From WSJ’s “The New Ways to Thrive at Work Now, According to Adam Grant”
WSJ: This is a tricky moment for white-collar professionals. What’s the issue?
Grant: Great careers used to hinge on ability, and now they depend on agility. The past was basically: Become a subject matter expert, define what you’re better at than everybody else and then that is essentially how you make yourself rare and valuable.
WSJ: And now?
Grant: The expertise you have today may be obsolete tomorrow. Pre-AI, what was rewarded and valued and promoted was how much information you had in your head; we’re now in an environment where information is a commodity. So the differentiating skill set or capability is: Can you recognize patterns? Can you synthesize lots of disparate pieces of information? Can you figure out what perspectives are credible and which ones aren’t? All of that is a long way of saying that human judgment is going to supersede human expertise.
Grant: What I don’t think AI will be able to crack anytime soon is the hard work of synthesizing information into a compelling framework that is memorable, that rings true with human experience, that resonates emotionally, that’s sticky, that is pithy.