Career in the Collaborative Age | The Fourth Revolution Blog

Why You Should Not Let Success Isolate Yourself

Success isolates. It may not look like it, because success breeds courtship by a number of followers praising you all the time, but the truth is that success does isolate from true friends and trusted feedback. At least if we let it happen.

For the creative, and for entrepreneurs, which are subset of the creative, this is a major issue, because exchanging ideas and having real, tough conversations with others is at the source of creativity. Thus if the successful creative lets isolation take place as per the natural evolution of things, creativity will dry up!… And so will success, one day or the other

Actually the rule should be that more success should leave more time to create trustful, deep relationships. It will require a lot of effort because success tends rather to breed superficial relationships with many people that want to take a lot of time. Yet again and again, I have observed how ‘successful’ people became more and more isolated from their true friends that could tell them the truth, how tough and difficult to hear it could be.

It can be tough to get constructive contradiction from friends, but that’s the only way to grow. If you encounter success, beware of the isolation trap and how it will limit your potential!

Three Unexpected Issues of the Collaborative Age

In a remarkable talk, Scott Belsky (Head of Behance, the leading online platform for creatives to showcase their creative work), shares some very interesting findings about the operation of the Collaborative Age’s internet.

He initially supposed that:

careers would be more independent and distributed
people would be far more collaborative
opportunity would be increasingly determined by merit, creating a new meritocracy.

Practically, through the platform he founded, he found that meritocracy, innovation and access to opportunity are not natural on the web. In particular:

niche communities tend to be created which limit the ‘long tail effect’ and prevents encounter-driven creativity
the critical mass concept for rating work does not fully work, and a lot of creative work gets commoditized for a low price (e.g. logo creation)
there is a very widespread lack of attribution on the web, which limits the value of creative people’s portfolio and the leverage they can get from it.

It is not yet clear if these issues are structural issues of the Collaborative Age, or if they are transition issues as the Fourth Revolution unfolds.

Listen to his talk here:

Why You Need to Give Yourself Permission for New Ideas

“New ideas won’t appear if you don’t have permission within yourself” – Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, quoted in the book Focus by Daniel Goleman. He continues “When I was a VP at Oracle, I took off to Hawaii for a month just to relax, and when I did that it opened up my career to new ideas, perspectives, and directions.”

You need to give yourself permission and time to release your creativity. This is often related to giving yourself permission to disconnect and be creative. This might then take the shape of a walk, or of a couple of days off, undisturbed by the concerns of your usual occupation.

I can testify that my most creative moments have been related to a change of scenery and some time to think and develop new ideas.

So, if you want to be creative, create the space for it. You can’t find and explore new ideas if you stay in your daily grind and don’t spare time and space for this essential activity. It is not easy to give ourselves permission to do that because we all run very busy lives. But essential for change and your personal growth as well.

When will you give yourself permission for some time and space off?

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”

I 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).

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.

At 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?

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.

This 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.

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.

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).

Collaborative 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“.

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.

I 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!

Why the Law of Financial Viability is Important

When starting a new pursuit or a new venture, it is important to remember ‘The Law of Financial Viability’: “When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, seek evidence of whether people are willing to pay for it. If you find this evidence, continue. If not, move on” – writes Cal Newport in his book So Good They Can’t Ignore You.

Hence it is essential to determine as quickly as possible (based on a demonstrator or Minimum Viable Product as they say in the Lean Startup movement) whether people are really ready to pay for what you want to offer. That is also applicable to a career change – are people willing to hire you?

And there is a significant distance between people saying that that they’s be interested and they would be happy to pay – and people really, actually paying.

One of the interesting consequences of this observation is that it is far better to have the first customers pay a little something rather than giving for free: it will prove that people are happy to reach their wallet, which is a significant psychological hurdle; and as an associated benefit it will force you to get your payment and invoicing processes up and running.

To summarize, Cal quotes Derek Sivers as saying: “When it comes to decisions affecting your core career, money remains an effective judge of value. If you’re struggling to raise money for an idea, or are thinking that you will support your idea with unrelated work, then you need to rethink the idea”

Demonstrate the value of your idea by effectively getting money for it.

How Age Changes our Outlook on What We Can Achieve

I’d like to thank Mary Cravets for an insightful comment on my post ‘How We Underestimate What We Can Do in Ten Years‘. In this post we comment the statement that ‘People always underestimate what they can do in ten years and overestimate what they can do in a week’. Mary commented that our perspective on this timeline will probably change considerably between our 20’s and our 40’s.

too-late-to-start? — It is never too late to start something awesome and different! Here in the case of entrepreneurs

For sure when we reach 40 or 50 we will have grown consciously through a few decades, and in hindsight most of us can measure how much change we have introduced in our lives in the space of a typical decade. When we are 20, our experience in the matter is more limited. Hence we might believe more in the statement with maturity.

On the other hand, when we are 20 we think we can take the world by storm; at 40 or 50 most people are a bit more prudent. If they have met significant hardship or disappointment on the way they might even be pessimistic about how much they can change the world around them and this might prevent them to take initiative. Our level of energy and endurance might also have sagged on average (it is not true for everyone!).

Age and experience does change our outlook on what we can achieve. There will be, depending on the person, positive and negative tensions that will or not lead to take initiative.

Personally, I try to reinvent myself about every 7-8 years, professionally at least. That is what I have done in the past. Those changes are a bit tough sometimes, but they can be managed. And it is fun! The more I age, the more I want to continue to do that, because it is fun and I like to discover new things. And right now I am quite sure that what I will be doing in a decade will be quite different from what I think today. What about you?

Why is Deliberate Practice so Powerful?

“This focus on stretching your ability and receiving immediate feedback provides the core of a more universal principle— [deliberate practice] – one that I increasingly came to believe provides the key to successfully acquiring career capital in almost any field” writes Cal Newport’s in his book ‘So Good They Can’t Ignore You’.

We have already mentioned this concept of deliberate practice in the post where we reviewed the book ‘Talent is overrated’. Practice is not sufficient. It needs to be accompanied by pertinent and frequent feedback and challenge.

The psychologist who came with the concept, Ericsson, is quoted as writing “Most individuals who start as active professionals… change their behavior and increase their performance for a limited time until they reach an acceptable level. Beyond this point, however, further improvements appear to be unpredictable and the number of years of work… is a poor predictor of attained performance“.

Practice that is not deliberate will soon lead to a performance plateau. Get frequent feedback and stretch yourself constantly to reach mastery instead.

Now… how can you develop more deliberate practice in the activities you’d like to become great at?

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