Looking back on 2021, Paving the Road for 2022

This episode is the last #5minpodcast of 2021.

This week Ricardo shares five key lessons he learned about 2021 that are paving his way to 2022 and can also help you make a better 2022.

He also made a LinkedIn article with a few things that are keeping him awake at night. You can read it in full at https://rvarg.as/lookingback.

Listen to the podcast to learn more.

Download (13 MB)

Episode transcript

The transcript is generated automatically by Podscribe, Sonix, Otter and other electronic transcription services.

Hello, everyone, welcome to the Five Minutes podcast. Today, it's the last podcast of 2021, and of course, I cannot finish the year trying to look back on 2021 and trying to understand what would be, I would say, the main tip or main advice I would share with you for 2022. And I did this using always one thinking it's what keeps me awake at night when I think and try to understand what happened in these 12 months. And I cannot start in a different way. And I need to say that 2021 was not an easy year. And maybe you specifically had a great year professionally or maybe a great year personally. But for most, for the vast majority of people in the world, it was an exhausting year and with a lot of stress and anxiety, nobody thought just one month ago that Omicron this new COVID variant would reach a new level. Just today, one million people got infected in the world, everywhere, it's happening everywhere. Thanks, God. It's not so dangerous based on what people I would say, the science says, but it's very, very disturbing. And this creates a massive impact not only in public health but in the way people see life, in the way people relate to their jobs and the way companies, are handling that.

We cannot predict, for example, if we will be able to travel in three days from now for the new year. We don't know if the planes will take off if things will change if restrictions will be imposed one more time. So this uncertainty is becoming very, very stressful for everybody. The uncertainty on the job market, the concept of the great resignation that we see people leaving their jobs because, you know, they saw that they don't want that for them, even knowing that they need to find ways of surviving. They are just trying to find a new way and they are trying to say, you know, I don't have too much to lose now with this, and I want to share with you five things that I learned, and these are all my absolutely personal views, OK?

And the first one, it's the level and the degree of unpredictability reached a new level. So if we were thinking that we are facing a scenario full of uncertainty now, it's a new level. There is no single economist, no single futurist or no single magazine that predicted what happened in 2021, in 2021 more people died from COVID than in 2020! Right, where we stop the country and the planet and everything. I'm not saying the U.S. I'm talking in the U.S. and globally, so it's incredible. It's just incredible. So all the damage we see, so this level of if you go back one year and take the most prominent magazines or analysts trying to figure out how 2021 would be with the vaccine and look what happened now? I'm not saying, please, I'm saying that the vaccine was amazing, incredible. But most of the people thought that, oh, these would be enough, and it's not, and it's not. And we know that we need to rethink the way we work. And this brings all of us a new level global supply chain that we saw the massive impact recently, all the impact of last mobility of the workforce. This is all coming to bring us a far more VUCA environment than we thought.

The second one is about working remotely. Working remotely is a double-edged sword. You know, it's amazing. Incredible to wear your pyjamas and work with shorts in your living room. You know, have all this freedom of not having to drive or to make your way to work. However, we don't know how strong and how critical is to be all the time online, all the time in virtual meetings. There is massive damage in our way to see the work because we don't get this. I would say this human connection. Ok, maybe in the future technology will do that. But today, you know, when you see the Zoom screen, it's not. It's not, you know, people have Zoom fatigue today. And another aspect when we go back to work in the office, how it will be. So some people do not want to go back to the office, some people want to go back to the office. Some organizations want people to go back. It will be a dramatic shift and how we will avoid this presence bias for those who decide to work physically while others work remotely will be those working remotely. Will they be perceived as less productive if you compare them with those working physically? This is a big question. Everybody's talking today. If you see the trends at The Economist, you will see this comment and this is something that brings a lot of doubts for companies and for people.

The third one is about online business, influencers making money online. And for me personally, it's an illusion for 99.99 per cent of the people, you know, because we are working now remotely and we always see this huge success cases of someone that got an idea and suddenly is making millions and millions with a disruptive idea working alone at home. Let's go-to data. Out of the almost 40 million YouTube channels, I'm just using YouTube as an example, only 0.002 per cent are this giant YouTube channel is making real money on YouTube. So it's very, very unlikely that this machine of making easy money would work for most of us. And why? I'm saying this because many people love to think about the shortcuts to success. And as I said and I recorded last year on the What Matters series, there is no shortcut for success. Even these huge YouTube channels with millions and millions of subscribers are owners and they are leaders. They work around the clock producing nice content that people. It's absolutely hard work. It's not because technology is in place that the recipe for building a successful business has changed. It has changed the platform. But is it still with a very strong pillar on hard and smart work?

Number for its traditional incumbent companies are bleeding, are bleeding. These are the companies that are suffering most, and it's so interesting because if we go back 30, 40 years, they were the inspiration. You know, these massive large companies they have, I would say all this structure to overcome everything. However, now they are facing huge challenges in the supply chain. They are competing against disruptive business models. They are facing a dramatic challenge to hire new talent because new talent wants to work for a disruptive business model. How do they build a long relationship with these employees? And one example I want to share with you to illustrate that. Recently, a digital bank, a Nubank that is very strong in Brazil and Colombia, did its IPO, and it's now the most valuable bank in Latin America, surpassing ultra-large traditional banks in Brazil. You know, I'm not here to discuss the success of the bank or the fee, but being an incumbent, having a massive legacy became a nightmare for many organizations, and this is something that needs to be revisited if you are part of the incumbent companies.

And last but not least, we are all in a permanent state of transformation. Transformation is everything. There is nothing stable. There is nothing. And everything is a permanent change. Permanent change. There is no sense of stability, and this is something that we need just to learn how to live. And this goes back to my first point. This concept of volatility and uncertainty is, for me, the key topic of 2022. And of course, I don't want to give advice to anyone because I don't feel myself in a position to do that. However, adaptability and your capability to be resilient become key for you. But key. Everything else becomes less relevant than your ability to adapt to these different circumstances. Those who are able to adapt will be far more able to reinvent their work to reinvent their organization instead of trying to fight against the change that is completely out of my control and your control, and on top of that, it's not only to bring this adaptability to us but bring also to our colleagues in the organization and bring mostly for those who are on the weaker side of our society because they will be the ones suffering most. And there is no way you can adapt yourself by destroying the full society. So it's an effort that, for example, companies must undertake to reinvent their business, because what I can tell is that people are afraid, people are afraid about what will. This permanent state of transformation will reach a point where I can see myself as irrelevant. And my answer is yes. But your ability to learn and to adapt will make you relevant forever, and this is the key for us to make 2022 a year with. I would say, less anxiety, more adaptability, more clear eyes for us really to bring a better society next year.

So I wish all of you happy holidays and we will continue together in 2022. But now it's time to really to reflect and prepare ourselves for the new year.

Happy New Year to all of you and see you next week with another Five Minutes podcast.

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