You probably know them, those people who go to the same office, every day, every single day, for 40 years, and bless them, they’ve done a great job. They have built something that is called the corporate world.

But the corporate world is changing, it’s changing dramatically. It’s changing because different people come to the office. It’s changing because some people do not go to the office anymore, but they work from home, and even some people work at home. They together form a community – a very different community – that is corporate life in 2007. How will corporate life be 10 years from now? Probably substantially different.

If you measure good and successful companies, you see three things. First of all, they understand change, and they understand that change means getting different people, from different backgrounds and different experiences into the same organisation to [and] change that organisation.

The second thing that they understand is the need to innovate, and innovation means being very close to your customers. [And] Customers are very diverse, and therefore they need to get input from a very diverse force from within their own company.

And the third thing that they do understand is that it’s all about talent.

So if you look to business life in general, things are changing dramatically. Understanding that talent will make the difference means that people will need to recalibrate the [word], definition of success. What is the definition of success? How do you create an environment in which people can thrive, in an environment which is stimulating, and in an environment which invites new ideas and new concepts?

Well it’s a different headquarters today than it was five years ago, and my prediction is, it will be a different headquarters 10 years from now.

First of all, we have to look to globalisation. That entered a new phase. The old globalisation is best described as the Starbucks in the Forbidden City: a successful formula, just put into a different cultural environment. And guess what? People loved it. You get your Samsung TV in the rest of the world, but it’s still a very Korean company. You get your Starbucks in the Forbidden City, still a very American company. And of course, we have our examples at home. If I look to BT, BT was a very UK company – very proud of that – but at the same time, what we did, is we took our concepts and brought them unchanged into different markets.

Now, that will change. It will change because there is something happening in the world. Knowledge becomes a universal set of currency. Knowledge becomes digitised and therefore, you know what? You can fold it in, into different sources of knowledge, you can work together. You can even work together without physical proximity. You can work together from wherever you are. And therefore, companies and corporations have the choice to let the best work together with the best, and that means, it’s now global sourcing. Where do I find the best talent, and how do I inspire the best talent to work with other best talents, is the name of the game. Many of those best talents do live in the UK, and we should be very proud of them. Many other talents live somewhere [else] in the world and we should incorporate it [them] in what we do because it will make our businesses more competitive, and more attractive for everybody who wants to buy from them.

And at the same time we need to realise, we have to change how we are going to be attractive to the talent. The talent from today has no passport, no gender, no age: talent is simply talent. So an open mind is all you need. You need the willingness to see what a talent is, and use it. You need the willingness to see where talent is, and attract it and retain it. Not, probably, in the classical office. Not, probably, in the classical thing[s] that we call HQ. But somewhere in the organisation, to inspire them, and motivate them, and empower them.

Now in that world, people will make choices. They will make choices to deliver, to deliver value to organisations, to focus on how long they want to deliver value and to focus on what for them the value is. And those answers will be very very different than what we have seen in the past. They will vary. Which means that we have to accommodate a workforce that has total[ly] different criteria of success than we had in the past. And they will be individual criteria. So, after years of focusing on innovational [innovative] technology, and after years of understanding that that is not simply enough, but that you need business models to accommodate innovation, the third leg, innovation 3.0, is social innovation. If we get so many talented people available, if we develop them by better education and motivation, we need to incorporate them in a way that is not one size fits all. We need to understand that if we want to be successful we need their creativity, we need their passion, we need their commitment. But we need it in a way that most of all fits them. They may be sitting in other parts of the world, or next door. They may be people we have in our organisations already for years, or brand new people. What will happen is, that we have to rethink how we create the value in our own organisations. Technology has made many things available to us. It has blurred the borderlines between sectors of the industry. It is a fantastic opportunity, and a big threat at the same time. But at the end of it, it’s all about people, it’s all about talent. And the way we deal with them, the one size fits all versus the accommodation of individual needs and desires, will determine the good and the not so good corporations. It will determine success, not just for an individual company, but also for a sector, and probably for a market or a nation.

Now the UK has been wildly successful in adapting [to] change. Just simply look to how London has developed over the last 30 or 40 years. It’s a phenomenal success. And it is the acceptance and embracement of change that has made it happen. But this is more profound. This comes very close to home. This is about how we as organisations are willing to look in the mirror and say, although we like what we see, we are going to do it different. Different in all aspects of how we organise ourselves, and how we reward and recognise talent. That is an interesting journey, and we all have to participate.

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