WHY ADAPTABILITY IS THE NEW REALITY ?

WHY ADAPTABILITY IS THE NEW REALITY ?

   January 13, 2018       Hardik Gandhi

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It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change -Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin theory states, 'Survival of the Fittest’, which means that the fit survives till the end.

If we do not adapt changes prevailing in our life, we might not be able to survive Irrespective of our HIGH IQ and EQ…

Adaptability is the ability of an individual to respond to his changing environment, it shows the ability to learn & improve from experiences.

By being adaptable, we can easily survive, adopt new changes, learn new skills, gain practical knowledge, and be successful in our work. In many organizations, logic is the only rule, where emotions does not have any role to play….

Adaptive quotient(AQ) individual can offer a practical path to solving problems, they have the capacity to handle changes and are open to new ideas.
They take on new challenges at a shorter notice and deal with changing priorities. But if, an individual is intellectually intelligent it means, his/her knowledge is limited to only a particular part of his/her skill. It’s not a complete measure of a person’s worth. It indicates only one limited type of ability.

I’m ready to play a bet …that adaptability quotient (AQ) will soon become the primary indicator of success, with IQ and EQ both taking a backseat to how quickly we’re able to keep up with constant changing world.

EQ & IQ are important, but it’s only two legs of the stool. What I Learnt by Reading Books of great People is both IQ and EQ are not fixed properties, but rather can be developed through dedication and hard work. I guess…AQ works similarly — some of us are born with higher AQ potential, but each of us can work to alter it over the lifetime. We can see example around us like We all have that friend who dislikes changes and another friend who thrives on the new experiences. This leads me to suspect that we are already subliminally aware that AQ exists and that it has variance, but we’re not talking about it. Furthermore, we don’t have a hardcore way to test or improve it.

The reason I say So is because when I used Google to search for “adaptability quotient” …. I received short Inc article written by the leader of a change-management consulting firm, along with a 2011 Harvard Business Review article titled “Adaptability: The New Competitive Advantage” (worth a read). Beyond those, other are useless…

Adaptation gives an opportunity to grow. It gives us more experience. We are living in the age of technology, where everything is changing. It does not matter how much we try to get used to things, every new day will bring a new challenge.

Creative Destruction

According to Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson the reason nations fail or succeed is political institutions. They theorize that there are two kinds — “extractive” institutions in which a “small” group of individuals do their best to exploit the rest of the population, and “inclusive” institutions in which “many” people are included in the process of governing.

The reason that inclusive states are far more successful than extractive ones is Creative Destruction.
It means challenging vested interests to develop a better way of doing things. It means replacing the old with the new, new sectors attract resources from old ones, new firms takes business from established ones, new technologies make existing skills and machines obsolete.

Here is a Real Life Example for Creative Destruction…
Fortune 500 firms 1955 v. 2016: Only 12% remain, thanks to the creative destruction that fuels economic prosperity

Image Courtesy : Mark.J.Perry

Here is the Complete Coverage

Fortune 500 firms 1955 v. 2016: Only 12% remain, thanks to the creative destruction that fuels…
What do the companies in these three groups have in common? Group A: American Motors, Brown Shoe, Studebaker, Collins…www.aei.org

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Some Real life Examples to explain It Even better

Basically it is All About High AQ vs Low AQ…

1) NOKIA vs Apple AND Android

Let’s take two cases...

First case where Apple was designing iPhone and Second case where Nokia was selling half a billion phones each year.

Google bought a company called Android and announced an Open Handset Alliance, a grouping of industry players who would come together to build an open source OS for smartphones. Nokia was invited to join but refused to demean itself.

Soon after Apple launched an Apps Store that began to take off, attracting tens of thousands of developers, and then customers.

Within two years of these events Nokia was already in crisis.
In 2007, Nokia had a market capitalization of €110 billion; by May 2012 this had fallen to €14.8 billion. Those figures illustrate the extent of the decline over 5 years, years in which Apple and Android came to dominate smartphones.Nokia/Symbian also launched an Apps Store, Horizon, now happily forgotten, and after six months it had the sum total of 60 apps in it.

And Nokia launched its own Apps and Content store – Ovi, in 2009. But Nokia had no real platform experience to compare with Apple’s. The platform was shaky and it tried to launch simultaneously in 35 countries – because that’s what dominant players do. It was a disaster and the tech press called it out as such. Nokia was faced with a gale of criticism for the first time.

2) RYAN DAHL— Creator of Node.js and Now a AI & ML Researcher at Google Brain

Ryan Presenting the Original Node.js Paper

Dahl grew up in San Diego, California. His mother got an Apple 2C when he was six years old, one of his first experiences with technology. Ryan attended community college in San Diego and later transferred into UCSD where he studied mathematics. He went on to attend grad school for Mathematics at the University of Rochester where he studied algebraic topology, which he once found “very abstract and beautiful” for a couple of years but later got bored of it because “it was not so applicable to real life.”

Once he realized that he did not want to be a mathematician for the rest of his life, he dropped out of the PhD program and bought a one-way ticket to South America and lived there for a year, where he found a job as a web developer. He worked on a Ruby on Rails website for a snowboard company

Ryan Got into JavaScript Development around 2007–2008 , The Hottest topic for the season during that time for JavaScript plus ASync I/O. Coming From a Non Software Background , It was Difficult for Him to achieve Wonders in Computer science.. He Taught Himself Every bit of Programming and Slowly and Steadily Developed a Programming Language Named Node.js which is one of the Most Popular Programming Languages.

Image Courtesy : indeed.com

Ryan Did not Stop , After Spending Years with the Node Community , He Decided to Step away from the Node Project and Join The AI & ML Revolution. He got into Google as a Software Engineer and Started Working on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning .

This is Inspiring as Ryan being a Non Computer science grad Adapted to Industry Trends to gain Success…

This is an Example of How People Have adapted to changes even if Their Previous Background Did not Support that.This is an Example of HIGH AQ.

A Short Interview with Ryan Dahl :

Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js - Mapping The Journey
Ryan Dahl is a Software Engineer working at Google Brain. He is the creator of Node.js, JavaScript runtime built on…www.mappingthejourney.com

3) Sweden vs Rest of the World

The New York Times published a fascinating article last week on Robots and How Sweden Differ on thier Views.One of the Swedes interviewed is Mika Perrson, a remote mine operator testing self-driving vehicles to replace truck drivers.Below is the Link :-

The Robots Are Coming, and Sweden Is Fine
Eighty percent of Swedes express positive views about robots and artificial intelligence, according to a survey this…www.nytimes.com

“Mr. Persson, 35, sits in front of four computer screens, one displaying the loader he steers as it lifts freshly blasted rock containing silver, zinc and lead. If he were down in the mine shaft operating the loader manually, he would be inhaling dust and exhaust fumes. Instead, he reclines in an office chair while using a joystick to control the machine.” — New York Times

Persson and the nation on the whole do not fear the automation of existing jobs because of strong social safety nets — the government provides health care and free education, plus employers finance extensive job training programs.

According to the Swedish minister for employment and integration, “The jobs disappear, and then we train people for new jobs. We won’t protect jobs. But we will protect workers” (NYT). Furthermore, unions in Sweden “generally embrace automation as a competitive advantage that makes jobs more secure” (NYT). I think Sweden would receive an extraordinarily high AQ score.

Contrast Sweden with the Rest of the World, however, and I become deeply concerned about us. In Most of the countries, the healthcare system is dependent on our employers, so “losing a job can trigger a descent to catastrophic depths. It makes workers reluctant to leave jobs to forge potentially more lucrative careers.”.

With this mindset, it’s no wonder that 80% of “Americans were ‘worried’ about a future in which robots and computers substitute for humans”(Pew Research survey in the NYT) as compared to the “80% of Swedish Population that express positive views about robots and artificial intelligence, according to a survey this year by the European Commission” (NYT).

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Conclusion

Above Examples are enough to convince me that we might be well on our way toward a future High AQ being the Most important Factor :-

In a macro sense, I think Three things are likely to happen:

1. We will certainly agree that adaptability is an important indicator for future success and we need a metric for it — AQ.
2. A sizable industry will emerge to boost our AQ ..
3. A good Mix of EQ , IQ and AQ is Required for Long Term Success.