Reinventing Reinvention
We happened to catch fellow Florida State alum Sara Blakely giving the commencement speech at our alma mater this past Saturday. In that speech, she told a story about how her dad gave her a book (on cassette tapes!) by Dr. Wayne Dyer. She said that book, How to Be a No Limits Person, changed her life. What caught our attention, though, was that her dad said, “I wish I were your age instead of at the age of 40 when I listened to this because it would have changed my life.”
That got us to thinking about the work we’ve been doing and how AI is going to transform not only work but also individuals’ lives. Reinvention used to require a runway most people couldn’t afford once they were adults.
For a select few, it could be a sabbatical or perhaps years of nights and weekends to get a new degree. The marketing director who wanted to move into product, the accountant who saw herself in operations, the engineer drawn to design, they could see the destination clearly. Unfortunately, we created a system of work that did not align with this type of thinking. The cost of the bridge to get there was usually the reason people stayed put.
We believe that AI tools eliminate that cost.
We’re watching it happen inside our own work at NICH as we transform into an agentic agency. Skills that would have taken months to develop now take days. Capabilities that used to require hiring a specialist can be built up in real time, by people who already understand the business. Reinvention that used to demand a leave of absence is happening on a Tuesday afternoon between meetings.
It’s not just us. We see this happening across three layers all at once: people, roles, and organizations.
People are reinventing themselves. They are picking up new functional skills, exploring adjacent disciplines, and discovering that the careers they assumed were closed to them are suddenly within reach. Workers who’ve spent twenty years in one lane are looking around and seeing options they didn’t see two years ago.
Roles are being reinvented. The job a person had eighteen months ago is not the job they have now, even if the title hasn’t changed. The recruiter is doing strategic talent intelligence. The analyst is doing modeling that used to live two levels up. The marketer is shipping work in a day that used to take a team of four weeks to do.
Organizations are reinventing themselves. The companies that are leaning in are remaking entire functions, not by tearing them down, but by giving them new shapes. A communication team of ten can now be a comm team of two and a strategy team of eight. What we see is that ideas and execution are now the focus as the tasks are handled by machines.
The opportunity is now speed.
Those days where reinvention used to take a sabbatical or a degree are gone. Now it can happen at work while the work gets done. The organizations that build for that, that design jobs with room for people to grow into something different, that treat reinvention as growth instead of risk, that give their people permission to become someone new without making them leave first…those organizations win. They will keep their best people and attract the ones quietly looking. They get to be the place where reinvention happens. Imagine that as your next employer brand.
The leaders telling the better story about AI are going to attract the people who want to write a better next chapter for themselves. It’s a competitive advantage hiding in plain sight.