I recently read some excellent questions to reflect on work (professional life). I’ll try to answer them. If you do likewise, see if they help you as much as it did me.
What would you work on even if you weren’t paid? Mentoring. Paying it forward for people earlier in their careers, trying to get into this line of work. I also help out (pro-bono) in an anti-human trafficking (missing persons) group.
Did you learn a hard lesson this year? Plenty. Don’t undervalue or underprice your experience and expertise; it’s not a competitive strength; it’s a sign of weakness. If you put out free (valuable) content, few people will value it (except your competitors, who will devour it 😖).
When have you done the right thing, even though it cost time, money, or reputation? Turning down work for a major social media platform that fails to create proper safeguards to protect children. The fee they proposed would have paid for my mortgage for two years.
Which rules did you follow, break, or re-write? Follow - Focus on daily habits when motivation and inspiration are elusive (particularly challenging earlier this year when a loved one passed). Break - The unwritten rule that too many professions cling to: We must make what we do seem complex to justify our existence (or costs). Re-write - How we assess risk. How we do it currently is all wrong and leads to overstatement of unlikely events and underestimation of the things that actually kill success.
What values do you share with your clients/stakeholders? Many of the organisations I now work with are SMEs. The values vary, but a common point would be disruption, especially cutting through the conventional BS in our industries.
How would you answer those questions? They might help align and focus on areas needing tightening or expansion for 2024.
Outsourcing risks, an extreme example
To encourage nuclear disarmament during the Cold War, the US agreed to buy uranium (enriched for peaceful purposes) from Russia. That severely impaired the domestic US uranium enrichment industry.
Fast forward to now, and the US is paying Putin’s nuclear agency approximately $1 billion annually. It’s not just the US; plenty of other Western states are similarly struck.
On a smaller scale, I recently spoke to an organisation that has invested heavily in Israeli tech firms (many are world-leading). Now, they face questions from antsy coastal investor types worried about boycotts.
I’m not commenting on the conflict but merely pointing out that almost all firms I deal with don’t consider political risk, geopolitics, or conflict when deciding to outsource or invest. You should. But it doesn’t have to be complicated. I use six questions that quickly triage political risk. Much like the packing image above, it’s all about knowing where you’re going, when, how, with whom, to do what, and why.