SKILL 4—INTRINSICALLY DIRECTED

This skill is the ability to manage one's own career and life. Two forces come together to drive the need for training in this skill set. First, the demand to do more with less means that people will be much more independent in their work. It is not cost-efficient to have supervisory ratios like we've had in the past. Workers need to know how to super­vise themselves.

Second, in the new world of global competition, there is a new employment paradigm. Some people have called it a new social con­tract. People cannot count on doing the same job for most of their ca­reer. They can't rely on lifetime employment or climbing the ladder with the help of some mentor. Big companies lay off thousands of workers every day. Huge mergers change the job picture regularly. We now change companies, change jobs, even change careers, with in­creasing frequency. It will be easy to get lost, to drift through such a world. The workforce needs to be taught how to define a course for themselves through these troubled waters and stay on it even as the winds are constantly shifting.

The skill set required to deal with both these forces is basically the same. Our people need to be taught to set goals for themselves, de­velop plans to achieve those goals, and measure progress against their plan. Combined with this, they need to know how to maximize their productivity, how to manage their time, and how to stay organized.

In support of attribute 3, human resource responsiveness, we need to teach the NOW how to identify what matters most and how to set specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, timely (SMART) goals to achieve the most critical requirements. They must be given the skills to put personal plans in place to achieve those goals through training on basic plan/project management techniques. Then they need to be taught how to execute those plans by prioritizing their daily activities and working on the critical few instead of the trivial many. Basic time management techniques should be included as well.

SKILL 5—INNOVATIVE INTELLIGENCE

Innovative intelligence is the ability to demonstrate creativity. As we empower our workforce to solve issues as they arise, to invent new processes and even products as needs are identified, we will rely on the creativity of our entire workforce as never before. It can no longer be the job of just the engineers or staff experts to improve product and process. Improvement becomes the job of every employee, and the NGW will have to be trained to be able to respond.

Management needs to know how to foster and respond to creativ­ity. People need to know how to analyze problems and to apply critical thinking processes and analysis techniques. They need to understand the systems engineering approach to the development of solutions so their changes fit in to the overall company processes. People need to know how to think in new ways, how to develop creative responses to new demands, and how to be productively creative to stay ahead of the competition.

The first part of developing creative solutions is to understand the issues. We should teach the classic analysis tools like pareto charts, fishbone diagrams, control charts, and brainstorming. Once the issue is understood at the level of facts and data, then we can teach people to invent creative solutions. We can teach people about barriers to creative thinking, and how to overcome them. We should explain the four roles of the creative thinker: explorer, artist, judge, and warrior. Training on cognitive functioning will help people understand different thinking styles and when to apply specific thinking styles.

Successful development of this skill will help us develop attributes number 3, human resource responsiveness, and number 4, global mar­ket responsiveness.

SKILL 6—PROCESS ORIENTATION

This skill is the ability to improve any and all processes. One of the biggest shifts for a successful global competitor is the shift from func­tional or departmental thinking to process thinking. Functional think­ing causes people to think about their job, their department. When judg­ing the merit of a new way of doing something, they think about the impact on themselves. This causes suboptimization and territorial in­fighting. Process thinking helps people understand how potential im­provements affect the company as a whole.

We need to ensure that everyone from top to bottom understands what we mean by a process: the conversion of input to output by ap­plying value. The NGW must be intimately familiar with process map­ping. A picture is still worth.... The NGW must understand various types of process-mapping techniques and when to apply them. Mea­surement is the key to any improvement. Measure the wrong thing or in an imprecise way and you may work at improving the wrong area.

Attribute 2, physical facility and equipment responsiveness, is ob­tained by teaching the basics of process improvement: process thinking, process understanding, process mapping, process measurement, and pro­cess redesign. We need to teach our workforce specific methods in each of these areas, combining classic tools like the plan-do-check-act cycle, benchmarking, and SWOT analysis with cutting-edge techniques for process reengineering and designing performance metrics.

SKILL 7—COLLABORATIVE OUTLOOK

This skill is the ability to work in teams. We have to react fast as cus­tomer demands are identified. There is no longer time to wait to run everything up the management chain or to get new ideas and strategies approved by a large bureaucracy. We have to move now, or the oppor­tunity may be lost. Empowered teams, who know their processes and how they relate to the overall operation allow a company to be much more responsive. Additionally, we can no longer compete as an island. Varying customer requirements will require collaboration across sev­eral enterprises, even with competitors. Today's competitor is tomorrow's teammate. The prime contractor on one contract will be a sub on the next.

Waving a magic wand and saying you are now a team does not create a team-centered workforce. Management must determine such things as why go to teams, what is the composition of the teams, are they cross-functional or departmental based. Management must de­cide what authority the teams have. How will the teams be measured and rewarded? What about individual performers within the teams? Lastly management must decide what happens to management in a team-based organization. What authority does management retain for itself? All this must be clearly spelled out in advance creating the teams.

After management has defined the expectations and limits on the teams, people will have to be taught things like stages of team devel­opment—storming, forming, norming, performing; team roles—team leader, scribe, and process observer. Consensus decision-making is a new and critical skill that teams will have to be taught.

We need to teach people the tools and skills required to success­fully implement and work in self-directed work teams and cross-enter­prise partnerships. This skill will develop attribute number 5, teaming as a core competency.

The key to successfully competing in the rapidly changing world is the attainment of the attributes identified in the first section of this paper. We have to be faster, better, and smarter then the competition. The company can only be faster, better, and smarter by the creation of a highly skilled, motivated workforce, a Next-Generation Workforce. An integrated set of skills is the key to the creation of a Next-Genera­tion Workforce. The existing workforce can only be turned into an NGW by providing an integrated set of training designed to work together to provide the required skills.