Robert Johnson on inventing every job after the first

What this conversation is about

Robert Johnson had been a university president for fifteen years when he sat down to open the special series for Make Reinvention Your Superpower. Glenn Llopis calls him a dear friend, and the premise of the series is blunt: there is an urgent need to deconstruct what you became in order to achieve in the world as it was, and to reconstruct who you are to be ready for a future that is still unclear.

Glenn warmed him up with statements rather than questions. The first was that whatever job you hold and whatever expertise you have built, something is in the works that could make it all seem obsolete in a flash. Johnson agreed, and put the weight on mindset rather than skill. You can be proficient in your profession, he says, and still be finished, because the job you hold today will be a different job in two or three years. The line he uses with students is at the top of this page.

"without strategy change is merely substitution, not evolution." — Glenn Llopis · 00:06:17

That is the distinction the series is built on. People who wait to be forced end up swapping one thing for another without evolving at all.

Why people who know better still don’t move

Glenn asked the question this work keeps running into. People know the world around them has changed. Why can they still not see their own opportunity to reinvent? Johnson answered in one word, twice: fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of not being good enough, fear of failing. Someone who will neither fight nor flee retreats into a cocoon that feels safe.

His picture of that cocoon is recognizable to anyone who has worked in a large organization: a person twenty years into a job who has never once asked what they should be doing differently, who says no when you ask whether they are happy, and who has never really thought about changing it. His alternative is a question to ask of any job you take, including the one you have now: how is this preparing me for whatever is next?

The playbook, and who wrote it

When Glenn described following a set of rules handed to you at work, Johnson named it before the sentence was finished:

"what you just described, that's standardization. I was hoping we'd go there. That's standardization. That is, here's the playbook." — Robert Johnson · 00:10:36

He remembers what that playbook promised. Take a job, stay five to seven years, wait for the promotion, perhaps change companies inside the same industry, retire. Outside a handful of licensed professions, nobody expected you to go back for more learning in order to stay relevant. He says that path is a thing of the past, and the replacement is less comfortable: learning new things and unlearning the ones that no longer apply, deliberately, as a steady state.

"Just because a particular expertise, job or skill might not be in demand in a few years, doesn't have to mean that you as a person are not in demand." — Glenn Llopis · 00:12:16

Outcomes, parameters, and letting go

Johnson is clear this is not only the individual’s job. Leaders have to leave room for it. What he holds constant with his own team is the outcome and the value added; how the work gets done matters far less to him than that people have the freedom to keep asking what is next.

"instead of telling people, this is what I want you to do, and here are the 10 steps on how you must get it done, we have to say, here's what I would like you to do. Here are the parameters have at it." — Robert Johnson · 00:17:55

Glenn described what happens to the people who never get that latitude:

"they have forgotten how to have new ideas after being trained. That success depends on how well they execute old ideas. They're stuck in career quicksand." — Glenn Llopis · 00:19:41

Johnson’s warning is that an organization full of people in that condition eventually stops existing. The question he puts to leaders instead is which new business model could put them out of business, on the logic that whatever the answer is, that is the model to adopt.

Success nobody else gets to define

Glenn moved to the third skill in the book, Pursue, and asked Johnson to react to its ingredients: an all-encompassing will to act, curiosity that seeks precise answers, confidence in your own skills, performing at a premium level. Johnson’s version is the pursuit of excellence as a permanent condition rather than a destination, and it begins with honesty. Knowing yourself is not the same as being honest with yourself, and once you admit a shortcoming you have two choices: wait and see what happens, or make something happen.

Asked why so many managers cannot say what they know about themselves without knowing it, he pointed at the habit underneath:

"Because the system, the quote unquote system is telling me that, and I'm relying upon the system." — Robert Johnson · 00:34:21

And then the sentence the whole conversation turns on:

"I can't let an organization or any other individual define success for me." — Robert Johnson · 00:36:10

He closed on obligation rather than ambition. Anyone with the privilege of an education carries a responsibility to leave the world better than they found it, and if each one reaches one, the world gets better.