Author: Jeremie Averous

Stop to be Excessively Specialized – Become a Generalist to be Successful in the Collaborative Age

In the late Industrial Age, to be successful in our careers we were supposed to be specialists. How often did I hear career advice in the form of dismissing any effort at being rather a generalist (and generally, deploring that I did not want to specialize in a well-recognized discipline).

Mutitasking (exaggerated)
Are you a Jack of All Trades?

Being specialized was great for the organization because the bureaucracy could fit you in a pre-determined box, could figure out what you should or could become, figure out what to pay you and in general, identify you as a particular commodity type. The Corporation hated types that could not be classified properly.

In the Collaborative Age, being excessively specialized is becoming a burden. We are not speaking here of being a Jack of All Trades; what we support rather is that the Knowledge Enhancing Exchaning Networker (K.E.E.N.) of the Collaborative Age needs to be a generalist with a few areas of particular excellence.

Excessive specialization precludes agility. Specialization is based on deep knowledge of something which necessarily stems from the past; it might help understand similar features in the future but certainly not significant, disruptive changes that would come from somewhere else. The specialists of the cathodic screen – a highly complicated device – have been wiped out by flat screens in a merciless manner.

Today you need to understand enough of the world to be agile enough. That is being a generalist. being well-travelled is a great way to understand the limits of personal assumptions. Of course, you also need to be world class at certain skills – and they might not be those skills that had been painfully codified by the Industrial Corporation. It might be creativity, leadership, networking, a gift for understanding computer code…

In start-ups everybody needs to do a bit of everything – which is also why deep specialists won’t fit in. Start-ups are about creating a new way of doing certain things – not repeating the old ways even slightly better. They don’t need specialists to thrive. They need generalists.

Even the Harvard Business Review makes the case for General Managers in this post “Bring back the General Manager“, lamenting that departmentalization of corporations since the early 1980’s has fostered specialist careers and that organizations are missing generalist General Managers!

Successful people of the Collaborative Age will be generalists with certain highly developed gifts. Don’t become a too narrow specialist. Open your eyes to the world and get ready to contribute through multiple channels.

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How to, and Why Foster our Enthusiasm

According to Churchill, keeping enthusiasm when moving from failure to failure is the key to success. According to Emerson, “nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm“. What happens here?

Nothing GREAT was ever achieved without enthusiasmEnthusiasm, etymologically, means ‘inspired by the Gods‘, or even ‘possessed by the Gods‘. It described a quasi-divine state of excitement and zeal. It describes an energy that we can’t really explain, due to an attraction to an idea, a goal, a calling.

Can you foster enthusiasm? Do you need to wait for that Divine spark and energy? What can you do kindle your enthusiasm?

I believe that we can certainly work to improve our enthusiasm and excitement and do not need to wait for divine inspiration. It is certainly the key to much action and realization. We need to foster it and grow it within us.

How can we do that? By caring about our enthusiasm and helping it grow, notwithstanding ‘failures’ and ‘successes’. What counts is the journey, and how enthusiastically we discover more of the world around us and how we can influence it.

Kindle you enthusiasm, you need it; and we need it!

 

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Moving from Failure to Failure without losing Enthusiasm

I like this quote by Winston Churchill – “Success is the ability to move from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm“.

It triggers a lot of questions and reflection.

Maze of life
Are you lost in the midst of the maze, going from failure to failure?

The ability to move from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm is certainly a great quality and skill. Does that really lead to success? It depends what you mean by success. For sure, the road to success – in the sense of a unique contribution to our world-  is littered with failures that need to be overcome. Failures that teach. Failures to be perfect. Failures of skill, timing and opportunities.

Still, does personal success and well-being require those failures? Maybe those failures are the stuff that we need to become aware of what we need to learn. And our ability to learn from our failures is certainly the key.

What did you learn from your last failure or half-failure?

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Why Writing is a Key Skill – and How it Can be Learned

I love writing. I love the way it forces me to put my thoughts together in the right order, how it shows whether what I think is logical and meaningful. Writing undoubtedly also exercises my creativity.

Writing imageI did not always love writing. I was quite crappy as a young student. I improved. Today I write a lot, and I exercise in writing a lot (this blog is part of the exercise!). It’s clearly a skill that can be improved. Today I can write very quickly good quality pieces of text. It has become such a skill that it is part of the foundation of my professional success as a consultant (writing procedures and reports, anyone?).

This astonishing article “The Writing Revolution” even shows how imparting writing skills to struggling students can change their lives and their grades. How giving them the skills to express themselves clearly and logically improved their level in almost every topic. A school introduced that and it is now becoming a standard throughout the US.

Further to writing by itself, writing and publishing to the world is a further skill where you need to overcome shyness.

In the Collaborative Age, writing as a skill is even more important because we are using more writing than ever to communicate. Are you improving steadily your writing skills? if you are not, you should!

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Today More Than Ever, Powerlessness Doesn’t Fly! Do Something!

“Today more than ever, claiming powerlessness doesn’t fly. Excuses suck. There are people changing entire roles, departments, organizations.”

Leading Change
(courtesy of ondemandleadership.com)

“There are people starting companies because they couldn’t find one they wanted to work for. There are people changing careers, changing their lives, changing the perspectives of the people around them and earning the permission to do something new and different in even the most notoriously complex industries.” That’s a quote from Amber Naslund on her blog Brasstackthinking (read more of that post here).

She goes on – “Hell, people are reinventing industries right out from under the old models, and creating markets we’ve never seen.”

Are you still there, or already on your way to create something new and great?

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Industrial Age’s Compliance Doesn’t Work any More for Creative Organizations

In the Industrial Age, the typical manufacturing worker had to be compliant. Follow orders. In the Collaborative Age, where creativity matters as a key competitive advantage, using the same approach leads to disaster.

Paramilitary training
Getting Industrial Age recruits ready for service

One of the best examples I got about the spirit of the Industrial Age comes from a plant project in a remote areas. It is important to employ locals – who had until then been only in the Agricultural Age. The key initiation for the new recruits is a paramilitary boot camp. Why? Because it trains for compliance, obedience, rigor, timeliness, self-maintenance… everything that you would expect from an Industrial Age worker. Thus the transition from the Agricultural Age to the Industrial Age is about imparting compliance. That’s exactly what the mandatory public school, after 1850, did to our economies (and still does, which is a problem).

Today, in the Collaborative Age organizations, the key is creativity and difference. In an excellent book “Weird Ideas that Work: How to Build a Creative Company“, Robert Sutton explains clearly why having people that don’t fit in the mold, misfits that don’t obey the organization’s social codes, is a key ingredient of success for creative organizations. Here are some of his weird ideas:

  • Hire slow learners of the organizational code and misfits
  • Hire people who make you uncomfortable even those you dislike
  • Encourage people to ignore and defy superiors and peers

Note exactly what you would expect to happen in a manufacturing organization!

Think about it. We are so much used to the Industrial Age organization that we take for granted that employees should be compliant. That’s true in manufacturing activities where you seek repeated similarity and minimum variation. That’s suicide in the creative organizations of the Collaborative Age.

Which side is your organization? Are you sure you are doing the right thing and not falling off to the comfort zone of the Industrial Age?

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The Nonsense of Copyright Life Extensions

Copyright is an institution of the Industrial Age that will be transformed deeply by the Fourth Revolution. Yet, while the availability of material on the internet that can be downloaded and reused for free is booming, while the cost of patent and copyright infringements lawsuits is exploding, this questions has not yet found the right answer.

Lock and Copyright sign
The Copyright institution, locking away troves of opportunities

Actually in the last 50 years the law has been constantly amended in the wrong direction, as mentioned for example in this post by Alex Tabarrok “Copyright unbalanced“: the duration of the protection has been increased from 28 years after a voluntary deposit to 95 years after publication (whether or not the copyright protection would have been sought).

This lengthening of copyright protection is at odds with the acceleration of our daily life and the much quicker obsolescence of content. Copyright protection duration should shrink, not be extended. These extensions are but the reflection of seeking undue benefits.

In the changes to the Copyright institution in the Collaborative Age, 10 years protection should be more than enough. Specific copyrights with different timeframes could also be implemented (1 month for news, 1 year for position papers…). Less developed countries where copyright rights are not defended strongly are benefiting of this situation to be more creative and to develop their own products. When will politicians and diplomats seriously tackle this issue which impedes our economies to grow and develop?

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Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

So many self-development books speak about “finding ourselves”! Is that really true? Do we have an innate ourselves that we need to seek through some layers of junk accumulated throughout the years?

Life is about creating yourself!This is a wrong concept. Life is about creating ourselves. Life is about building something – us. Life is about growth, change, finding the synergy between ourselves and our environment.

Life is about the choice we can make to become what we want to be, how we want to behave. The choice to give out to the world the effect of some of our incredible talents.

And isn’t it much more enticing to consider that we can make our life a life of building something unique, great, rather than just trying to figure out how we were made? Stop looking to the past for innate talents. Look into the future and grow. It is worth every minute of it.

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What is Strategy really about? Analysis or Action?

“Real strategy lies not in figuring out what to do, but in devising ways to ensure that, compared to others, we actually do more of what everybody knows they should do”. This quote by David H Maister in “Strategy and the Fat Smoker: Doing What’s Obvious but Not Easy” is actually a great insight. Read it again just to get it.

Fat person working out
Will you make the first step like this guy?

His view is that it is quite easy to know what you need to do; but that genius lies in effectively doing it. Like the Fat Smoker knows he needs to stop smoking and needs to go on a diet but for some reason it turns out to be too hard.

Would competitive advantage be more on the execution side than on the conceptual strategy side? As mentioned often in the field of startups, ideas by themselves have absolutely no value; what gives them value is their realization. It is the fact that you battle the world to give shape to your idea – probably pivoting and improving from time to time as you get feedback from the world.

Of course then all the usual issues about changing behavior and doing new things apply: do not set unrealistic expectations, set achievable intermediate goals and follow up on the long run, get support on your commitment from your environment, etc.

Remember that doing more theoretical analysis of your strategy is not very effective. What’s effective is to plow your way decidedly. Take action. Now.

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How we Need to Reinvent our Relationship with Nature

During the all the previous Ages, exploitation of nature was a central economic activity. This often meant killing ‘pests’ – when it was not to exploit wildlife directly (whales, fur animals…). Today, forests and wildlife come back with a vengeance!

Wolf, wildlife invades our life
What will we do with wildlife as it comes back?

This excellent paper of the Wall Street Journal “America Gone Wild” describes the situation in the US: wildlife booms and starts to impact severely the modern american way of life. In Europe, a generation of countryside hobby game hunters who were traditionally managing wildlife is also disappearing, opening the way to a more professional management of game and wildlife.

It is great to see that nature comes back and that the environment does improve in developed countries. Forests grow. Wildlife develops. Still as we are moving into the Collaborative Age we need to reinvent wildlife management to satisfy our wish of a dynamic wildlife and still manage it so that it stays within reasonable bounds that we can accommodate. This will need more professional, subsidized game management, probably involving professional hunters. A new institution, probably.

There will be some soul searching on that subject in the next years and decades; and there will certainly be some instances of excessive wildlife presence that will need to be curbed.

More importantly we need to invent a new relationship with nature. Let not the fear of the wolf so ingrained in our European minds will come back to haunt us! Not any more a confrontational or exploiting relationship, but a synergistic relationship that will make us thrive on Earth. Are you ready to contribute?

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If a Team could not Solve a Problem, the Person with the Information you Need was not Invited

This quote is from a presentation by Matt Fourie, a consultant specialized in problem-solving and thinking tools, at the last Project Management Institute regional conference in Singapore.

Empty chair in a meeting
Who in your your organization knows about the issue?

What he means is that throughout his decades of experience as a consultant helping organizations solve problems, he has found that in more than 95% of the cases, the solution and the understanding of the problem was known by someone in the organization. But that this knowledge was not mobilized effectively. This very much connects with my experience too – often by listening to the front line people, the answer is obvious.

Usual issues that impede proper problem solving are:

  • problem-solving meetings involve managers that do not know about the details of the operation
  • there is a disconnect between management and operators
  • people jump to conclusion (and action) without analyzing the data

It is where all the initiatives such as Total Quality management are really useful, as they seek to mobilize effectively all the organization members’ knowledge. Today with internal social networks we have a further opportunity to leverage that knowledge.

Next time when you face an issue in your organization, rather than looking for external answers, the first question you should ask is: “who would know the answer in the organization, who should I include in the discussion?”. Do that today! You’ll see the difference.

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How to Respond to the Question: “Who Are You To Do This?”

As I try new things outside what people would expect to be my normal occupation (as defined by my diplomas, certificates and list of positions), a question I often get is “Who are  you to do this?.. do that?..”.

Distinguished Professor teaching students
Do you need to be certified, chartered, PhD to teach effectively?

At first I was a bit disturbed by the question. I did not have the certificate to train! I did not have the diploma to facilitate! I am not a certified consultant (yes, certification programs also exist for consulting!). My answer now is: “I am a passionate human being”.

Of course there are some areas for which I needed to have additional education. I am a Certified Professional Coach because I needed a structured program to get the competencies it entails. But for many other activities I have no formal paper to certify my competency. Still I manage to develop my brand and I get more and more clients.

As soon as you’ll try new things outside what non-imaginative people expect from you, based on your standard Industrial Age profile, you’ll get the question: “Who are you to do this, to do that?”. Don’t feel threatened. Know that you do that because you bring value to others and to yourself.

Don’t hesitate. The new world will be created outside the certifications, diplomas, courses and standards. The people that changed the world did that outside the usual framework and values of their time.

Go for it. If you feel you are the one that can do it, do it. For yourself. For the others.

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