Shaping The Future

The widespread belief that tech-savvy, educated millennials are well positioned to handle the challenges of the fourth industrial revolution is unfounded. It does not fully grasp the reality of a flux society, where relevant technological skills and knowledge are continuously changing: no one is permanently tech-savvy. Millennials, like other generations, face the challenge of needing to continually reskill. This has compounded their struggle to begin their careers at a point when there is no longer any guarantee of lifetime employment or retirement at a set age. Shaping the Futures of Work is a timely sociological exploration of the impact of technological innovations on employment. Nilanjan Raghunath proposes that stakeholders such as states, enterprises, and citizens hold equally important roles in ensuring that people can adapt, innovate, and thrive within conditions of flux. A promising model focuses on collaboration and proactive governance. While good governance includes citizen engagement, proactive governance goes one step further, creating inclusive policies, roadmaps, and infrastructure for social and economic progress. This book reveals that lifelong learning and adaptability are imperative, even for well-educated professionals. Using Singapore and Singaporean millennials as a case study, Raghunath examines proactive governance and delivers research and analysis to elucidate career trajectories, pointing to a work ethic that aims to engage with technological futures. Looking at local and global sociological literature to confirm the need for proactive governance, Shaping the Futures of Work suggests that Singaporean millennials – and professionals around the world – need to better prepare themselves for flux, risk, failure, and reinvention for career mobility.

This book focuses on developing an understanding of the complex interplay of forces acting on individual universities and higher education systems to enable leaders and practitioners to take purposeful and strategic action. It explores the challenging landscape of higher education and the pressures that are reshaping the university as a societal institution, describing the complex interplay of technological, sociological, political and economic forces driving change. The issues analysed are global in scope, reflecting the diversity of contexts, but also the common nature of the challenges facing institutions individually and collectively. The analysis draws on the lessons learnt and evidence from over fifty organisational case studies undertaken by the author over the past decade, exploring organisational change in higher education institutions in New Zealand, Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom, and on his engagement as president of the ACODE organisation with colleagues responsible for learning technological change in Australasia. The book helps institutions respond to technological change purposefully, in ways that build upon a clear understanding of the complex nature of the existing institution, its students and the organisational context.

Too often Indigenous peoples have been portrayed as being without a future, destined either to disappear or assimilate into settler society. This book asserts quite the opposite: Indigenous peoples are not in any sense “out of time” in our contemporary world. Shaping the Future on Haida Gwaii shows how Indigenous peoples in Canada not only continue to have a future, but are at work building many different futures – for themselves and for their non-Indigenous neighbours. Through the experiences of the Haida First Nation, this book explores these possible futures in detail, demonstrating how Haida ways of thinking about time, mobility, and political leadership are at the heart of contemporary strategies for addressing the dilemmas that come with life under settler colonialism.

A leading thinker on Canada's place in the world contends that our country's greatest untapped resource may be the three million Canadians who don't live here. Entrepreneurs, educators, humanitarians: an entire province's worth of Canadian citizens live outside Canada. Some will return, others won't. But what they all share is the ability, and often the desire, to export Canadian values to a world sorely in need of them. And to act as ambassadors for Canada in industries and societies where diplomatic efforts find little traction. Surely a country with people as diverse as Canada's ought to plug itself into every corner of the globe. We don't, and sometimes not even when our expats are eager to help. Failing to put this desire to work, contends bestselling author and longtime foreign correspondent John Stackhouse, is a grave error for a small country whose voice is getting lost behind developing nations of rapidly increasing influence. The soft power we once boasted is getting softer, but we have an unparalleled resource, if we choose to use it. To ensure Canada's place in the world, Stackhouse argues in Planet Canada, we need this exceptional province of expats and their special claim on the twenty-first century.

This book provides a clear roadmap for the roles workers and leaders in business, labor, education, and government must play in building a new social contract for all to prosper. It is a call to action for a collaborative effort to develop both high-quality jobs and strong, successful businesses while simultaneously overcoming the deep social and economic divisions that are all too apparent in society today. Written by two leading and trusted experts in the field of employment and work from MIT and Cornell University, this book is a practical, action-oriented guide. Readers will feel empowered to take actions needed to shape a better future of work for themselves, their employees, their co-workers, and others they may represent. It emphasizes the need to fix America's broken social contract and reimagine a new one. The most important message of this book is that we have the ability to shape the work of the future by harnessing the power of new technologies. The book is essential reading for business executives, labor leaders and workforce advocates, government policy makers, politicians, and anyone who is interested in using emerging knowledge and technologies to drive innovation, creating high-quality jobs, and shaping a more broadly shared prosperity.

The true heroes of transformation within organizations are not just CEOs, but managers who create energy, gain alignment, and solidify the will within the company to turn the strategic vision into reality. Shaping the Future provides how-to guidance -- plus examples based on interviews with executives from companies like Boeing, Microsoft, Rockwell-Collins, and Harley-Davidson -- to help businesses create a strong future. Rethinking many classic assumptions about change, Shaping the Future emphasizes the importance of making a single, critical change -- the strategic imperative -- rather than many smaller ones. The book presents a practical and unique Transformational Model, consisting of five key steps necessary to overcome resistance and effect large-scale change within an organization. Demonstrating an exciting new approach to an ever-more critical challenge, Shaping the Future provides thoughtful and tested guidance for true change leaders.

The Future Is in a Seed You are the one who shapes your future! No matter how you’ve lived up until now, your past cannot derail your future because God’s potential lives in you! In Shaping Your Future, author and teacher Barry Bennett explains that God has entrusted each of us with the ability to grow our own future...

Shaping the Future of Work lays out a comprehensive strategy for changing the course the American economy and employment system have been on for the past 30 years. The goal is to create more productive businesses that also provide good jobs and careers and by doing so build a more inclusive economy and broadly shared prosperity. This will require workers to acquire new sources of bargaining power and for business, labor, government, and educators to work together to meet the challenges and opportunities facing the next generation workforce. The book reviews what worked well for average workers, families, and the economy during the era of the post-World War II Social Contract, why that contract broke down, and how, working together, we can build a new social contract suitable to today's economy and workforce. The ideas presented here come from direct engagement with next generation workers who participated in a MIT online course devoted to the future of work and from the author's 40 years of research and active involvement with business, government, and labor leaders over how to foster innovations in workplace practices and policies.