Shouldn’t we rather be stimulating debate about how to reskill repeatedly?

How should we understand the concept of a 3 yr degree when the knowledge taught in yr 1 may be out of date by yr 3?

How do we fund the continous reskilling?

How do we support people during the intermittent reskilling?

How do we organize all of this?

Won’t our sense of security come from a collective agreement that we committed to a sense of security of each and everyone of us but that to achieve that security we may have to have continous public debate about where to invest and how to cover losses when we jump the wrong way?

This effectively dealt with how to exploit the executive whose main MO is to do only that which is most likely to save his own skin.

Boylan approached this from the perspective of a company outsider seeking to communicate with a key executive, but it almost certainly applies to internal situations also.

His hypothesis is that executives under pressure and feeling insecure don’t care so much about being right, but they are certainly petrified about being wrong.

Essentially Boylan claims they feel it’s safer to say “no” to incoming ideas (read ‘YOU’ and/or ‘change’) as in the extreme they might feel they can never be wrong if they simply zap all incoming new ideas.

There may be a little more to this simplistic claim, with communication overload playing some role, and more involved and complex mechanics at work as one might expect with most human behaviours.

However, it seems communications directed towards target executives that play up on their fears of being wrong, can achieve greater penetration than those which don’t harness this powerful emotion.

Boylan’s book talks about creating a ‘circle of leverage’ whereby you let several key executives in your target firm know you have notified other executives in the same company, and letting them all know you have an incoming new idea.

Furthermore, you also set about informing them of their competitor companies you are also approaching with this idea.. of course you’re sophisticated and subtle with all of these communications that are now flying around, but you create ‘mass awareness’ and put your target under the microscope.

The intent is to trigger your target from an ‘I must not respond’ state to a ‘must respond’ (and often quickly) out of fear of loss, and the possibility that they could be making a widely perceived mistake.

The above is only a microcosm of the entire workforce, but from an individual psychological perspective perhaps there is not a great difference between the public and private sectors, and how insecurity may stymie an individual’s performance.

From a number of perspectives there could be wide-ranging ramifications for both organisations and individuals, all hinging around perceived job insecurity, individual risk perception, and communications.

I’ll leave the UK macroeconomic analysis of this to the economists, although I have fond memories of this from my time at UMIST – it’s not as much in my area of self-interest these days. After a little hopping around Europe & Asia I’m now resident in the US and looking to penetrate some of the largest companies on the planet, while still doing my bit to decrease the UK’s balance of trade deficit!