7 Achieving the Maximum Impact Across the Globe: Transformational Skills to Exploit New Solutions

Our theme throughout this book can be summarized as “self-empowerment” for technical professionals through a set of Transformational Skills. These Transformational Skills are proposed to help them identify opportunities and develop and deploy them into New Solutions. In Chapter 5, we addressed the specific skills that professionals can acquire to identify opportunities by emphasizing a common language as well as scouring their field of activity for gaps in core capabilities and filling such gaps. We presented in Chapter 6 a set of enablers for professionals to enhance their effectiveness in developing New Solutions by aggregating resources and integrating knowledge from many sources. Armed with these skills, the professional becomes a system thinker and an integration engine, combining the essential resources from long reaches—his/her department, the company, suppliers, as well as end users. The entire world becomes the professional's working field. But all these skills and capabilities yield positive results only when the outcome is clear, tangible, and useful for the largest number of beneficiaries. The larger the user or beneficiary pool, the greater the reward. This is the transition point where the professional—a knowledge worker—transforms from an effective player in a limited playing field into an influential resource: a Global Intellect.