Category: Career in the Collaborative Age

How Competency Also Requires Emotional Intelligence

In a short and powerful blog ‘The confusion about competence‘, Seth Godin reminds us how competency is not just about grades, certificates but also about the ability to perform emotional labor.

In some countries such as for example France, India or China, the university one graduates from defines one’s career capability – even many years later. But the selection criteria used on young people do not involve any assessment of the ability to perform emotional labor, to be emotionally intelligent. And this makes so many super-graduated people incompetent in real life. They can only thrive in protected social settings.

“It doesn’t take a genius to see that competence is no longer about our ability to press certain buttons in a certain sequence. Far more often, competence involves the humanity required to connect with other people, in real time. It requires emotional labor, not merely compliance.”

Well said!

 

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How to Re-Engineer Higher Education

This column by Seth Godin in Medium is worth reading: ‘“Will this be on the test?” Rethinking online education“. Seth Godin is an acclaimed marketing guru who we have often quoted in this blog. He is also a founder of what he calls an alternative MBA or altMBA. His educational approaches in this program are widely different from conventional higher education, and he explains why there are dramatically more effective – and why MooCs are not so successful.

Industrial-Age Higher Education: the student factory

Traditional higher education is defined by institutions: “large universities that have built their institutions around lectures, tests and accreditation. So have many internal training functions.” This is why the main question is not whether one learns useful things, but whether it will be on the test as the only objective is to pass.

Online learning developed by universities is just a transfer into the online space of universities’ basic assumptions, which don’t really work. This explains why after an initial fervor for MooC, we find out now that most participants lack engagement and 99% of students don’t finish the courses.

Seth Godin’s proposal, executed in his acclaimed altMBA program is: “At its core: enrollment, not tests. Experiences not media consumption. Peer to peer, not top down“. This has been the foundation for a very successful program for executives. Those principles could be used for the re-foundation of higher education in the Collaborative Age.

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How to Do Our Work So Well It Becomes Art

Mitch Joel states in a blog: “When done well, your work becomes art.” “That’s probably the only sign of success that personally excites me. Fame? Money? Likes? Shares? Follows? When the work that you’re doing is, literally, considered art, it truly transcends.”

“This is one of the exact reasons why people laud business luminaries like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. They elevated the ordinary of business to an art form (whether you love their brands or not). You can see this type of magic in everything from business to martial arts.”

This is a great pointer towards excellence in whatever we are producing at work. Even more when one considers that art is an expression that aims at changing the way we look at the world, through the production of all sorts of emotional impact.

We should aim at work to produce stuff that changes the world. This should be the basic measuring stick of our success at work. Let’s thus have the mindset to produce art

And you, how are you measuring the impact of your work?

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How to Overcome the Difficulty of Working ON the Business While Being IN the Business

“Entrepreneurs know all too well how difficult it is to work in the business and work on the business at the same time. Creating the product, delivering a service, often also getting the word out and developing customers are a full job already. Yet we also need to take some time to step back and look at the big picture — where is the business going? What opportunities might we miss because we simply don’t see them?” says Valeria Maltoni in her post ‘The Seven Deadly Diseases of Management‘

This is of course a major difficulty I live with every day as an entrepreneur. When we get a great mission with a client that takes all our time and most of our intellectual capacity, it takes a lot of will to continue doing marketing and business development, not to mention R&D and exploration of new topics that could bring a lot of value to the business and to the clients.

Still it must be done unless, on the short term, we have long inter-missions with no revenue or, on the long term, the company becomes irrelevant.

I have not found better than a lot of self-discipline, reminders and a list of business development actions to be taken every week. Still I have not found a great magic solution to resolve the conundrum. Any suggestion?

The best situation I have experienced is of course to stop being in the business in the sense of being involved in operations (acting as director and involved in the strategy). This has the drawback of not solving the paycheck issue one has when in charge of his family. However increasingly I tend to try to diminish my time compensated by clients and spend more time outside of the business thinking about how to grow it, because that is really the most effective at the end.

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How Remote Teams Can be More Productive Than Colocated Teams

This interesting post on Techcrunch ‘Not even remotely possible‘ makes the point that a remote team can be quite more productive than if they are colocated.

“Quite apart from the time and rent saved, there’s growing evidence that remote teams can be more productive than in-person ones. Consider: “We found massive, massive improvement in performance — a 13% improvement in performance from people working at home.” Consider companies like Automattic, Gitlab, InVision, and Zapier, all of which thrive as fully remote companies.” [the Stanford link is a study made on China’s largest travel agency]

The interesting point here is how the way we work changes because of remoteness: “The biggest transition from office to remote work isn’t the geography; that’s incidental. The biggest transition is the mode of communication, which goes from default-synchronous (walk over to your colleague’s desk) to default-asynchronous (PM them on Slack.) I certainly concede that certain forms of work, and certain people, benefit more from synchronous communications; but I put it to you that “most kinds of software development” is not among them, and that an ever-increasing fraction of the world’s work can be described as “most kinds of software development.””

Managing remote teams and getting traction from home is the future. It saves money, environmental disruption and is even more productive! So why wait?

 

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How one’s Status Should be Earned and be Limited

In our previous post ‘How Different Power and Status Are‘ we exposed the differences and why it is important to seek to develop some Status, and not just Power to progress in conversations and be successful.

At the same time it is important not to seek too much Status (or to concentrate just on seeking it) because it will become, beyond a threshold, a manifestation of one’s ego.

Thus status is dangerous concept because it may lead to a disconnect with the reality of the action, and too much self-centering. Status and the external perks and benefits associated with it is important but ideally it should be temporary and diminish after a certain period unless steps are being taken to justify it.

Status should be earned and should be related to one’s actions. And that’s where the concept becomes difficult.

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How Different Power and Status Are

We are sometimes tempted to assimilate Power and Status. But these are quite different things. Valeria Maltoni in her post ‘Compound Effects in Influence‘ explains clearly the difference. And why we should try to aim at developing a bit of status as a way to be heard in the world – and not just power.

Status, but what about Power?

“Power and status are two major dimensions in social hierarchy. When we have no power, it is status that helps us be heard.

Because status is something we earn through respect and competence, only others can give it to us. Power gives us control over resources, and it’s something we may be able to take based on that. But only focusing on power means we’re missing the opportunity to develop status — and status helps us play the long game in relationships, and in life.

In relationships, when we have power but no status, we may use that power to retaliate by using that power to degrade others. This is the mechanism that locks bullies into a perpetual cycle of escalating consequences if not addressed.
When we’re under the influence of raging emotions, we’re not watching for our biases and assumptions creeping into our arguments and thinking. This prevents us from using reason to understand what is really going on. We may be too close to the dynamics and situation and seek comfort in all the wrong places.”

Of course there is still the dimension of influence in addition to Power and Status. But understanding clearly the difference between Power and Status is essential.

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How to Bounce Back from a Setback

We all have from time to time to recover from a setback, which may be more or less substantial and structural. That’s also part and parcel of experimenting. An excellent post in Lifehack ‘How I Bounced Back From a Fiasco‘ gives a useful list of activities to perform when one intends to bounce back from a setback or failure.

The headers are as follows:

  1. Give up the victim mindset
  2. Change the setting (environment)
  3. Know Yourself
  4. Body First
  5. Mull it Over and get it Out
  6. Set Goals

I find this list interesting in particular the first items and the emphasis on maintaining the body in shape throughout the process. And you?

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How Lifetime Employment Has Become Impossible As the LifeSpan of Companies Dwindles

I stumbled on the enclosed picture and I found it was a great way to illustrate the tremendous change from the Industrial Age to the Collaborative Age.

Where life employment could be a reasonable assumption, the average lifespan of companies today requires us to rethink that perception completely.

And this represents the average lifespan of the larger companies, not considering even smaller companies that are generally less stable over time.

Our own lives transcend the life of temporary organizations. Organizations become more and more transient organizations built around a project. They are rarely developing into a sustainable organization of its own, and are often acquired by other businesses.

The time of companies’ instability has come. Are you prepared?

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How Taking Vacations Is a Requirement for Transparency

The Forbes paper ‘5 Reasons Why You Need to Make Key Employees Take Their Two-Week Vacations‘ (by the way a very US problem description) makes an interesting point in that it is essential to have employees take vacation for transparency sake – and be replaced in the their position by other people doing the interim.

Examples of large recent frauds in organizations involve people who don’t take vacations, or who don’t make what they are working on accessible to others even if they are taking time off.

It is therefore essential in high risk or stakes environments to have people being replaced at least temporarily by others that would have access to their files. This is an essential fraud prevention lever which I believe is often underestimated by fraud prevention frameworks. And vacations is the right opportunity (in addition to more frequent job rotation, which is another technique used historically by many organizations and governments).

Another reason why taking vacations is mandatory!

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How the Fourth Revolution Will Create New Occupations

In this interesting Guardian post ‘The meaning of life in a world without work‘, Yuval Noah Harari explains that he sees a new class arise in a few decades: the useless class, spending their time deep playing in virtual worlds and creating no value to society. People who are not just unemployed, but unemployable.

The lift operator, an occupation that was replaced by automation a while ago

I believe this is an erroneous vision. Again and again in the history of humanity, deep transformations of society have created situations where we could not envisage how we would keep busy and contribute to society in a few decades’ time. And it is true that in the transition a lot of people now past their 40’s might find it difficult to adapt to the new social conditions and find their place in the future society.

As a simple example, I wonder how the lift boys have been considering their replacement by automation!

However, again and again history has shown that people get busy and bring value to society in new ways that can’t really be fathomed a few decades earlier. Yes, probably the concept of industrial-age ‘job’ will disappear; a lot of current trades will become obsolete, and basic low qualification work will be replaced by robots. I remain quite optimistic however that we won’t end with a large percentage of people subsidized to do nothing while a minority would create social value. It is not the direction of history, and in spite of an increasing abundance I am sure that the same will happen again: our occupations of tomorrow can’t even be imagined, but they will be present.

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How the Fourth Revolution Should Remain Human-Centered

While digitalisation is at the core of the Fourth Revolution, it is important to realize that the transformation of our society will remain human-centered.

There is a definite anticipation that a lot of duties currently performed by humans will be automatized and that robots and algorithms will perform duties actually not possible until now. This is correct, but going beyond by believing that the Fourth Revolution will deploy without close relationship with the human element is not realistic.

New robotic and data analysis capabilities should be seen as extending human reach and capability rather than replacing it. Of course this is meant in general. Some trades will definitely be replaced by robots. However, in general the tools that will be made available to us will extend our performance and the successful ones will be at our service. They will thus allow us to create revolutionary products and services.

Those successful services and concepts will be those that will leverage best the synergy between the human element and the fantastic new capabilities offered to us by free global communications and almost unlimited computing power. Complete robotisation that would not serve primarily to extend our capabilities is an illusion.

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