David Brooks beat me to the punch again. I had half finished a blog on Geoff Colvin’s fascinating new book, “Humans Are Underrated,” planning to finish it in the next couple weeks. But no, he reviewed it in a superb column, “The New Romantics,” emphasizing business’ return to the importance of the relational. Still, there’s a lot more to be said about Colvin’s seminal work.
Colvin emphasizes that most business tasks are relational (i.e. conversational). Ironically, technological forces are actually driving the need for relational or conversational skills. Case in point: tech project managers are essentially conversationalists. (They don’t code and for that matter don’t need to know how to code. They just need to understand coding and what it can do. But they’re responsible for making certain those development jobs get done well and on time.) Recently I checked out project management positions available just in the city of Minneapolis. Linkedin surfaced 801 openings in a couple seconds. A friend of mine, recruiting for a staff augmentation firm, told me that a good tech project manager in Minneapolis can get up to $140-$150,000.
Reframing the competition with computing.
Colvin’s point is that trying to figure out what computers can’t do and getting an education to fill that need is wrongheaded. The driving question is...