we look back on sudden, large changes that knock us off our normal path. A taxonomy of change has emerged in recent years to describe such events. The best known is the ‘Black Swan’, coined and popularised by Nassim Taleb as things that “seem to us, on the basis of our limited experience, to be impossible” but which happen anyway, have a major impact and are often rationalised later. 
At the 1983 International Design Conference in Aspen, Steve Jobs delivered a speech addressing the theme of the conference; The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be. In it he set out his thoughts on new technology, intuitive design, personal computing as well as the need for a constantly evolving idea of what the future will look like, including the future of work. 
Even as we begin to glimpse the light at the end of the tunnel of the pandemic, evidence suggests that many workers want to carry over the working flexibility that the pandemic afforded into the post-pandemic world and a new future of work. Namely, employees are wanting to adopt a ‘mixed’ working style – spending time both working in the workplace, 
Although the term ‘metaverse’ was coined in 1992 by science fiction novelist Neal Stephenson, it has only just entered the mainstream lexicon after 
Ricoh UK has published a report called 
While the move to flexible and hybrid working is widely accepted by businesses, their preparedness to implement such a strategy is not yet fully realised. That is the key finding of 
May 16, 2023
Getting back to the future of work
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Flexible working