From this month’s HR News and Views:

Part I: The knowledge worker of today; the new capitalist!

The biggest challenge for knowledge workers; a word first coined by Peter Drucker is to stay relevant. Knowledge, unlike skills makes itself obsolete and changes very rapidly.

The knowledge we start with when starting our careers is not adequate for a fifty years work span! It will become increasingly important to reinvent ourselves, find ways of staying relevant, keeping our interests and energies high and continuing to be effective. As Drucker says, “If you haven’t learned how to learn, you’ll have a hard time. Knowing how to learn is partly curiosity. But it’s also a discipline.”

The following guidelines are some of the ways in which he believes Knowledge workers can continue to be effective executives; a characteristic that is very learnable.

“I have not come across a single ‘natural’: an executive who was born effective. All the effective ones had to learn how to be effective. And all of them then had to practice effectiveness until it became a habit. Effectiveness can be learned - and also it has to be learned.”

To read the complete issue, click
here

Two different and interesting ways that Banks are experimenting to reach out to customers:

It is likely that retirement ages will increase in the near future. Peter F. Drucker had this to say about it, “we will have to raise retirement age, to 75 or even higher. For another, the nature of retirement will change. Expect people in the next century to phase in and out of retirement. And why not? They will be in better shape than 75 year olds of this era, and will have great job mobility from having worked in many positions and places in their careers.”

• Deepa