Getting to What's Next™

The number

Up to 60% of jobs in advanced economies have tasks AI will significantly reshape. The half-life of a professional skill has fallen from 8 to 12 years to roughly 4, and is heading for 2 to 5 by 2030.

IMF, 2024 · Gartner, 2025

What it's doing

It's rarely a robot taking your chair. It's the thing you're expert in quietly losing value while you keep getting better at it. Expertise has a shelf life now, and nobody sends the memo.

The number

Half of children born in developed countries today are projected to reach 100. A working life now stretches toward 60 years, and four or five careers in one lifetime is becoming normal.

London Business School, 2016

What it's doing

The single-track career, pick a lane and retire out of it, is over. You'll reinvent more than once, not as a crisis but as the default. The map was drawn for one act. You're living four.

The number

Five generations work side by side for the first time in history. Of everyone employed in the US today: Millennials (ages 30 to 45) are 36%, Gen X (46 to 61) 31%, Gen Z (18 to 28) 18%, Boomers (62 to 80) 15%, and the Silent Generation (80+) 1%.

Pew Research, 2024

What it's doing

Five different operating systems on loyalty, feedback, ambition, and what work is even for, sharing one hallway. The old assumption that everyone plays by the same rules is gone, and most of the quiet friction on a team starts right there.

The number

Around half of employees (51% US, 45% UK) would consider quitting if a company's values don't match their own. Values and culture have overtaken pay as the top reason people stay or leave.

Net Positive Employee Barometer, 2023

What it's doing

What 'good' looks like, how you're expected to lead and show up, moved fast. The behavior you were rewarded for a decade ago can quietly read as wrong today. People now walk over values, not comp.

The number

By 2040, emerging Asia is projected to make up nearly a third of global GDP, with China on track to become the largest economy around 2030. Opportunity is concentrating in new places.

Euromonitor, 2024

What it's doing

The centers of gravity, industries, capital, talent, are physically moving, and they don't announce it. The same skill set is worth different things depending on where the puck is going. Doubling down on where opportunity used to be is how you stall.

The number

Digital nomads are now about 12% of the US workforce, roughly 18.5 million people, up 153% since 2019. Remote and hybrid work have gone from a rounding error to the norm.

MBO Partners, 2025

What it's doing

Where you live and where you work have come apart. When place stops deciding for you, it's freeing and disorienting at once, because the options you used to inherit from geography are now yours to choose.