Best Opening Story for Digital Upskilling Program
In the last few months, I have been involved in Digital Upskilling Program, a program mandated by the company’s leadership team to transform the mindset and the way of working the employees in all lines of business.
This program is a huge task and responsibility, especially when everyone is so new to what the digital way of working means for a 90-year-old company this year where the traditional way of working has been the life and blood for so many years.
So, how do we approach this? We survey the line of business where digital upskilling will have the most impact initially. That means our front line or salesman. For this survey, we discuss and conclude five things that should be taught to the frontliners. One of them includes data analytics. The curriculum of upskilling is partly influenced by the book Digital Mindset.
Not only was the curriculum influenced by the Digital Mindset book, but when we launched the program to a broader audience, we use the book’s opening story to the program’s opening story. And I, as an audience member, was amazed and influenced by the passion when my colleague re-told the story. And I decided to buy the book, to read the remarkable story.
“Sara Menker,” my colleague, starts the story with this name like she is his long-lost friend. I sometimes imagine we are old friends, and he is telling me the good old days about Sara Menker while he is smoking a cigarette.
“Sara Menker is an energy commodities trader in New York”.
Now, I know she is not his friend because he has yet to visit New York. My colleague then continue with the story of Sara Menker.
In the summer of 2008, she (Sara Menker) was watching the financial market collapse. She was working at Morgan Stanley at that time. She knew from the numbers running across her screen the end was coming. Next to her desk, her friend has his hand in his face. “The world’s coming to an end,” he said. “This is Armageddon. We better start buying up gold.”
“What are you going to do with all that gold if the world’s economies collapse?” Sara blurted out. “Forget gold. Buy a sack of potatoes! You need potatoes. We’ll all need potatoes”.
And I know you must be thinking, POTATOES? Why POTATOES when the financial industry is collapsing? This is where the story gets interesting.
My colleague continued the story, pretending he was Sara Menker’s best buddy. Sara thought that people wouldn’t just lose money when the market crumbled. The impact could be catastrophic, and the whole financial system that supports agriculture, including crop insurance, won’t be able to finance the production of food. People won’t be able to eat and government may fall.
Growing up in Ethiopia, a country with a history of catastrophic famine, she knows firsthand the value of food security in ways that many people in developed work, her friend in New York, will never understand. So, she started her quest to understand the economy of agriculture and build an AI company that ingested 40 million unique agricultural data sets and amassed more than 500 trillion data points. This data collection is necessary because the agriculture industry is so complex and interconnected. What happened with the coffee production in Brazil can impact the coffee production in Vietnam.
“She built a company called Gro Intelligence. This story shows the importance of Digital Mindset. Every company now is a digital company. Including our company. We collect data from every facetof our operation. And Digital Mindset is very important for the Digital Upskilling Program.”
Amazing story right? And here is the word he always utter by the end of the launch.
“To be able to work effectively in Digital age, do we need to know all the computer programming, data science and other detailed technical requirement? The answer is no. The Digital Mindset book uses a term called “The 30 Percent Rule”. That means, we do not need to know everything, we only need to know 30% of the knowledge to be proficient in digital skill and economy.”
“And that is the aim of our Digital Upskilling Program, to equip you with the 30% of the skill.”
The audience amazed, clapped their hands and influenced by his passion.
