"Individuals need to change their expectations: the age of dependence on employers is going the way of deference to social superiors. People have to come to terms with a world in which the only people they can really rely on are themselves. Reid Hoffman points out a billboard that appeared on the side of Highway 101 in the San Francisco Bay Area proclaiming bluntly: '1,000,000 people overseas can do your job. What makes you so special?' Today's worker need to repeat those words every night before they go to bed and then in the morning when they get up." Id. at 25.
"Inward-bound courses would do wonders for 'thought leadership'. There are good reasons why the business world is so preoccupied by that notion at the moment: the only way to prevent your products from being commodities or your markets from being disrupted is to think further ahead than your competitors. But companies that pose as thought leaders are often 'thought laggards': risk analysts who recycle yesterday's newspapers, and management consultants who champion yesterday's successes just as they are about to go out of business." "The only way to become a real thought leader is to ignore all this noise and listen to a few great thinkers. You will learn far more about leadership from reading Thucydides's hymn to Pericles than you will from a thousand leadership experts. You will learn far more about doing business in China from reading Confucius than by listening to 'culture consultants'. Peter Drucker remained top dog among management gurus for 50 years not because he attended more conferences but because he marinated his mind in great books: for example, he wrote about business alliances with reference to marriage alliances in Jane Austen." Id. at 277.
