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Build a Better Future by Becoming More Flexible

In planning their businesses and careers, many people make the mistake of believing that the future will be almost exactly like the past. Applying 20-20 hindsight, they carefully prepare to avoid repeating mistakes that others have made.

Unfortunately, optimizing a solution to deal with past conditions often leaves them totally vulnerable when new conditions emerge.

Here's an example of this kind of thinking. In consumer products, very few new offerings succeed in gaining enough consumer acceptance to be profitable.

Not wanting to launch unsuccessful new products, Procter & Gamble (P&G) used 20-20 hindsight to conclude that rigorous market testing by offering new products initially in a medium-sized city was a good way to avoid big failures.

That approach worked well for many decades, allowing P&G to outperform those who didn't do such rigorous pre-launch evaluations.

Unfortunately, P&G eventually had difficulty in testing its new products. Competitors learned that poor results in such geographically limited test would lead P&G to delay introducing a new offering.

As a result, competitors would hit test markets with huge amounts of advertising, free samples, coupons, trade discounts, and new offerings that would never be used against a full-scale product introduction.

As a result P&G's tests often failed, even for products that were ready to be successfully launched.

After two decades of slowed progress with new products due to such opposition, Procter & Gamble learned that its test-marketing program needed to be changed.

By making more extensive introductions following good research results without test markets, Procter & Gamble became much more successful in offering its innovations.

In the field of corporate strategy, being more flexible has been taken a step further: The most effective companies set their strategies based on the assumption that future conditions cannot be predicted and are likely to be much different from the past.

As a result, the most effective companies often sketch out a number of very extreme scenarios and identify strategies that will leave the organization much better off under any imaginable circumstance.

Naturally, these organizations still have to be agile in adapting to unanticipated changes when they occur. As an example, I'm sure that few companies considered strategies for dealing with the kind of worldwide credit crisis that emerged in the summer of 2008.

Even as the credit crisis was occurring, its eventual shape was unclear. Being fast on your feet was critical.

This corporate lesson applies to individual careers: The jobs that people prepared for while young may not be around by mid-career . . . or even next year. What will preparation for a flexible, successful career look like?

I recently corresponded with Dr. Dietrich Roeben, a 2004 Ph.D. graduate of Rushmore University, to find out what conclusions he has drawn from his success in moving across different management fields and countries in agile fashion to engage in fascinating new challenges.

Let me tell you a little about Dr. Roeben. He grew up in rural northern Germany where he enjoyed many of the outdoor activities that continue to bring him happiness.

After earning a technical undergraduate degree in Industrial Engineering and Management at TU Berlin, he graduated with an MBA degree at the University of Derby in the UK.

He next gained the equivalent of a Master of Science degree at his alma mater, TU Berlin. Four years later, he was admitted as a member of the Chartered Institute of Management (UK).

By building strong technical and management skills, Dr. Roeben ensured that he could fill a much wider variety of roles than people with only technical or management training.

That gave him a major advantage at the beginning of his career, an advantage that has continued to provide benefits.

Many German graduates intend to spend their careers working for export-oriented companies in Germany. Dr. Roeben took a different path: He exported himself and began working for a number of non-German companies in locations outside Germany.

These assignments took him as far afield as Nigeria. Naturally, it didn't hurt in making these moves that Dr. Roeben is fluent in four languages (German, English, French, and Dutch).

By diversifying his cultural and language skills, he became even more valuable to potential employers.

While succeeding in these initial assignments, Dr. Roeben took as many courses as possible to gain more insights into his field and new industries.

In the process, he tested his learning by writing papers sharing his observations about the subjects that interest him.

These continuing education efforts helped make him aware of new trends and conditions that he and his employers needed to address. The papers also raised his visibility and credibility with potential employers.

The post-graduate learning and writing whet his appetite to write a doctoral dissertation about the strategic aspects of operations management. Unfortunately, he found that prospective employers didn't want to provide him with any flexibility at work to allow for doctoral studies.

Taking a traditional full-time job, he decided to work on his doctorate while commuting and traveling, during the evenings, and on weekends.

During his doctoral program, he sought the career counsel of a friend who worked in recruitment for a large company. She reported that her company was looking for people who would be flexible and freely admit that only the next 12 months can be planned with any certainty.

That advice provided quite a jolt to Dr. Roeben because despite his career flexibility he was used to thinking in terms of continuity in his business planning!

Here are the conclusions he drew:

"Within the last decade the speed of corporate change has increased to levels that only a few employees can cope with. Careers that have been well planned end when once reputable companies can't pay their bills anymore.

"Once 'safe' jobs in previously stable industries are not safe anymore. I assume the person who can deal with these changes is the previously mentioned flexible person operating in an organization with a one-year planning horizon."

If he wanted to work flexibly in locales around the world, it didn't make sense to enroll in a Ph.D. program that had to be done in a specific location.

As a result, he chose an online program where he could have access to top professors online to advise him without needing to meet with them face-to-face.

Dr. Roeben was happily surprised by increasing his flexibility in ways that he didn't expect after starting his doctoral studies.

Improved time management was the first new flexibility he gained: He learned that he could engage in his doctoral studies anywhere . . . on a train, on a plane, or sitting in a park near home.

Although sitting at a quiet desk is more productive than mobile studying, he learned that you can still get a lot accomplished wherever you are.

The second lesson was that technology could help him get more done. Loath to drag around a laptop computer during his extensive travels, Dr. Roeben discovered that a handheld PC was extremely helpful for taking notes, organizing his thinking, and writing.

Finding that this method helped his Ph.D. studies also led him to begin using the handheld PC for his business work.

Discovering that a more focused work style felt comfortable, Dr. Roeben began to yearn for opportunities to become an entrepreneur where he could move faster than in his big-company roles.

He also developed a desire to teach and plans to make both activities priorities. Expanding his experience and skills in those dimensions would give him even more career possibilities.

After earning his Ph.D. from Rushmore, Dr. Roeben realized that complacency is an enemy that has to be continually addressed: "We need to question the way we do things more often."

Keeping his newly found focus, he quickly turned his dissertation into a management book, Planning and Controlling the Outsourcing and Maintenance of Technical Services (Books on Demand, GmbH, 2005).

In addition, he worked at two different jobs, one in Europe and one in the Middle East, that have given him the chance to develop new knowledge and skills. As a result, he has published papers that draw on these new experiences.

He is also looking for an opportunity to gain a teaching university appointment while holding down his day jobs.

What will the future hold for Dr. Roeben? Only time will tell, but his sensitivity to overcoming complacency, anticipating the need to change, focused work style, continual learning, and ability to make good use of technology will serve him well.

I wouldn't be surprised to find him earning another doctorate in a different discipline.

What are the lessons for you? You prepare for your career differently. In doing so, you should assume:

1. you won't be working for your current employer a year from now.

2. you won't be doing your current type of work five years from now.

3. that your best job opportunities are not in the country where you live now.

4. that you need to learn new skills that you haven't been introduced to yet.

5. that your job prospects will depend on your becoming a world-class authority in some important area that you don't yet know about.

I wish you well as you begin to increase your flexibility to gain from these new perspectives.

Donald W. Mitchell is a professor at Rushmore University, an online school, where he teaches how to create flexible strategies for businesses and nonprofit organizations. For more information about ways to engage in fruitful lifelong learning at Rushmore to increase your effectiveness and improve your career, visit www.rushmore.edu

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