Work Different: 10 Truths for Winning in the People Age
Kate Bravery, Ilya Bonic, and Kai Anderson
Wiley (November 2023)

“People won’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” Theodore Roosevelt

More than fifty years ago, Alvin Toffler offered this prediction in his classic work, Future Shock (1970): “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” The business world today is more volatile, more uncertain, more volatile, and more complex than at any prior time I can recall.  This is probably what Kate Bravery, Ilya Bonic, and Kai Anderson have in mind when noting that leaders in companies such as Apple, Pepsico, Medtronic, and Marsh McLennan have preached that “the wisest long-game play has been to protect employees (and, for that matter, society) during this unprecedented time. They saw it as necessary to secure the future of their firms.”

At one time, Southwest Airlines was more profitable and had greater cap value than did its nine largest competitors COMBINED. When its then chairman and CEO, Herb Kelleher, was asked to explain the airline’s success, this was his reply: “We take great care of our people, they take great care of our customers, and our customers take great care of our shareholders.”

We are now in what Bravery, Bonic, and Anderson characterize as the People Age, “a brave new world built around human-centric values, a world full of opportunities and challenges in service of advancing prosperity for all. Navigating unchartered territory requires accepting and adopting to new truths, as many of the old rules and accepted practices no longer apply. Today, [begin italics] business as usual [endf italics] is anything [begin italics] but [end italics] usual, and that’s not a bad thing.”

It is no coincidence that companies annually ranked among those highly admired and best to work for are also annually ranked among those most profitable in their industry segment. However different they may be in most respects, all of these companies have a people-centric workplace culture. That said, it must be added that they hire people who can — as Toffler suggests — “learn, unlearn, and relearn” but also have qualities of character that earn and retain respect and trust. In the healthiest organizations, people think and behave in terms of first-person PLURAL pronouns.

In 2024, change will continue to be the only constant. Kate Bravery, Ilya Bonic, and Kai Anderson focus on ten new or recent “truths” and devote a separate chapter to each.  All are worthy of careful consideration. However, it would be a fool’s errand to attempt to act on every “truth” at full strength or at the same time. Each reader must determine which of the material is most relevant to the current and imminent needs of their organization. Also, keep this African proverb in mind: “If you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together.”

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Here are two other suggestions to keep in mind while reading Work Different: Highlight key passages, and, record your comments, questions, action steps (preferably with deadlines), page references, and lessons you have learned as well as your responses to key points posed within the narrative. Pay special attention to the end-of-chapter Calls to Action (CTAs)  as well as the material in the two appendices.

These two simple tactics — highlighting and documenting — will facilitate, indeed expedite frequent reviews of key material later.