Entrepreneurs as Path Finders: What We All Must Become Now

By Deborah Grant, Professional Coach and Organizational Consultant

Most people aren’t ready.

Right now, while you’re reading this, decisions are being made in boardrooms, research labs, and government offices that will reshape every industry you can think of — finance, logistics, healthcare, legal, manufacturing, retail, media — within the next five to ten years. And many jobs, possibly yours, are on the line.

We’re not talking about having to make a few uncomfortable human resource adjustments or tightening things up here and there. We’re talking about the disappearance of entire categories of work. It is due to AI, of course, but not just AI. Quantum computing is emerging commercially, and within the next decade we’ll begin to feel it acutely, because quantum computing will make the speed of AI today feel comparatively much, much slower. Quantum computing will support the crunching of previously unmanageable data scenarios so efficiently that humans will be rendered redundant in an astounding variety of roles and jobs.

Across industries, the most useful way to understand AI’s impact is not as simple job loss, but as compression of roles through task automation. Research suggests that up to 30% of all work hours globally could be automated by 2030, while 60–70% of jobs contain tasks that can be automated.

At the same time, an estimated 1 in 4 jobs are at high risk of automation, particularly those built around routine, repeatable processes. Expanding the view further, automation could affect the equivalent of up to 300 million full-time jobs worldwide, highlighting just how widespread displacement is likely to be.

Taken together, these figures point to a reality that headline job-loss numbers often obscure: even where roles are not eliminated outright, they are being reduced, consolidated, or redefined.

In practical terms, this suggests that across much of the economy, the impact may feel closer to 1 in 3 roles disappearing or significantly shrinking, as fewer people are needed to accomplish the same volume of work. The result is not a collapse of employment, but a steady erosion of job layers—especially in administrative, analytical, and support functions—leading to leaner organizations and a more competitive landscape for the roles that do remain.

And here’s what makes this different from every other disruption in history. There is no safe industry to run to.

Previous historical automation waves hit factories. Workers moved to offices. But this wave hits the offices too. It hits the analysts, the researchers, strategists, the administrators, the coordinators — the backbone of the modern workforce. Which means, for the first time, untold millions of people are going to find themselves without a clear path forward.

In response to the prospect of AI, robotics, and quantum computing combined, solutions are being discussed to account for millions of unemployed citizens who cannot pivot quickly enough into new careers. Talk of UBI, or Universal Basic Income, provided by governments, is moving from fringe to a mainstream conversation, largely driven by these projections. But a meaningful UBI is probably years, even 20 years or more away. When it comes, it will likely start in low figures —around $500–1,000/month, scaling to as much as $2,500 per month depending on the city, state, and region. But it won’t be enough to sustain a single person, much less a family or, most importantly, feelings of human dignity and meaning for those receiving it. As casualties mount, there will be endless squabbles within governments around the world about how to mind the yawning gap.

Here, in the United States, we are just as vulnerable to change, but culturally we are also among the most able and willing nations to embrace new paradigms. We are a nation of immigrants and travelers; we are good at “building something from nothing,” or taking advantage of whatever we can find around us in the immediate environment. For the sake of survival, our culture has primed us for short-term thinking. This can be helpful in facing new challenges.

But our weaknesses are just as imposing. They stem from our inability to see and sense longer-term consequences for ourselves. This includes the very people whose innovations in technology have set this entire cascade of chaos in motion while personally profiting hugely from them. Even they cannot stop the incoming tsunami of change now.

Pandora’s box is wide open, and the goblins and gremlins have emerged. At the same time, an enormous genie is out of the bottle and offers to grant spectacular wishes all around. The ending to this story has not yet been told.

What are our three wishes? Do we even know what we really want?

What Can We Learn from Other Cultures?

I was five years old the first time I came to this country. The first thing I saw of this nation was the Statue of Liberty rising out of the early morning mists of New York harbor from the deck of the Queen Elizabeth II. My parents had taken my sisters and me on the long voyage by boat from Yokohama, Japan to Hong Kong, then stopping by what was then called Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Bombay, India (now Mumbai), and through to Naples, Italy, visiting the ruins of Pompei, and then on camper van and ferries across to London. That trip, one of several my parents led us on around the world, primed me to understand the great variety of our beautiful world. But the sight of that awe-inspiring form of the Statue of Liberty, the torch held high above her head, was the crowning glory of those memories from my earliest childhood.

A few days later, traveling down the coast toward my grandmother’s house in South Carolina, I saw something very different, and it made no sense to me. At a gas station, on one side of the building, there was a water fountain. It was dirty — visibly, neglectfully dirty — in sharp contrast to everything I’d just seen in New York, with its shiny space-age vending machines. I could read well enough to make out the sign above the water fountain, but I did not understand what the word meant. I only knew that someone had decided that certain people deserved less than the man bending over to drink from the clean water fountain on the other side of the gas station. Jumping back into the car as we set off again down the road, I asked my parents why. They looked at each other and went quiet. Years later, I have reflected on how my own parents, whom I love and respect dearly, were in the position of having to explain something horrifying to a five-year-old and chose silence.  It was the kind of silence that speaks much louder than words.

This was my first lesson in the distance between a nation’s ideals and its practiced ones.

Due to my parents’ work as missionaries in post-World War II Japan, I grew up in Japan as the nation rose from the ashes into great stability and affluence, returning to the United States only once every four or five years.  Each visit was a brief, vivid immersion in a world built on assumptions almost perfectly opposite to the ones I had been raised within, the Land of the Rising Sun. Japan had given me something I had no name for then: an understanding that the wisdom of the group, the community, and the collective carried a weight – and provided a psychological cauldron of safety so great – that individual preferences needed to challenge our sense of stability much more rarely.

What the Japanese scholar Takeo Doi beautifully outlined in his seminal work, The Anatomy of Dependence, is a system of amae, which is difficult to translate but reflects a deeply compassionate, warm, and inclusive sense of interdependency and acceptance of each other’s vulnerabilities. The edges of this construct have been slightly frayed by the onslaught of globalization, but amae still stands. Doi’s thesis addresses how something as simple as the need to be cared for—which forms the basis of the deeply interconnected networks in Japanese culture—can shape an entire society’s structure, values, and emotional life. Doi suggested that all humans experience forms of dependency, but Western societies tend to suppress or pathologize it, while Japanese culture acknowledges and integrates mutual reliance into everyday life.

Thankfully, Japan is still a nation built on collaboration and community; it has not only benefited greatly from its understanding of dependency but has also begun to implicitly share these values with the rest of the world. We are the better for Japan’s generous world leadership, which so often radiates amae.

When I came to the USA for college at Duke University, I was old enough to ponder this contrast. I leaned more than ever on my habit of journaling to record my fish-out-of-water experiences and the feelings of isolation I was encountering. What I wrote about, as a nineteen-year-old watching this culture with fresh eyes, was how individuality here was genuinely celebrated — more freely and more loudly than anywhere I had visited.

I was also seeing the price paid as too many citizens had fallen through the cracks, abandoned to languish over decades of neglect. The same culture that lifted the exceptional individual seemed to have no safety net beneath the ones who could not find their footing for a wide range of clearly legitimate reasons. The celebration of the self, taken to its extreme, had dissolved the web of mutual obligation that holds human beings together.

Fast forward to 2026, and the ground is shifting under everyone, all at once, in every country, across every culture, and it is magnified in the USA where interdependency is pathologized: the person in the large corporation whose role is quietly being automated; the young person entering a shockingly dismal job market; the person in mid-career whose position is cut without warning and no retraining for a new role in sight; the person who is sick and tired of feeling like a cog in a grossly outdated machine. The smart ones already have a plan of escape from a world that is crumbling, and if they haven’t left their current jobs yet, they surely will, one way or another.

Mapping a Pathway Forward

The Japanese language understood something about entrepreneurship long before it became a global buzzword. The word for entrepreneur is 起業家 — ki-gyoh-ka. The first two characters mean to rise up and begin. But it is the final character, 家, that carries the deepest meaning. 家 is the character for house, home, lineage, and commitment to excellence in establishing something from nothing. A 起業家 or ki-gyoh-ka, is not simply someone who starts something. They are people who make the spirit of self-starting their essential individual identity, and as a group.

So, this is where true entrepreneurship begins. Not with a business plan. Not with funding. Not with the right connections or the right moment or the right amount of courage stored up. It begins with paying attention to where we are, as things are. It begins with a clean assessment of the resources we have and the changes we know in the deepest recesses of our soul which need to be made. We need to be in healthy, fighting trim so we can be our best and most reliant, resilient selves. Entrepreneurship, in its purest sense, is the commitment to change with a spirit of focus and meaningful work— with a readiness to do what it takes, to strike out into the unknown, and to invent ourselves and the world around us all over again. Together.

For those who lead organizations, the responsibility is even more urgent: groups of people committed to the common goals of making things on the widest scale, running projects, systems, and movements — who sit in C-suites, boardrooms, congresses and parliaments, who make billion-dollar investments and sign huge payrolls. These people make critical decisions that reach into the lives of dozens, hundreds, thousands, and ultimately millions of people.

The groups that engage in intimate, deeper conversations with their employees about what is happening now will come out stronger. The companies that don’t transparently tackle the changes will face a reckoning with loss of talent, loss of direction, and loss of profit. And the cost of it all will be an epidemic of human psychological and spiritual despair. The loss of humankind’s collective sense of purpose is going to be incalculable if we do not begin to deal with these forces head-on now.

It is an era when the leaders of responsive organizations - intent on meaningful, ethical survival - must reach out to their workers:

We see these changes are coming, and we are going to face it together before it forces our hand. Let’s navigate this together. The times may dictate that we will end up in a place that looks foreign to us. We may emerge as an entirely different company than who and what we appear to be today. To do that, each one of you needs to be a pathfinder. Tell us everything you see, everything you want to explore. We promise to listen, and we want you to tell us when we don’t so we can improve. Let’s navigate this potentially treacherous time together. Be the change along with us. We want you to lead us as much as we will lead you.

You, our employees, know the systems, the culture, and our customers firsthand — you hold all this knowledge, and you are our assets. We’ll redirect. We’ll retrain.  Stay with us and we’ll provide the support you need. Promise us your best and we will not forsake you. We don’t know where all this will lead us yet, but let’s trust each other and begin some serious exploration and build new structures for what we do and how we work.

We cannot put the blame on any external factors and passively wait to see what happens. We must each become entrepreneurial pathfinders now.

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For comments and questions, contact deborah@grantglobalcoaching.com. For individuals and groups who want to embark on a practical journey of self-reflection and planning for the future, visit www.grantglobalcoaching.com to book a discovery session.

Note: Grant Global Coaching & Consulting LLC uses AI where it genuinely supports human learning—and we’re thoughtful about how and why we use it.

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Stanford University, Human-Centered AI Institute. (2024). AI and Workforce Disruption Research. Stanford University Press.

IBM. (2024). Quantum Roadmap 2024. IBM Corporation.

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Boston Consulting Group. (2024). Quantum Computing Economic Impact Report. BCG.

Brookings Institution. (2023). UBI Policy Briefs. Brookings Institution Press.

World Bank. (2023). Labor Market Disruption and Social Safety Net Reports. World Bank Publications.