In The Professional: A Playbook to Unleash Your Potential and Futureproof Your Success, leadership coach and author Tony Frost delivers a must-read guide for those ready to take charge of their professional growth in a workforce that is increasingly powered by AI. Photo: Supplied.
Learn how to gain a competitive advantage in your career and stay relevant in the era of artificial intelligence (AI) with a well-timed guide titled The Professional: A Playbook to Unleash Your Potential and Futureproof Your Success.
Furthermore, when it’s endorsed by David Gonski, author of the Gonski Review Report, it’s essential reading for anyone interested in the topic. In the foreword, the Australian public figure, corporate lawyer and businessman applauds this handbook.
“I found this book to be an excellent and very useful read,” Gonski writes. “Indeed, as I read it, I had the recurring feeling that I wished it or an equivalent had existed years ago when I started out on my professional journey.”
The Professional is a guide to futureproofing your professional career by filling the gap between university learning and the demands of a post-COVID workplace where AI and other information technologies are progressing at a dizzying pace.
Leadership coach Tony Frost is one of Australia’s top professionals, with an award-winning first career of 34 years as a pre-eminent lawyer and chartered accountant advising top-tier Australian and multinational organisations. Frost is now an executive coach, mentor, lecturer, keynote speaker and company director.
Being honest and transparent, he writes in the introduction about this book for the “modern professionals who make the world go round”. For hundreds of years, experts in myriad professions have been providing all manner of services to clients who need the know-how and skills they themselves lack.
“As a professional building a successful career today, you are facing unprecedented challenges and opportunities as you service your clients and solve their problems,” Frost says.
“Changes in client demands, technology, competition and the regulatory environment have always loomed large, but the pace of change has accelerated markedly and shows no signs of slowing.”
To have a long and successful career, you will face, and need to respond to, four interlinked challenges. Operating in an environment of ever-increasing complexity. Clients have become increasingly sophisticated, demanding and cost-conscious when seeking external services. Although working from home and other forms of remote work had been building slowly in the decades before 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic revolutionised where, when and how professionals go about their task of serving clients.
The fourth point of note is: “AI was first posited seriously in the 1950s, but it was the release of the ChatGPT platform by OpenAI in November 2022 that really focused the minds of most people … about the potential of AI to dramatically reshape all manner of activities, including the world of work.”
To help you address these challenges and questions, the playbook offers five factors: self-care, motivation, learning, capabilities and accelerants. Also included are questions for reflection, and templates and tools to help make his suggestions clear and easy to understand and implement. However, don’t accept the suggestions as gospel.
“Poke, prod and challenge them. Discuss them with colleagues. Add and subtract things and make them your own.”
Frost calls this framework a playbook, which is introduced in Part II. Why? “Because ultimately, I believe you should have fun at work.”
Gonski finds The Professional is a game-changer providing valuable insights as Frost brings “high energy, experience, optimism and practicality to every page”.
“I particularly like his four challenges: complexity, increased client demands, remote work and effects of artificial intelligence … these provide enough insights to make the book worth reading.
“Many have written in the area Tony is exploring but none have done so — in my view — with the light, practical approach and at the same time the depth that I believe Tony has achieved.”
Gonski asks how one can become the best possible professional and add the most value in the age of artificial intelligence. “Both of these questions remain on my mind after 47 years of life in business.”
So, how should young professionals view the coming of AI? Gonski strongly agrees with Frost: they should be “worried and excited but more excited than worried”.
The Professional: A Playbook to Unleash Your Potential and Futureproof Your Success, by Tony Frost, Wiley, $34.95
