Author: Jeremie Averous

How to Resist Patent Trolls (Video)

We have written several times on this blog on the patent troll phenomenon, these entities trying to make money by owning widely applicable patents and attacking normal companies for wrongdoing (links below).

This excellent TED video gives an excellent explanation of the phenomenon and what you should do if it happens to you.

It also reminds a great lesson of what to do when you are taken hostage by someone. Concentrate on your objective and don’t let yourself be impressed.

Follow this link if you can’t see the video.

Previous posts on patent trolls:

Hat tip to Tim Berry for the link

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Why We Should Stop Treating Our Organizations Like Machines

“These days, a different ideal for organizations is surfacing. We want organizations to be adaptive, flexible, self-renewing, resilient, learning, intelligent – attributes found only in living systems. The tension of our times is that we want our organizations to behave as living systems, but we only know how to treat them as machines” says Margaret Wheatley.

fourmis de feu
Those Amazon basin ants self-organize as floating rafts to survive the periodic tropical inundations. A powerful example of collaborative organization in an unpredictable environment.

This is an absolutely powerful way to expose the tension that increases nowadays between the Industrial Age’s process-driven, “machine-like” organization and the Collaborative Age’s network that serves to produce value.

Comparing the Collaborative organization to a living system is clearly spot on. It is an ecosystem that achieves results through temporary collaboration, creativity through serendipity and random encounters.

Alas, the mechanistic view of organization is still very present. This creates huge waste and low satisfaction of those who participate in these organizations. This tension will increase in the next few years in all traditional organizations until it will resolve either through a crisis or through a transformation.

And you, are you ready to consider organizations as living systems?

Hat tip to Valeria Maltoni for the quote and Robert Branche for the image (on the cover of his new book, “les Radeaux de Feu“).

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Hope is not a strategy. And Uncertainty is your best friend.

I stumbled upon this statement as headers in a post by James Altucher about what he learned being a trader. As a trader and faced continuously by uncertainty and impossibility to predict the future, he learnt some basic wisdom that should help us in today’s even more uncertain environment.

Uncertainty vs certaintyHope is not a strategy: hoping that something will unfold positively in the future, without any underlying indication, is not very useful. It is counterproductive because you won’t be taking any action. Hope is passive.

Uncertainty is your best friend: it might be a bit rock-n-roll but only thanks to uncertainty can we hope to create our space in the world. If everything was certain, our fate would be decided and why would we do any effort? How could we expect to trace our own way? It is up to those who know how to thrive in uncertainty to create change in the world and to create success for themselves.

Drop passive hope and work on better taking advantage of uncertainty. These are key skills in the world today. When do you start?

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Why Security is a Superstition – and What to Do when Feeling Safe

“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.” – Helen Keller.

medieval castle
Are you sure you’ll be safe behind these walls?

This is a powerful quote. The late Industrial Age brought us the concept of personal security and stability but that was an illusion, and will ever be. As Helen Keller says, avoiding danger and adventure is no safer than plunging voluntarily into it. Still we seem to have a hard-wired need for a feeling of security. This is visible in many ways in our daily lives.

Again and again, life demonstrates that it is better to be agile and changing than to stay in the illusions of security. Which brings to the following conclusion: when you feel safe, enjoy, but it this feeling stays for too long, maybe it is time to put back into question your personal circumstances and start another adventure. Are you ready?

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How Crowdfunding Demonstrates the Power of the Long Tail

Kickstarter, a leading crowdfunding site, released very interesting statistics about the crowdfunding activities it supports. On this site, 1 billion dollars of funding will be reached early 2014 with more than 5 million total backers!

funded by Kickstarter What is particularly interesting is that the long tail, so typical of the Fourth Revolution, is at work everywhere: in the distribution of the value of successful projects (75% of projects have a value of less than 10,000$), in the distribution of the number of projects backed by backer (71% only backed a single project and this represents a stunning 40% of the total amounts spent).

This serves to confirm that crowdfunding does leverages the contribution of individuals in a fully distributed manner. As the US federal government and Security Exchange Commission is finalizing regulations that will allow companies to be funded by crowdfunding within certain limits (read this excellent article on the subject, “The promise and perils of equity crowdfunding“), we do observe a definite shift in the capability of individuals to influence projects and even companies on a global level and a decisive manner.

This is a definite shift in the economical power of our societies. Watch for the creative stuff that will ensue!

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What to Do When Reaching a Goal Seems Impossible

“When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goals, adjust the action steps.” – Confucius

minimal-staircaseThis ancient wisdom is still very much applicable today. It goes against our tendency to let go too quickly of goals that seem unattainable. It just pushes us to revise our present ambitions to avoid despair and still continue towards our lofty goal. It focuses us on adjusting the present level of challenge without doubting that we will reach our goals.

 

 

When you are stuck or overwhelmed by the level of challenge, do adjust the steps so that they are smaller and easier. Don’t change your goals!

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How to Overcome the Stockholm Syndrome of Traditional Employment

Following on our blog “What is so Awful About the Disappearance of Hierarchy?“, and the fact that many people feel attached to traditional hierarchical organizations as a kind of comfort anchor, I find that an interesting phenomenon to prompt thinking is the “Stockholm Syndrome”.

stockholm-syndromeThis psychological syndrome appears after hostage-taking situations, where the hostage might have developed a comfort feeling from small attentions the hostage taker might have had for him/ her. In spite of an overall terrible and violent picture of an hostage situation, it happens that a very strong emotional connection develops, where the hostage defends the hostage-taker. The hostage feels like the hostage-taker cares, whereas this is absolutely not the case.

It might be a stretch, but would it not be a similar case regarding the attachment of many people to traditional, hierarchical organizations? Employees are the first to complain loudly how they feel mistreated, poorly recognized, and how work is a burden; and at the same time, presented with alternative types of organization, they defend the traditional hierarchy because of the comfort provided and the small attentions given from time to time (gifts, bonuses and other recognition material).

We know when we are taken hostage in everyday life when we feel vulnerable, powerless and at the mercy of other people. Don’t let it happen to you even within normal employment: find your freedom space, including financially, and don’t feel at the mercy of your employer. And avoid absolutely the Stockholm syndrome!

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What is so Awful About the Disappearance of Hierarchy?

As I was giving a conference in Singapore I talked about how the Fourth Revolution will certainly lead to the disappearance of traditional hierarchy in organization.

hierarchyThe reason is that Industrial Age hierarchy was justified by the scarce and expensive communication capabilities. This resulted in the pyramidal organization, which minimizes the number of links between individuals. Today with cheap and plentiful communication, organizations should become much flatter and networked.

Anyway I must have touched a ‘hot button’ because my remark did spur a lot of questions. Attendees seemed terrified by the perspective of the disappearance of traditional hierarchy. It might be because it gives some comfort and single point of reference (the boss) which makes it a more comfortable situation to be in compared to being in the midst of a network with uncertainty as to what needs to be done and how. Still some organizations do manage to be successful that operate in a fully non-hierarchical manner (see the blog post on the company Valve).

Removing hierarchy requires each of us to determine its objectives and be self-directed when it comes to what needs to be done. I fully understand that proposition might look scary to those used to work in a traditional environment. Still isn’t it an interesting value proposition that includes more freedom? Is it worth it? Can everyone adapt to this new organization? What do you think?

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How to Push Ourselves Hard – and Not Break

In our previous post ‘How Courage Is a Skill and How It Can Be Developed‘ we explained that courage can be developed through exercise; and one of these is to expose oneself progressively to harder and tougher situations.

Stretch yourselfAs a health reminder it is important to know how to stretch oneself without over-stretching to the point of rupture or to the point of becoming hurt.

Christopher Penn says it well in this post about his experience in the field of martial arts:
“That’s the danger of a lot of the “self-actualization” advice being given. It’s conceptually reasonable advice – shoot for your dreams – but the uncomfortable truth is that many of us, myself included, don’t always have a realistic perception of where we actually are with our skills, with our capabilities, with our resources. We can believe we have abilities or resources we don’t actually have, and when we try to make our leap, we fall far short of where we believe we should be.”

“So how do you benchmark yourself? You put yourself in adverse conditions that are reasonably safe and you work on breaking your delusions until you know where you are. The easiest way to do that is to try with a reasonably low risk project that forces you to put all your skills to the test.”

It is important to stretch oneself outside one’s comfort zone, and it is also important not to over-stretch so as to avoid to get hurt. The only way is to test the limits and know where to pause for a while. It is only possible to identify this limit by trial and error – and most importantly, by staying conscious of your own reactions, of being aware of your own self.

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How Courage Is a Skill and How It Can Be Developed

Courage is a mental skill. As such, as we know now, it can nurtured and developed – because we can act to change our minds through regular exercise. That is a fundamental discovery of the latest decades as we move into the Fourth Revolution mindset.

weight training
How you need to improve your courage (daily)! – as a metaphor?

As with all mental capabilities it is thus possible to train and develop our courage. Even if we start without having any. It just requires consciousness of the need and dedicated commitment to train.

There are two approaches to this training, which are complementary:

  • dealing progressively by exposing ourselves with more ever difficult situations (like weight training)
  • increasing our knowledge of the situation at hand to diminish the ignorance and lack of skill factor, which increases our fear.

I decidedly believe that exposing oneself to the object of our fear is a great way to train ourselves to overcome the stumbling blocks that we sometimes set ourselves on the way to achieve what we want. I might have a hard time sleeping for a few days before a first, like a speech in front of a large audience or before a CEO of a large company, but the most important is to go for it, willingly.

How do you go for it yourselves?

For more information on this topic, read a complete post by Steve Pavlina, an experienced coach.

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What’s the Point of Being Courageous?

What is courage? “Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.” – Ambrose Redmoon.

courageous without saddle?
Is it courage when you don’t saddle up?

That idea was even expressed more forcefully by John Wayne: “Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway” (personal note: there is a border between courage and recklessness – that might be the saddle part).

The most important question remains – what is the use of being courageous? Anais Nin gives us the answer: “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage“. We need to be courageous to expand our lives and reach out to our wants, beyond our comfort zone.

Courage in life is not an option. Yes, we are all scared. Still, what about saddling up, right now?

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