*Women, confined to homes and within their minds for long periods in history, have today redefined themselves, while retaining their core strengths of emotional intelligence and multi-tasking. And have done it so well that in a recent survey by a German TV channel, more than half the men who were questioned as part of the survey, said they are living in a woman’s world out there.

*A small timber concern in rural Finland is today the world leader in wireless communication. That’s the story of Nokia.

*The Big Blue IBM not just became an On-Demand service brand from a hardware brand, but also turned around the disadvantage of employing too many people in too many places (thus breeding inefficiency) into an advantage of being able to provide service everywhere with the right number of people!

*The radio has come back in a big way, essentially by retaining its strength of being unobtrusive (unlike the television). It has found a new role in the listener’s life, especially when he is travelling, in its brand new FM avatar.

Essentially, they have all done the same thing. Reinvention is indeed the name of the game but in this globalised, rapidly changing world of ours, plain reinvention won’t do. You would probably end up like Michael Jackson who rejigged his face, race, musical style and ended up as a freak.

Reinvention has always been there. Only now, it is gained stature and an importance that has risen out of sheer necessity. The old cliche ‘The only thing that is constant is change’ perhaps has to be reworked today to ‘The only thing that can keep you constant is change’.

In her bestselling book ‘Eat, Love, Pray’ American writer Elizabeth Gilbert says, today, reinvention is more a process than an event, interpersonal as well as intrapersonal. In contrast to its past avatars, today, reinvention is rooted in the ordinary. For instance, a grandma learning to climb a mountain may be less interesting a story than a professional working woman just learning to say no to her domineering boss.

Nowhere is reinvention (or the lack of it) more apparent than when it comes to brands.

Companies and brands that have reinvented intelligently have reaped the benefits.

As said earlier, if IBM had continued to be a hardware brand, with its unmanageable size, it would have sunk royally by now. Take the case of brands like Dyanora, HMT and Ambassador that were doing so well once in India but have become quite the dodos of the 21st century. As Manek Singh, HR manager in a top consulting firm in Mumbai, says, “It is all about staying relevant and staying ahead of the race. Brands have to understand their core strengths first and then repackage with the changing times.”

And nothing is a bigger brand than the individual. Today, reinvention is applicable best in individual careers, especially in the IT and ITES fields. Says Parikshit Karan, who is working in a financial sector KPO, “In the globalised world where the employee market can change in a matter of years, if not days, one cannot continue to do the same work, the same way over and again. For instance, technology can catch up with your work and you might easily become obsolete. Our world is demanding that we re-train our skills constantly. This does not necessarily mean that a person has to change careers — it just means being on your toes and being ready for constant re-orientation.”

Women versus men

And as far as individuals are concerned, the multi-tasking career women of today define reinvention just in the way men perhaps don’t! Women who have forged ahead in their career, while expertly managing their homes and children, did not learn to do it overnight.

This is essentially the reinvention of a gender. As Gina B Nahai, author of ‘Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith’, a powerful book that depicts the lives of several women who refused to meekly accept gender-specific roles and forged a new life for themselves, says, these women didn't create their new lives without sacrifice, humiliation, pain, loss, or mistakes, yet they succeeded in reinventing themselves and elevating their human experience.
Kathleen Herron, Deputy Managing Editor of the Sunday Times, London, is a great example of constant reinvention herself.

At 62, she retains all the enthusiasm of a child, is constantly on the look out for new things to learn and feels affronted if somebody dares call her old! Women are naturally programmed better to understand reinvention and men are yet to recover from the shock, she feels.

Shifting gender roles

There has been indeed an almost sudden shifting of gender roles where women, especially in the Western world, are being seen as being better able to cope with multi-tasking and emotional intelligence than men — the two skills that are increasingly considered vital for survival.

So whoever one’s inspiration is (even if it is Jackson), there is only one learning. Learning to change and changing our minds enough for it to be ready to learn. Always.