VIDEO OF THE MONTH: Shereef Bishay – Open Enterprise: Applying Open Source Principles to the way we Work – on the organization of the Collaborative Age is a real eye-opener on how conventional workplace is boring and how to transfer open-source software development organization into ‘open enterprises’. Remember – conventional organizations are bust as a concept!
Shereef explains how to setup the organizations of the Collaborative Age and gives inspiring examples. Enjoy!…
Don’t miss my public talk on the 6 March 2012 at the Lee Kong Chian School of Business in Singapore at 7:30pm!
This talk is hosted by SPMI, the Singapore Chapter of the Project Management Institute. More information on this event on the website of the SPMI.
Pencil already this event in your agendas to discover Project Soft Power, the Secret of the Great Project Leaders! in a unique occasion before the publication of the book later this year!
I have been preparing this show for some time now, come and participate to a mind-changing occasion!
“The most successful project leaders rely not only on their technical and analytical skills, but also on strong personal and interpersonal practices. This speech will allow participants to understand the 5 practices of Project Soft Power, and how everybody can learn and practice them.”
Even if you are not involved in project management, this talk can still be of interest to you as it will describe those skills that are indispensable today for the K.E.E.N., as part of his leadership skills.
Come to attend this unique occasion!
This is a powerful quote, which got me thinking. It is interesting because of the ambiguity of the word “acting”: acting as in “doing”, or acting as in “actor”?… This ambiguity is great because it creates suddenly a greater understanding.
At some stage one needs to dive in a situation. Take the bike and try. And fall. And try again. And fall. Until such time where biking will become a skill that will change the view on the surrounding world.
Much better and more effective certainly than staying at the side of road, looking at the bike, and over-thinking how to make it work.
An other practical example I know is influencing one’s posture to change one’s mood and outlook on things. Not by thinking – but by doing, by acting in the sense of the actor, can we change the way we think!
Basically, whatever you want to do, don’t over-think it. Just go and do it. Even if you fall a few times, you’ll get on to something. And your outlook on the world will change. And so will the world.
[This great quote’s origin is a bit hard to trace. Some internet sources mention Millard Fuller, and it has been repeatedly and widely quoted since it appeared in the book “Execution: the Discipline of Getting things done” by Cassidy and Charan.]
The Fourth Revolution also creates revenue opportunities for the citizens of emerging countries in more surprising ways than being service providers for commodity services that still require creativity and intellectual initiative.
According to a World Bank report, the market of gaming-for-hire, where people get hired to play games and earn rewards or virtual money on behalf of richer players living in developed countries, was worth… 3 billion $ in 2009. In China and India alone, more than 100,000 “game laborers” would be playing day-in, day-out to be able to earn precious tokens, levels and virtual treasures to resell them to richer players that don’t want or cannot put in the time!
And a definite market for “microwork” develops where people implement simple tasks like tagging pictures, removing double pages at Amazon, and get paid a few cents per task, . More on microwork in this interesting article from the Economist on “Jobs of the Future”.
These are not necessarily jobs people would dream of, but they start to provide, and will provide more an more livelihood to developed countries.
Who doubted the Fourth Revolution was not happening?
Any worthwhile project will encounter resistance. Because it tries to change the status-quo. Because if it is worthwhile, it changes its environment significantly.
Here are some contrarian thoughts about this effect:
Now obviously there needs to be a measure of resistance in the process. It must not be so hard as to be impossible to overcome. Still it must be hard enough so that not so many people do overcome it.
Reevaluate your current personal and professional projects. Are they difficult enough? Are they too difficult?
Most importantly, drop those that are too easy. They are probably not worthwhile.
Two Google-related university teachers have just done a mindblowing experiment that overturns conventional university education.
We know that the Fourth Revolution will overturn most institutions we’ve inherited from the Industrial Age. The latest to date: Universities.
It’s still only a precursor, still it gives us the direction for what will happen in the next 10-20 years: the first online course from Stanford University, a course on Artificial Intelligence, has been given late 2011. The mindblowing detail of this experiment that ended up being a revolution is given in this post by Eric Salmon, “Udacity and the future of online universities“. Unexpectedly, more than 160,000 students from all over the world registered and the professors had to setup a dedicated website!. Extracts from the post:
“There were more students in his course from Lithuania alone than there are students at Stanford altogether. There were students in Afghanistan, exfiltrating war zones to grab an hour of connectivity to finish the homework assignments. There were single mothers keeping the faith and staying with the course even as their families were being hit by tragedy. And when it finished, thousands of students around the world were educated and inspired. Some 248 of them, in total, got a perfect score: they never got a single question wrong, over the entire course of the class. All 248 took the course online; not one was enrolled at Stanford”
WOW. WOW! And it’s not finished:
“The physical class at Stanford, which dwindled from 200 students to 30 students because the online course was more intimate and better at teaching than the real-world course on which it was based”
Read the rest of this mindblowing post! And right now, these teachers have decided to create a new online university, Udacity, which will propose soon online courses on a number of subjects, IT-related mainly.
So, what is really new? For some years already, large universities have made their courses accessible on the internet (see for example, Stanford Engineering Everywhere or MIT opencourseware); by this we mean the course material.
However, the lectures have never been given online, nor have students be graded or have taken exams exactly like if they were in the class. Sure it just got tried – and it works!
As many Industrial Age institutions, the classical university institution is now under siege. Sure, there will be a few more years before we’ll see macroscopic effects: this experiment has been done by IT-savvy professors who also work at Google, for IT-savvy students; it will take time before this spreads to the entire faculty and all subject matters.
Still, the university institution is in question and will soon be exactly in the same conundrum like physical newspapers or the publishing industry are today. Their economic model will become unstable because it is funded by big Industrial Age corporations that seek to produce commoditized degree-holders (see the blog post on “Leave alone the academic executive programs. Go and learn real life leadership! It’s cheaper and better!“). The logic of geographical concentration of university to enhance communication is obsolete as we have just seen demonstrated. So, be ready to see big changes. And Google is at the forefront of the new online university (the two teachers of that particular course are also working at Google), so that we can expect that Google will see the interest of reinventing the business model, leveraging lower fees to a much larger number of students.
Should the current universities not reinvent themselves in time (which is probable in view of the fate of most institutions when comes a fundamental revolution), other players will replace them, and they will disappear in the heap of Industrial Age institutions that did not manage to transform themselves…
If you want more in-depth analysis, more comments on this revolution in Alex Tabarrok’s blog: The Coming Education Revolution (August 2011) and Udacity (January 2012).
This post has been published early February in a slightly different version on Social Media Explorer: How Google is on the Way to Take over the Higher Education Market, where it has been viewed more than 700 times.
Once in a while I see an interesting idea for entrepreneurs and I note it down – I sometimes lose its origin though. Here are some words of wisdom for the would-be entrepreneur. Funny enough they could also apply to all of us individually.
“Profit in a business is like gas in a car. You don’t want to run out of gas, but neither do you want to think that your road trip is a tour of gas stations” – Tim O’Reilly in a post about Steve Jobs, ‘A focus on things that matter most‘. In the same post there is an quote from Steve Jobs: “My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products, the products, not the profits, were the motivation“. The lesson is that if you want to build a great companies, focus on the clients and the products first. Profit will come, as a consequence.
A useful piece of advice about cash flow management: Cash flow is like the depth of water below the keel of your ship. You don’t care if it’s more than what you need to move forward. It can be 100m or 2,000m and it makes no difference. But make sure you have enough to never run aground!
A fantastic concept from the last Jim Collins’s book, Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck–Why Some Thrive Despite Them All: “shoot bullets before you shoot cannonballs“, or in clearer terms, don’t commit large amounts of resources to a new project before you’ve tested it at small scale. The small scale experiments – the bullets – will give feedback and will allow to decide whether and where to shoot a cannonball that will commit lots of resources from the company. Do a lot of small scale experiments and shoot cannonballs rarely on those opportunities that are proven.
Do you have any useful piece of advice to add?
I have had some interesting reactions to the blog post “The art of overcoming the lizard: make U-turn impossible for some time!“. Is the ‘no U-turn’ metaphor the right one? Actually the popular imagery for making sure you move forward and you can’t move back is ‘burning bridges’. I had thought using this image first, but actually that’s wrong!
Burning bridges (or boats) was a very common tactic from military generals that wanted to make sure their army would not flee – one of the most famous examples is Cortes burning the boats that had brought the conquistadores to America in 1519. Even since time immemorial that was a motivation tactics: in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, we are told: “When your army has crossed the border [into enemy territory], you should burn your boats and bridges, in order to make it clear to everybody that you have no hankering after home.”
Is that really what you need to do? Right, after you burnt the bridge, the lizard brain can say what it wants, you need to move forward, or at least you can’t move backwards. But you have severely reduced your options; you might also have alienated a number of people, which will have negative influences in your future activities.
I believe it is enough to make sure you are in a “no U-turn” situation that makes sure you have to cross the bridge and taste the air on the other side. In particular when the “no U-turn” situation is linked to your ego, it is enough to calm down the lizard (I just resigned, I’m not going to come back to beg for my position, do I?).
So, simple piece of advice: don’t ever burn your bridges unless you are really compelled to to tame an insistent lizard brain. And that should never happen in normal life, only in life-and-death situation.
Take the highway and don’t look back, that’s enough!
In high-tech, breakthrough technology appears to be negatively correlated with R&D expenditure. In this amazing article, how Apple disrupted its market on a shoe-string R&D budget, we see how R&D expenditure (relative to the revenue of the company) does not correlate at all with market breakthrough, on the contrary.
Here is the curve given in the post. Other examples are developed in the post itself like Microsoft – high expenditure, low results.
We know that with the Fourth Revolution looming, the conventional R&D system is broken. The “R&D factories” that were created during the Industrial Age can’t produce the disruptive output we need to make a difference in the world.
As an other example, pharmaceutical companies are also suffering from the obsolescence of the former model where pumping money in R&D would automatically deliver a blockbuster later on.
What is the appropriate new model for R&D and breakthrough innovations?
A first part of the answer could lie in the ‘lean startup’ movement which is currently very trendy. What is the concept about? It says, basically, that prototyping is cheap today. Don’t spend years developing a perfect product you believe the market wants. Come out as soon as possible with a workable product, test your product as soon as you can on the market, and iterate like mad. Apple does exactly that: their products are always missing something that will come in the next iteration. And in the meantime they get plenty of feedback on what to improve.
A second part of the answer will lie in “Open Innovation” or “Crowd Innovation” as soon as it will have found an effective model.
Here is the conundrum: effective R&D (in the sense of market breakthrough) costs 10 times less and is 10 times more effective that what you think.
Should you do more of what you’re doing now or seek a new model for R&D, a model that will bring you through the Fourth Revolution?
I needed some graphical work done for my new book and I went online to try Elance.com, one of the networks of international freelancers (cf the post on “Today, the freelancing market is without borders. Did you realize it?“). I must say, the experience was very positive.
It is very simple: after opening an account for free, I put in a one-page description / specification of the job. After 72h I had already 15 to 20 proposals from contractors. Each of them had a link to their previous work so that I could see whether I liked the style; they also proposed a price. Contractors were from everywhere: Europe, USA, South America etc…
After a few days I finally made my choice for a contractor located in Argentina. After two weeks of collaborative work online (the graphic designer sending rough sketches, me commenting), I finally got what I needed, 5 characters to illustrate my book.
Elance.com secures the payment and delivery process and gives a lot of information on the contractor’s ratings on previous jobs, the comments of the previous clients etc, which is really helpful in selecting the contractor you need. Actually it appears there are many companies from emerging countries that seem to derive much of their income from platforms like Elance.com.
You are following this blog, so I know you understand what the Fourth Revolution is. Still even I can’t stop to be amazed at what we can do today with a computer and an internet access. Do you realize, I hired in less than one week a contractor who worked for me from the other side of the planet, in Buenos Aires, Argentina and it was like he was working close-by!
As I just arrived in Singapore I don’t have the network of local contractors yet. It is at a point where I won’t even look for a graphic designer or a translator locally! I’ll just go online and hire on the global market!
No profession is really protected anymore from the Fourth Revolution. Borders don’t really matter much.
And consider your own market, your opportunity field: it is worldwide, wherever you live. Did you realize it? When will you leverage on it?
PS: Wonder what these characters mean? I will share with you in a future post the five roles of Project Soft Power!
Today, for relatively simple services (graphic design, translation, virtual assistant, all sorts of website development etc) that can almost be called commodity services, the market is… worldwide. You can hire easily, from your desk, a service provider at the end of the world, North America, India or South America.. it does not really matter. Did you realize it?
Not convinced? Visit Elance or Freelance.com to see how those platforms propose to connect buyers and service providers, and what are all the possible jobs that can be done. Like E-Bay, these companies provide a platform that secures transactions, and they allow to examine the track record of buyers and sellers and the evaluations by previous users. Service providers can also show some samples of their work.
Those platforms for e-freelancing started typically in the early 2000s. Elance mentions a 100% increase of activity in this market in the last year and foresees another doubling in 2012. The overall market can be estimated to be far more than 500M$ in 2011, and will thus pass the billion $ mark in 2012.
Moreover, these services allow talented artists and individuals from emerging countries to take part to the worldwide market and benefit directly from the economy. Clearly that puts also pressure on the prices that can be proposed by service providers from developed countries. This is a fact today: for commodity services, the market is worldwide and that won’t change. The only way to charge higher prices is differentiation and creating longer term, emotional connection with the buyer. And career or business development can also be considered from home, using only internet to sell your services!
I remember how in Europe, a proposed regulation by the European Commission to allow the liberalization of services across borders was a big political issue in the middle of the last decade. Well, it looks that this debate has been made completely obsolete by the Fourth Revolution, at least for those services that don’t need physical work or presence.
In the next post I will describe my experience in using Elance, recruiting a… Argentinian (!) designer to produce the characters I needed for my next book, “Project Soft Power”.
Stay tuned! The Fourth Revolution has not finished to astonish you!
There is only one way to tame the lizard when doing a significant transition out of your comfort zone: make sure you can’t U-turn too soon!
In my previous post on the 10 useful learning points from preparing for my company launch, the first 4 points were basically about taming the lizard, the basic fear of the unknown.
In my case I have observed how the lizard was powerful, creating moments of very intense anxiety even if my situation moving forward was pretty secure seen from an external, rational viewpoint. Leaving habits, a sense of institutional security, a life I got used to manage quite easily, is a lot to bear for the lizard who seeks to protect us constantly.
Once I had taken the decision, I was pretty hasty in throwing in my resignation from my corporate job, a bit too hasty for some people. Yet it was necessary for me. After having put in my letter, I was on bridge to my new life. And U-turn was not possible, at least just now. It might still be somewhere along the way when I’ll have ventured on the the other side for some time, but for now I could just go onward, straight to the other side.
Sometimes it is necessary to make sure we can’t U-turn for some time. For the sake of overcoming the lizard. Plan for it if you intend to change significantly your life.
