The Ability To Evolve: Build These Business Skills For the 2030s

The rise of e-commerce in the late 1990s and early 2000s ushered in a major shift in consumer shopping habits and revolutionized retail. 

As more people began shopping online, brick-and-mortar chains struggled to keep pace with the demand for internet retail. Many were unable to effectively adapt their business models for the digital age.

Walmart stands out for having the foresight and agility to evolve despite initially being built for big-box stores. As early as 1999, Walmart launched an e-commerce site while many questioned if the internet was just a passing fad. 

The company made strategic acquisitions of existing online brands like Bonobos, ModCloth and Moosejaw, enhancing Walmart’s web capabilities. It leveraged its network of physical stores to enhance logistics for online ordering, in-store and curbside pickup, and merchandise returns.

Today, Walmart has successfully integrated robust omnichannel e-commerce functionalities with in-person shopping. 

The moves it made early on to expand online while its core model still thrived enabled Walmart to get ahead and withstand the industry sea change. It’s now positioned as an e-commerce leader while many brick-and-mortar counterparts closed their doors.

This demonstrates how being attuned to where a market is heading and proactively evolving, even amid current success, can ensure businesses remain relevant in times of change. It’s about long-term vision and staying strategically adaptable.

Being attuned to where a market is heading and proactively evolving, even amid current success, can ensure businesses remain relevant in times of change.

With developments in technology, remote work, AI, and economic shifts, the landscape 10 years from now will likely look very different than it does today.

To stay competitive in your career and become a valued leader in the future workforce, it pays to be proactive. Identifying key business skills to build up now will better position you to navigate what’s ahead.

Digital Fluency

As we continue moving toward a more digital and tech-integrated reality across industries, sharpening your digital skills will be essential for career resilience.

 From leveraging data analytics software to managing remote teams via digital tools, get comfortable with the latest programs and apps across multiple domains.

Specifically, prioritize building capabilities in the following areas:

• Cloud-based collaboration platforms: As remote and hybrid work becomes more prevalent, ensure you can navigate popular cloud-based collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams, Google Workspace, Zoom, and Slack with ease. Know how to organize teams, launch meetings, share documents, manage tasks, and message securely on these platforms.
• Data and analytics software: Data is invaluable for making strategic decisions. Develop fluency with data analytics programs like Excel, SQL, Tableau, Looker, and Power BI to extract and analyze insights from company data. Learn to interpret trends and create visualizations to convey data narratives.
• CRM and sales software: Key programs like Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho, and Oracle enable businesses to organize customer data and optimize front-end sales processes. Get hands-on practice with CRM tools to understand lead generation, pipeline tracking, account management, forecasting reports, and other sales functions powered by these platforms.
• Project management software: Platforms like Asana, Trello, Smartsheet, and Basecamp are ubiquitous in tracking and managing workflows. Master essential features for task organization, Kanban boards, Gantt charts, timelines, resource allocation, collaboration, and more offered through these tools.

Prioritizing these key categories of digital skills will significantly ramp up your business capabilities over the next decade across roles and teams. Consistently look for opportunities to upskill as new technologies and feature enhancements emerge.

Data Literacy

As data becomes an increasingly vital asset for business strategy and operations, data literacy will be an enormously valuable skill set. Understanding how to extract and apply insights from data enables better decision-making, cost optimizations, forecasting models, and more.

Some specific areas to develop include:

• Identifying trends and patterns: Practice regularly working with datasets of company metrics, operational data, financials etc. Analyze changes over set timeframes and look for meaningful variations or anomalies that constitute trends and patterns within complex data.
• Data visualization and presentation: Once meaningful conclusions have been drawn from analyses, focus on developing visualizations like charts, graphs and dashboards to bring numbers to life. Use compelling visuals and clear narrative structures suited to different audiences when presenting data stories and recommendations.
• Statistical analysis proficiency: Become fluent with both simple and complex statistical analyses – learn to calculate ratios, percentages, models and metrics like ROI, lift, revenue attribution etc. Deepen proficiency with statistical software like Excel, SQL, SPSS, Tableau and more depending on need.
• Contextualizing data insights: Data shouldn’t drive decisions in isolation – it requires human contextualization aligned to business goals. Work on tying conclusions from data back to department objectives, current realities, domain expertise perspectives etc. Learn to frame data narratives to different leaders in terms they care about.

Prioritizing expanded data literacy will enable you to derive value from the explosion of data across systems. It unlocks game-changing insights that boost revenue, decrease costs, streamline operations, improve products, and reduce risk through evidence-backed planning.

Hybrid People Management

As more companies embrace hybrid working models blending on-site and remote staff, managing these blended teams requires a nuanced leadership approach. Understanding how to effectively connect, motivate, collaborate with and lead hybrid teams distributed across locations will be a vital skill over the next decade.

Some areas for development include:

• Communication norms: Establish clear guidelines for communication cadence and channels suited to distributed teams. This may encompass daily check-ins, weekly one-on-ones, messaging norms, virtual meeting etiquette and more.
• Inclusion focus: Special care must be taken to prevent remote team members from feeling isolated. Institute tactics to foster inclusivity like circulating team updates, creating spaces for casual connection, and gathering distributed groups for virtual social events.
• Goal transparency: Without in-person visibility, hybrid team members risk misalignment. Managers must overcommunicate bigger picture goals and maintain alignment through frequent progress check-ins.
• Recognition across locations: Make sure accomplishments and contributions get full acknowledgment regardless of staff location. Implement online spaces for cross-location peer recognition.
• Equitable team processes: Review processes with an eye for inadvertent location bias – ensure parity of experience across meeting schedules, access to resources, project/skill development opportunities etc.

Getting ahead of challenges unique to hybrid management will be essential. Nurture cohesion, motivation and productivity across distributed groups by honing these leadership capabilities now.

Cross-Functional Knowledge

As businesses shift away from strict siloed roles toward more collaborative and agile ways of working, having knowledge beyond your immediate function or domain will be tremendously advantageous. Understanding how different disciplines intersect and how work flows between departments adds context that powers more innovative solutions.

Some best practices include:

• Know the customer journey: Strive to comprehend crucial touchpoints between customers and various teams like sales, account management, marketing, product experience etc. Recognize how subpar handoffs across groups impact customer satisfaction and retention.
• Shadow cross-functional partners: Ask to observe or get temporarily embedded with peer roles in other business units. A week spent with the product, data science, finance or operations squad can work wonders for demystifying their priorities and processes.
• Spearhead knowledge exchange forums: Use brown bag lunches, internal newsletters etc. to spotlight different team mandates and share learnings between groups. Highlight ways they can better collaborate toward collective goals.
• Reskill and expand scope: As feasible, actively seek out skills development in complementary business domains outside your primary role. Having working knowledge in multiple areas makes you a Swiss army knife team member able to tackle problems with multifaceted thinking.

Cross-functional knowledge expands your context for how business objectives translate across the organization, not just your team. Bringing that helicopter view and ability to speak other disciplines’ languages compounds creativity, cohesion, and solutions.

The Future Calls – Will You Answer?

The business world 10 years from now will likely seem unfamiliar and full of innovation compared to that of today. 

Wild cards like economic shifts, technology disruptions, climate impacts, and changing workplace dynamics make the terrain hard to predict.

Time-tested business principles of personal contact and customer service will never go out of style. 

But along with those, leaders who actively build future-proof skills like digital fluency, data literacy, hybrid management dexterity, and cross-functional prowess will steer their careers and companies to the forefront.

Begin identifying developmental areas that excite you. Seek out courses, training, job rotations and projects to steadily build those capabilities over time. 

Lean into opportunities that stretch your experience across functions. Bring fresh perspectives to your leadership approach as remote work habits stick. 

And never stop learning – make it a lifelong quest to satiate your curiosity with the richness the future holds.

The next decade promises to challenge us in new ways as business professionals. 

By embracing a growth mindset focused on key skills needed ahead, we can all play an active role in shaping what’s next in the world of tomorrow.