Read To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others for Free Online

and limber skills. *
    In short, even people inside larger operations like Atlassian and Palantir must work more like the shape-shifting pickle-maker Shamus Jones. This marks a significant change in the way we do business. When organizations were highly segmented, skills tended to be fixed. If you were an accountant, you did accounting. You didn’t have to worry about much outside your domain because other people specialized in those areas. The same was true when business conditions were stable and predictable. You knew at the beginning of a given quarter, or even a given year, about how much and what kind of accounting you’d need to do. However, in the last decade, the circumstances that gave rise to fixed skills have disappeared.
    A decade of intense competition has forced most organizations to transform from segmented to flat (or at least, flatter). They do the same, if not greater, amounts of work than before—but they do it with fewer people who are doing more, and more varied, things. Meantime, underlying conditions have gone from predictable to tumultuous. Inventors with new technologies and upstart competitors with fresh business models regularly capsize individual companies and reconfigure entire industries. Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, is a legend one day and a laggard the next. Retail video rental is a cash cow—until Netflix carves the industry into flank steak. All the while, the business cycle itself swooshes without much warning from unsustainable highs to unbearable lows like some satanic roller coaster.
    A world of flat organizations and tumultuous business conditions—and that’s our world—punishes fixed skills and prizes elastic ones. What an individual does day to day on the job now must stretch across functional boundaries. Designers analyze. Analysts design. Marketers create. Creators market. And when the next technologies emerge and current business models collapse, those skills will need to stretch again in different directions.
    As elasticity of skills becomes more common, one particular category of skill it seems always to encompass is moving others. Valerie Coenen, for instance, is a terrestrial ecologist for an environmental consulting firm in Edmonton, Alberta. Her work requires high-level and unique technical skills, but that’s only the start. She also must submit proposals to prospective clients, pitch her services, and identify both existing and potential problems that she and her firm can solve. Plus, she told me, “You must also be able to sell your services within the company.” Or take Sharon Twiss, who lives and works one Canadian province to the west. She’s a content strategist working on redesigning the website for a large organization in Vancouver. But regardless of the formal requirements of her job, “Almost everything I do involves persuasion,” she told me. She convinces “project managers that a certain fix of the software is a priority,” cajoles her colleagues to abide by the site’s style guide, trains content providers “about how to use the software and to follow best practices,” even works to “get my own way about where we’re going for lunch.” As she explains, “People who don’t have the power or authority from their job title have to find other ways to exert power.” Elasticity of skills has even begun reshaping job titles. Timothy Shriver Jr. is an executive at The Future Project, a nonprofit that connects secondary school students with interesting projects to adults who can coach them. His work reaches across different areas—marketing, digital media, strategy, branding, partnerships. But, he says, “The common thread is activating people to move.” His title? Chief Movement Officer.
    And even those higher on the org chart find themselves stretching. For instance, I asked Gwynne Shotwell, president of the private space transportation firm Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX), how many days each week she deals