Author: Jeremie Averous

Why Who We Are Is Not What We Post

To all: be aware that what people present of themselves on social networks is not what they are in reality. “Facebook feeds the highest level of our most basic human need: self-actualization. It allow us to present ourselves in the way in which we would like others to see us” writes Mitch Joel in his blog.

facebookThis has significant consequences, in particular of course that (most) people will present themselves in a better way than what they might be or feel in reality. Also, we more often post stuff when exciting things happen to us, not when we are doing boring household chores!

As I mentioned in a previous posts, the Fourth Revolution and the virtual relationships we develop presents us with a number of challenges relating to our emotions. It is easy to get injured by a post or a comment.

The fact that people invent a sort of parallel life on their social network feed is one of the elements that can contribute to create strong emotions, in particular when it would seem that all our contacts live a far more exciting and varied life than we do.

In reality we are creating new virtual realities of ourselves online, which map somewhat but not completely with our reality. What we post is not who we are. And don’t believe that you know what people really are when you look at their feeds!

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How Your Attention Determines Your Reality

“How we deploy our attention determines what we see” – quoted from Anne Treisman in the book Focus by Daniel Goleman. A more poplar quote is attributed to Star Wars Jedi masters: “Your focus is your reality“.

focus-jediControlling our own attention is an extremely important skill, in particular today as multiple technologies increasingly compete to grab our attention almost every minute of our waked life.

As our perception is filtered more or less automatically by our learned categorization. Focusing our attention is the only way that allows us to see beyond our learned filters to discover new things. Thus, attention is the only for us to grow and develop intellectually and spiritually.

Your reality is determined by where you focus your attention. Develop your attention skill. It needs to be trained like a muscle. A simple exercise is how long you can concentrate on a task or a book without looking at your messages or your emails. Remove unwanted notifications from your life, and grow your reality!

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How to Decide Whether to Hire Somebody – a Simple Collaborative Age Heuristic

Mark Zuckerberg says: “I’ve developed over time a simple rule. I will only hire someone to work directly for me if I would work for that person. And it’s a pretty good test”

interviewI find that it is an interesting heuristic which also says something about the leadership style of this particular leader (by the way, think that he hired Sheryl Sandberg for example who is currently reporting to him as COO and the consequence of this quote in that case).

Anyway, I clearly realize that this heuristic might seem strange in the most usual “industrial Age” working place settings, pyramidal hierarchies and leadership styles. In the context of the Collaborative Age though, it find that it is a thoughtful heuristic. One important aspect is that more and more, people that you meet in your professional life might report to you or become your boss depending on the project and the circumstances. So it is better to be able to work with them either way!

Quote from kk.org (Kevin Kelly).

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My new venture: launch of ProjectAppServices and MobiProjects

I am extremely pleased to announce the launch of ProjectAppServices, my new entrepreneurial venture. It is a quite different venture into the Information Technology and Services field this time, with some connection with Project Value Delivery however as it intends to develop in the same professional field (note – I will stay mainly active in my first venture Project Value Delivery for the moment).

ProjectAppServicesProjectAppServices‘ Mission is to create significant value for projects’ execution by selecting and deploying specialized apps or software in the Project environment.

ProjectAppServices logoIt develops customized solutions to  Clients for simple and complex projects. For each new product ProjectAppServices partners with experienced IT integrators, leveraging on existing technical platform or software that can be used or developed for the Clients’ needs.

MobiProjects logoIn particular, the new product MobiProjects shows great potential to revolutionize all those paper-based processes across organizational and geographical boundaries (such as vendor inspections, QC inspections, defects management, asset on-hire/ off-hire, logistics commitments, receipt notes etc.) thanks to a ground-breaking mobile platform technology that is: proven, cheap and easy to customize and deploy.

MobiProjects conceptI am of course quite excited by this new project which will develop in parallel to my current entrepreneurial ventures, with a brilliant team in charge that will certainly create some very good surprises soon! I am also excited to discover the potential of mobile technology in the field of project execution, and endless possibilities to make life of our Clients easier!

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Why Bureaucratic Processes for Risk and Business Planning Are Suspect

“Bureaucracy was born out of the human desire for complete assurance before taking action” – Scott Belsky in Making Ideas Happen. And this assurance is a very natural desire in humans. As a result, bureaucracy creeps up everywhere and fast and finally prevents us to take action.

risk management process
A risk management process that has great chances to become a large bureaucratic exercise

This effect is very interesting to observe in particular in the field of Risk Management. It’s all about risk and uncertainty, reactivity and agility to unexpected events… and most risk management processes implemented in organizations are awfully slow and bureaucratic – at a point where the operative executive does not really use them beyond maybe some thoughts once a year when he must or at the start of a Project.

There are quite a few areas where we will never have a complete assurance whatever the effort we will spend, such as predicting the future, including future risks. Bureaucracy is the wrong answer to risk management and future prediction so that any method that implies some of it should be automatically suspiciously classified as an attempt to seek reassurance for ourselves.

Is your risk management process or your future business planning process excessively bureaucratic? You’d better review it immediately because it is most probably not fit for purpose!

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Why Competency Standards Become Institutions and Resist Change

Competency standards appear for good reasons – generally because there is a need to have a clear understanding on a minimum set of competencies to take certain roles, and to develop those competencies. This improves business results while increasing the efficiency of recruitment and the mobility of the workforce.

IndustryStandardsAt the same time, while competency standards always stem from a changing landscape in the roles that are needed in organizations, they inevitably create institutions will, by their very nature, resist change.

An excellent example happened in the field of Project Management. It was quite a new discipline and a new role in the 1960s and 70s. At that time a formalization exercise began which created associations of practitioners (e.g. in the US, the Project Management Institute (PMI)), corpus of competencies (e.g. the PMBOK of the PMI), and on top a certification process (e.g. Project Management Professional).

Right now it is a standard, and the association of practitioners becomes defensive at the idea that it might need to evolve. As the standard becomes dominant in the market it tends to shut down competition. And organizations are now supposed to use a corpus that is a minimum standard across industries and by no means what is really needed in more complex or larger projects in a specific industry.

Professional bodies actually are part of these institutions prone to be put in question by the changes happening in the world. As they defend a profession and thus the livelihood of their members, they will certainly wage significant resistance of any change, and the older they are, the more entrenched they will become.

The number of these professional bodies increases regularly, and this leads to the question of how they will be put in question. Will a revolution be needed? Or will the amount of information available about people’s professional path and experience overwhelm the need to have clear cut professional certificates?

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How People Start Their Own Business More Often Above 35

Younger people (less than 35) start their own business much less often than older ones. That is a clear data from statistics about entrepreneurship in the US.

Rate of Entrepreneurial Activity ChartThis is reassuring, because beyond the myth of the Zuckerbergs and other student-age Microsoft, Apple and Google founders, it shows that most people that start businesses have significant work experience and possibly, business experience. This should increase the probability of success.

However we also need to be cautious – as it seems that lots of businesses are started defensively by people missing a job, that reason to be an entrepreneur because of that aspect might be more present for people over 35 as part of a career accident, as a way to build on their competencies in a tougher economy.

Unfortunately I have not found data showing business success by age of the founder, so we can’t conclude it is worth having some experience to have more chances to create a sustainable business. If you have such data, please comment!

All figures in this post from the Kauffman report.

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Why Higher Entrepreneurship Activity is Not Good News

The statistics about entrepreneurship in the US as brought together by the Kauffman foundation are clear: there is more people creating businesses when people have difficulties to find a job. Or, in summary, entrepreneurship is in majority a defensive move, contrary to what popular lore would tend to spread.

KAUFFMAN-INDEX
The Overall Entrepreneurship index shows that there is more entrepreneurs in tough economical times

The data is clear: it is in a bad economy that the entrepreneurship ratio is higher, such as between 2009 and 2013 (see figure).

Similarly, immigrants have entrepreneurship ratios that can be twice as high as people born in the US, and people with high school education or less are also more frequently starting their own business, etc. In particular industries that go through tough times such as currently the Oil & Gas industry, the rate of business creation seems to increase significantly.

If a large amount of business creation is thus defensive, there is no surprise that many fail, due to the lack of preparation of the owner, or simply due to the fact that when times get better, business owners come back to more traditional employment.

Contrary to what most people think, the dynamism of entrepreneurship is not necessarily the sign of a dynamic economy; it could be the contrary. Some healthy level of entrepreneurship is necessary for economic development, but a higher ratio might not be good news.

All figures in this post from the Kauffman report.

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What Collaborative Age Education Should Concentrate On

Education requires a major revamp nowadays with the Fourth Revolution. We don’t need anymore the Industrial Age schooling that was designed to educate the resources needed by the industry (in summary, compliant and literate).

Creativity-SchoolingCollaborative Age requires people that are collaborative, creative and know how to deal with the vast amounts of data and information available at everybody’s fingertips. This excellent paper from ParisTech review ‘Education Series – 2 – New knowledge, new know-how: skills for the 21st Century‘ summarizes some essential traits of future education:

 

 

  • Managing data to find useful information
  • Maintaining and developing creativity
  • Navigating diversified knowledge spheres

I think this paper forgets about a very important aspect of future education, which are the soft skills require to collaborate effectively. Industrial Age education promoted individual excellence (for example though the typical exams); Collaborative Age education needs to promote teamwork and team success.

In any case, “Developing a culture like this requires that the learners be not afraid to fail. […] If you want to discover new ideas, you must be prepared to take risks and to make mistakes. […] In the same vein, schools today do not value differences. In many instances, there is only one right answer to a question, whereas a creative approach enables students to propose new answers to a given problem, seen from a totally different angle or point of view. Conformity must be abandoned and intellectual curiosity stimulated“.

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What Our Quests are Really About

“It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves” – Edmund Hillary. In every of our quests, external visible rewards or goals are not what is important. What we learn and how we grow is what is essential.

Mountain-conquerI remember being in a conference with a famous polar explorer just returning from several months isolated is the cold of Arctic in the context of an important scientific expedition. The question from the floor was: “what were you looking for, what were your objectives?“. The answer came with something like: “myself“. I was blown out!

We don’t need to be Edmund Hillary or this polar explorer to have real quests in our lives. And like them, we need to realize that we are looking for ourselves when we start such quests – and not so much for the achievements and the rewards. This gives quite a different perspective on things!

Search for yourself, and start your quest!

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Why A Significant Change Will Happen Soon in Our Civilization

“We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth” — Vernor Vinge. Why? Read this excellent post on Artificial Intelligence – a crossing between our considerations on the fact we have no intuition for the exponential and our concern for the Singularity (why are we alone in space??).

In particular I can’t escape showing this great illustration – with all due attribution:PPTExponentialGrowthof_Computing

Oops! What’s going to happen soon? And the post argues with reason I believe that we might not see it coming until it is upon us, due to the fact that we do not have intuition for the exponential.

Are we ready for this? I think not.

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Why Data Monopoly is Not Like Physical Monopolies

A paper in Harvard Business Review takes the position that ‘Data Monopolists Like Google Are Threatening the Economy‘. According to this paper, beyond the usage of massive data to create value through data mining, the fact that these troves of data are concentrated within a limited number of major actors is a major issue akin to the concentration of means of production in the early XXth century in the hand of a few monopolists.

data_monopoly2I don’t agree with this analysis. First, there are always new actors coming into play that take significant shares of the available data. For example one could argue that Facebook today concentrates a lot of personal data, and it is only a fairly recent entrant compared to Google and Yahoo.

Second, there is no major capital investment barrier like for infrastructure or industrial facilities that were at the origin of the anti-monopolistic laws. There is no limited resources like for oil, or extremely expensive investments required like for heavy industries. Data and its management is not entirely free, but reasonably cheap so that new entrants can still appear. In addition the amount of data generated worldwide increases exponentially, creating ever more opportunities.

Yes, significant value can be created by clever organizations out of Big Data. No, these are not monopolies that impede the operations of the market, as long as internet usage is maintained equal for all users.

Please comment if you don’t agree!

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