Job Titles of the Future #9 - Chocolate Foresight Activator

I caught this Job Title of the Future from a recent piece on The Atlantic, describing the Hershey Company's quest to find, what the Atlantic called a 'Chocolate Futurist', or what Hershey refers to in their still-posted job ad, a 'Senior Manager, Foresight Activation.'

I think The Atlantic wins points for the jazzier job title.

Just what does a 'Chocolate Futurist/Foresight Activator' have to do?

Straight from the Hershey job listing:

Supports the activation of existing foresight (trends, forecasts, scenarios) into strategic opportunities (SOs) and platforms with commercial value for Hershey, mining existing foresight content for highest potential business impact opportunities or threats.  Performs ongoing monitoring of the external environment for new insights and trends approaching tipping points.  Partners with external agencies to identify new trends that can inform and accelerate foresight activation.  Collaborates with Corporate Strategy, R&D, Global Knowledge & Insights and Silicon Valley Advance Team as well as other business and functional teams to flesh out opportunity assessment and business case.  Shapes new initiatives in the front of funnel and drives to successful completion through Gates A, B and C.

What kind of background or education do you need in order to activate foresight and drive to successful completion through Gates A, B, and C, (what the heck does that even mean, btw?)

Education: MBA in Marketing or Masters in related field required

Experience: Minimum of 8+ year’s relevant experience.  Multi-disciplinary background (Marketing, Corporate Strategy, R&D, Management Consulting).   User design or consulting experience a plus.  Solid front-end innovation capability including the identification of insights and translation to business growth strategy.

Experience with a major innovation consultancy (i.e. What If? IDEO, Doblin, Innosight, Prophet, Jump Associates, Eureka Ranch, New & Improved) supporting multiple clients to accomplish the same.

Progression of successful accomplishments in identification and commercialization of new business opportunities. Experience with a top-tier consumer packaged goods company preferred.  International and technical experience desirable but not required

So, in order to 'activate foresight' it probably would help if you had a solid, cross-functional background, had a fair bit of customer-facing experience, and new something about product development and management.

But, at least according to the posting copy, in order to be qualified to be a Chocolate Futurist/Foresight Activator, you don't necessarily have to know anything much about chocolate. In fact the word chocolate doesn't show up anywhere in the listing.

Which in a way is kind of cool. The future might not be all that chocolat-y, who knows?

Maybe the foresight activator for a chocolate company should be someone that doesn't view the world through cocoa-tinted lenses.

Maybe Hershey is actually showing some foresight themselves in looking outside their normal frames of reference to find someone to help them 'form presentations that create a tangible vision of what the future might look like that business partners can grasp.'

Sounds like a cool gig. And one that earns official SFB designation as a 'Job Title of the Future.'

Job Titles of the Future #8 - 20 Jobs to Pick From

My friend Raluca shared the below Slideshare presentation with me, a really fun look at a topic that I have also had some fun with here on the blog, of course I am talking about Job Titles of the Future.

In the presentation, (embedded below, Email and RSS subscribers may need to click through), the folks at advertising and marketing firm Sparks and Honey offer up their take on how trends in technology and society are conspiring to create a new set of opportunities, i.e., jobs of the future that don't exist right now.

Take a look through the slides and I will have a couple of comments after the jump:

20 Jobs of the Future from sparks & honey

Pretty cool, right?

Of the 20 jobs of the future I think my top choices for most interesting and/or most likely to pan out in some kind of material way have to be 'Corporate Disorganizer', (a kind of nod to all the hubbub going on about the Holacracy stuff), 'Alternative Currency Speculator', (any time a new market forms there are always going to be speculators. And I love the movie 'Trading Places.'), and also 'Digital Death Manager', (a little macabre but I think on the money. Just what does happen to your Facebook or Twitter accounts if you pass away?).

Anyway, it is an interesting take with some ideas about what the future might hold. With the world of work changing every day, it pays to at least to attempt to stay on top of where the next year's and decade's opportunities are going to lie.

Have a great weekend!

Job Titles of the Future #7 - Professional eSports Player

Like lots of guys of a similar generation, I grew up playing sports, watching sports, talking about sports, etc. My Dad and my other adult male relatives were all big-time sports people as well - simply put, there was not a day of my youth through teenage years where sports in some fashion was not a part.

Fast forward about, well let's just say several years, and while sports are still a big part of many American kids lives, (certainly girls sports are a much, much bigger thing today than when I was a kid), there are lots more and different ways modern kids can choose to spend their time, energy, and as we will see in a second, to feed their appetite for competition.

And just like traditional sports like basketball and football have for many years offered at least the most talented and driven kids a pathway to fame and monetary gain, we are starting to see these newer forms of competition also present similar opportunities.  

What am I getting at?

Check an excerpt from a piece in the LA Times - Online game League of Legends star gets U.S. visa as pro athlete

International stars in sports such as baseball, hockey and basketball have long been afforded special immigration status to play on U.S. teams. Think David Beckham, the former Los Angeles Galaxy soccer player from Britain, or Dodgers rookie phenom Hyun-Jin Ryu, a pitcher from South Korea.

Now add Danny "Shiphtur" Le, of Edmonton, Canada, to the elite list.

Le, an online gamer, is one of the world's top players of League of Legends, a virtual capture-the-flag game in which two teams of fantasy characters compete for a glowing orb. Le is so deft at racing down the virtual field and opening up gaps for teammates that he recently became the first so-called eSports player to be granted a type of visa normally awarded to athletes featured daily on ESPN.

With a generation of children having grown up playing video games, the decision by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has been widely perceived as elevating America's newest professional sport to the same class as old-school stalwarts.

And in a worldwide competition in which the winning team can take home $1 million in prizes, the ability to sign the best players — whether from Canada or South Korea or Russia — was seen as a must-have for U.S squads.

Did you catch all that?

A professional video gamer from Canada was granted a special type of visa, (probably a P1A), to live and compete in the USA with the rest of his elite team of gamers.

I know you are thinking this is a kind of joke, or at least a once-in-a-blue-moon kind of occurrence. After all we are talking about video games, for gosh sakes. Not football, not baseball. Stupid video games.

Except that I bet video games in general, and specifically League of Legends, the game in which Le and his team competes in, are a much, much bigger deal than you realize.

How big?

More from the LA Times:

In the U.S. bracket of the championship series, eight teams compete against one another on Thursdays and Fridays at a West Los Angeles TV studio.

The games are broadcast online and draw more than 1.7 million unique viewers. A typical National Hockey League game on the NBC Sports Network last season drew a quarter of that audience.

Gaming industry analysts estimate that more than 32 million people worldwide play the game, about half of them in the U.S. The rest come from Europe and Asia. By those calculations, 1 in every 20 Americans plays League of Legends. That dwarfs baseball, from Little League to Major League Baseball.

Like I mentioned at the top, I grew up playing traditional sports under the watchful eye of my Dad who also grew up playing those same sports. It would have fulfilled both our dreams had I become an NBA star. But alas, short, slow, and unable to jump very high (mostly) did me in.

A new generation of kids is going to grow up playing games like League of Legends, under the watchful eyes of their Dads who also grew up playing League of Legends, (or World of Warcraft, or similar).

And if those stats are accurate, or even close to it, that 1 in 20 Americans are playing League of Legends then there are going to be lots of career opportunities that will spring up from that ecosystem. Sure just like baseball and football there will be the select few like Danny Le that will become elite-level professionals, but there may also be a need for more event organizers, promotions, marketing, expert analyses, training courses, and on and on.

Professional eSports Player, that has a pretty cool ring to it, and it makes the list as an official SFB 'Job Title of the Future.'

Job Titles of the Future #6 - The CEO Sober Companion

Whether it is a hard-charging, world-commanding, and impossibly tall and good-looking CEO, or the global head of marketing that never seems to sleep, hits every major city in her empire at least every quarter, while always being the smartest person in the room,  it seems like more and more the work of a big-time corporate executive is never done. 

Just like Knicks' legend Patrick Ewing once said about big shot corporate executives, (ok, he said something kind of like this, not actually this, but I needed a sports reference to try and get this post qualified for the 2013 Edition of The 8 Man Rotation E-book), "Sure, sometimes we party pretty hard, but we work hard and all the time too."  

Or if you don't dig the stretched to the breaking point Ewing take, how about this one from America's favorite (fake) CEO - Kenny Powers who put it more plainly - ' I'm the MF, CEO!'

The work demands, the inflated egos, the sense of entitlement, the feeling of invincibility that we often see possessed by people that have essentially been tremendously successful their entire lives - all these quite often combine with lots of money, opportunity, and some enabling behavior by friends and colleagues to drive CEOs and other execs into some bad, bad decisions regarding alcohol, drugs, and other inappropriate actions.

And having the CEO of a big, possibly publicly traded corporation running into scandal, trouble with the law, or even simple lack of attention to the requirements of his/her position caused by one too many whiskeys or painkillers is the kind of risk that more and more companies are deciding to attempt to mitigate. And one of the ways in which that risk is combated is with the 'Sober Companion'.

What does the 'Sober Companion' do? Check the details from this recent NY Post piece:

Trying to reason with his multimillionaire client while plying him with black coffee, Chuck Kanner ducked and narrowly missed a bottle of whiskey aimed at his head.

“He’d be sitting there [meeting] with people like Bill Clinton, Rudolph Giuliani and Mario Cuomo, spaced out, and I’d be saying: ‘Dude, this is not OK!’ ”

The unseemly row aboard the drunken CEO’s yacht in the Caribbean was all in a day’s work for Kanner, a so-called “sober companion” who makes his living keeping high-powered business executives on the straight and narrow.

He is part of an elite team of advisers and confidantes who work undercover, often 24/7, as personal assistants, bodyguards, researchers and potential investors, so the Masters of the Universe can get help for their addictions — while saving face as they rule the world.

So maybe personal assistants or even executive bodyguards are not all that new, and are certainly not 'Job titles of the future', but this new spin, or expansion of duties - for the assistant to pose as a consultant of some kind with the job of making sure the exec doesn't over imbibe on booze or drugs, well that seems like a brand new take on an old problem.

And I think it's also symbolic of the age that corporations and executives live in today. Don Draper could pretty plausibly get away with being drunk half the time and acting on pretty much every desire he wished. Sure, the times and expectations were a little different, but there were also no blogs, and no Twitter, and no Instagram to potentially capture and broadcast to the world all the monkey business he was up to, and that in today's age would be all over the web.

Sure the 'right' anser to this problem is to have CEOs and execs that know better. 

But until we are pretty sure that the million years or so of human tendency towards making bad decisions with booze and drugs is pretty much done, you might want to look into hiring one of these 'Sober Companions' for your exec team as well.

Today, it doesn't take much (maybe about five scotches and a bad decision), to destroy billions in company value.

Job Titles of the Future #4 - Cat Video Technologist

Quick reader poll, how long has it been since you've watched a cat video on the internet?

A very important POLL 

(NOTE - If you get re-directed, just click the browser BACK button to return to the post)

Liars, there is no way that you didn't watch one today. Or maybe it wasn't a cat video, it could have been an animated GIF of some bros cheering at a ball game, or a Tumblr filled of photoshopped pics of a random dude out on dates with super models.

Let's all just admit it, we are collectively wasting the best years of our lives on this nonsense.

But all that time translates to opportunity for others, and while marketing, advertising, and PR have all been around forever, the specific skills, attitude, and aptitude it takes to connect with consumers today - in our time crunched, multitasking, and multi-device lives are possibly quite a bit different.

Check out this piece from Business Insider, This PR Agency Wants to Hire a Cat Video Technologist, on PR firm Taylor Herring's quest for this kind of new talent to get a feel for what I mean.  The job ad (spoofed to look like an old-fashioned print ad) is below:

Sure, you could quibble with me in that the actual job, (and Taylor Herring assures it is real), is not different from any of the thousands of other 'social media marketer' jobs that are probably being advertised across the world right now. And you would be partly correct. The list of required skills has many familiar elements we'd recognize from similar and existing roles.

But what makes the Cat Video Technologist different are two things really. One, is that it points out directly the connection (to their business anyway), and importance of goofy internet memes like Ryan Gosling stuff and cat videos, and actual commerce. And two, the very way that Taylor Herring presented the job ad - the funny title, the internet job ad that looks like an old newspaper ad, the use of Twitter to market the opportunity, etc. all have a 'recruiting strategies of the future' feel to them as well.

The PR agency needs to find and attract some of the most creative, interesting, and social web aware people in the industry. One way to do that is to be creative, interesting, and to leverage the social web to try and make that happen. Everything about this seems smart to me, and forward-looking, so thus I bestow a Steve-approved 'Job title of the Future' to the 'Cat Video Technologist'.

Have a great week!