5 Key competencies for managers and entrepreneurs

What are the skills needed today for a manager or entrepreneur to be confident in taking their company, their team, to the highest possible level?
And I would also add, what are the skills needed to thrive and survive in this age of tremendous change, which is so fast that it challenges the mental, and physical, level of many people?

In this video I talk about five key skills that are indispensable-from my perspective-to thrive in this age of great change.

The other night I was having dinner with a very dear friend of mine, and long-time customer, a man of established managerial ability and also, by now, of great wisdom-57 years old, my friend Franco. He asks me:

“Luciano, but what do you think is the biggest need that companies have today from a training perspective? And what should managers focus on to train themselves?”

“Franco, it’s very simple – I replied. – today people are dying of information! Yuval Harari in the introduction of his book “Lessons for the 21st Century” states that “in an age flooded with information he who has lucidity has power. So, in my opinion, the number one skill to develop is complexity management.”

Today compared to 15 years ago, we receive 6 to 8 times more information to do our daily activities, in work but also in life. Do you think our brains go through this information surplus phase unscathed? NO! Do you think our brains are more capable of solving complex problems in a short time? NO!

We need to relearn how to govern this information excess.

1. Slow down

What do you do, in short, to manage complexity? First, paradoxically, in a fast-paced world, the first thing to do to manage complexity is to slow down.

If I don’t slow down, I can’t understand the fundamental difference that passes between necessary and unnecessary information, between indispensable and optional actions, between actions that are mandatory and actions that I even don’t have to do, both on a personal level and on an organizational level.
And to understand these things, which are indispensable to governing complexity, I can’t go fast all the time.
I have to know how to slow down, I have to know how to discern, to understand what I have to do to properly approach a strategic problem, a production problem, a business problem.

As the World Economic Forum also states, the complex solving problem is definitely at the top of the skills needed by 2020 to thrive in this equally complex world.

2. Generating Energy

As I hang out in the field with managers, entrepreneurs and people trying to bring their daily tasks home, I realize that energy is as precious as it can be, and it is as easy to lose today.

Very often people get to the end of the day and do not have the capacity to have energy for anything else; they look back and ask themselves, “but what did I do in the previous ten hours?” They feel tired, stressed, and fail to feel clear-headed, and aware, that they have brought home some output, some noteworthy result.
The ability to know how to generate energy for oneself and others is increasingly critical today, and will increasingly be a key skill.

Why? Because the world is going to go faster and faster, information is going to increase more and more, complexity is going to increase more and more, and we human beings are tossed around in this context, pulled from one side to the other, and in which we have not been trained to have energy to cope with the days to the best of our ability, to know how to charge others, to know how to also handle ourselves from all points of view: physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually.

If you want to have the ability to thrive in the years to come, you have to ask yourself, “What can I do to disproportionately increase my energy level?”
Also because working as a manager, and as an entrepreneur, one thing is certain: energy is as contagious as it gets in human groups!
A person who lacks energy infects exactly the opposite: it infects near depression, it infects demotivation, it infects a lowered energy level.
Instead, a person who has energy, who has motivation, who has vision, who has so much to give-both physically, mentally emotionally, and spiritually-is certainly capable of attracting others’ resources around him or her, is capable of becoming authoritative-as he or she needs to be-in order to be highly successful in the business world.

3. Being Agile

You have to be able to move nimbly: which does not mean to run fast like crazy, but it means to be lean, to be light, to have the minimum surplus needed, to have the maximum performance with the minimum cost, with the minimum waste.
Forevery project, for every activity, you have to ask yourself what is the minimum cost needed, the minimum resource needed, the minimum time needed.
And not to go fast, but to be able to move nimbly, without waste, without frills, without bureaucracy, without unnecessary administration, in a world that not only moves fast, but has great of uncertainties.

Previously in business a very simple rule “Big fish eat little fish” applied; today in business another rule “Fast fish come before slow fish” applies.

So, if you want to get ahead of the group of slower, more cumbersome competitors, it’s not that you have to run wild, but you have to get rid of the unnecessary.
You have to get rid, for example, of the desire to do everything and you have to fall in love with the desire to do a few essential things that delight your customers.
You have to get rid of the fact that you have teams with dozens of people, but you have to fall in love with the fact that you have small teams of 3/4 maximum 5 people, very effective, very compact, able to make decisions quickly and without the need to have the controller on duty.

4. Knowing How to Make Decisions

Today it’s all the rage to talk about Big Data Analysis, Industry 4.0-and these are very important concepts-only something peculiar is happening: everyone is racing to collect data, everyone is racing to digitize everyone, they are racing to have a flood of information, managed through PCs, tools and digital devices, but people are becoming more and more unable to make decisions.
On the one hand because it is paralyzed by the enormity of information and data collected, on the other hand because it is hoped-almost-that decisions will be made by PCs and no longer by people!

But let me assure you that there is no digital transformation, or data collection that is capable of replacing humans in making decisions!
Artificial intelligence can, at best, support people in making decisions through the ability to provide projections, data, through doing so-called “business intelligence,” but if you want to have the ability to thrive in this world-and to be even faster than your competitors-your people and yourself must become faster, more capable of making decisions with little information.

Elon Musk is said to be able to make important decisions with at most 70 percent of the information on any subject, and this has made him the great entrepreneur we all know, with all its excesses, and its flaws… but no one can question the greatness of companies like SpaceX or Tesla.

What do I need to do to empower my people to know how to make decisions?
You have to train them! Train them to make decisions, train your people to make decisions.
The ability to make decisions is like a muscle: the fewer decisions you make, the more incapable you are of making decisions.

In companies, decisions are sometimes made only at the top level; we train from the worker to the clerk to the manager to the cadre to make decisions because that is the only way. Maybe some decisions will be flawed, and in that case, let’s train ourselves to be able to change paths quickly, to calibrate, to correct.
But you can’t train this ability if you don’t feed it every day.

5. Loafing

“How?!-you will say to me-we are talking about skills in the world of work and you, Luciano, tell me that I have to learn not to work? “
Yes, we have to learn to work less. Why am I telling you this? Because our brains express the most of themselves under certain conditions.

If our brains are always under tension, in distress, and thus continually stressed — to give answers, to move, to endure, to chase urgencies, to have to react to different tasks without ever having time to stop, without ever having time at times to empty out… well ….it will be difficult for our brains to then be able to evolve to higher levels of cognitive missions.

So today’s manager, and the manager of the future, has to learn–from my point of view–to laze around, to take time daily to empty, because eventually our part of the brain working in the background will grant you unimaginable surprises.

Have you ever had brilliant ideas maybe while taking a shower, while taking a walk in a forest? I think so.
What does this mean? That our brains come to us at the least expected times.

But what happens today? what happens is that we all run, run, run on the hamster wheel, from one side to the other without ever stopping, and in the end we look like little mice in a cage so there is never a moment to stop, a stop to face what is happening in a different way, from a different point of view, changing cognitive level. Einstein said it is impossible to solve problems while remaining at the same cognitive level in which they were created and faced.

If you want to solve problems by changing cognitive level you really have to change the channel, and this becomes a key skill because today the most fashionable phrase is “I don’t have time,” “I don’t have time, I have so many things to do. there is urgency.”
But this paradoxically will become more and more the phrase of mediocre people. Successful people, people who have reached the peak of their performance in all fields, in the sports field, in the arts field, in the business field, in the medical field, are characterized by being able to make time for the important things, for the things that make a difference, in their role in their professional field.

Also in Management if you want to achieve maximum success, it is very important to train yourself to generate time, because this among other things will have a key consequence: by wanting to generate time you will be forced to do the other things in less time; therefore, with more agility, aiming at the essential things without getting lost in the useless, without getting lost in waste that is the opposite of what we are stating.

What things are important to you, what things are important to your company, to your team?
If you do not have of time to think about these concepts, these elements, it will be difficult to think about ferrying yourself, your company, and your team to different levels than they are today.

But to find time you need to train yourself daily to find yourself blank, that is, to be in front of a blank sheet of paper and your pen with a very simple task: what do I want to write on this blank sheet of paper?
And this is an intoxication that, I assure you, very often in business is almost considered a luxury, but the best luxury I can wish you.