Future-proofing 2

I've heard nothing further following a meeting ten days ago when I was asked to guarantee the validity of my current thinking for a period of 10+ years.  At the time I made no promises and I'm still happy that I took that option.

Right now I'm finding that people who should have a 12-18 month focus (ie sales managers) are making sage predictions about their needs in 2018.  Perhaps it's because the spectre of the billions wasted in obsolete IT investments has gotten into the water supply and in these straitened times waste is unforgivable.

Most of my pharma clients have an annual staff turnover within the team of about 15%.  Anything under that makes you a genius sales manager.  So even if you're very, very good at staff retention you'll still have no more than 1 in 5 of your team members in ten years.  Any investment in training needs to account for this as well as the fact that the individuals within the team will change and grow as well.  And one of the quickest ways to raise that turnover is to insist that intelligent, productive people undertake useless training that vaguely promises to address a need that may or may not arise over the next decade.

I'm not suggesting that an organisation doesn't need a ten-year horizon but it also needs a one-year one.