Career in the Collaborative Age | The Fourth Revolution Blog

How to Get a Great Job and Career

Cal Newport’s advice in his book ‘So Good They Can’t Ignore You’ is quite clear: “if you want a great job, you need to build up rare and valuable skills— which I call career capital— to offer in return“. And it’s not about following your passion!

A great job or career would thus be a situation where we can find personal satisfaction by creating great value for the world.

This seems relatively straightforward when pondering: if you want a great occupation with relevant independence and time to create great stuff, you need to have rare and valuable skills that are highly in demand. Hence you can exchange these skills against money – of course -, and most importantly also a large number of non-monetary compensation and advantage. In brief, a high value.

Have you figured out what is really unique and valuable in what you are doing? It might be only a very small part of your occupation at the moment, why don’t you get better at it and make it a linchpin of your professional life?

How Mindfulness Is Becoming Mainstream in Organizations

Mindfulness has been in the air for some years, in particular in California start-ups. It even seems that having a meditating practice is kind of a social obligation in the Silicon Valley these days. It has now become mainstream and has noticeably been part of the Davos summit this year, whereas it would have been quite out of question a few years ago.

A number of interesting papers have been written on the matter, such as ‘At Davos, Rising Stress Spurs Goldie Hawn Meditation Talk’ on Bloomberg, ‘Amid the Chattering of the Global Elite, a Silent Interlude’ in the NY Times. Why them such popularity?

Of course the boilerplate explanations include: an increasingly stressful world, compounded by smartphone addiction which really does not help putting the mind at rest. People seek a way to unplug even for a few minutes, and some recipe to manage their stress. Some others squarely seek in meditation and mindfulness a competitive advantage.

All these explanations are valid, in particular the need to learn to deal with the much increased amount of solicitations we are subjected to. Deeply I believe it also responds to the need for the individual to increasingly own its actions, and respond rather than react, even inside Industrial Age organizations that were initially designed for individuals to act like cogs in a large machine.

Mindfulness will probably spread further in organizations. We must be careful not to fall in the trendy obligation or just a way to improve well-being in daily work. It must translate into a real change of the organization’s culture.

Let’s start. Just take 5 and breathe!

Why a Healthy Company Culture Encourages People to Share Bad News

“A healthy company culture encourages people to share bad news. A company that discusses its problems freely and openly can quickly solve them. A company that covers up its problems frustrates everyone involved” – says Ben Horowitz in his book ‘The Hard Thing About Hard Things’.

I have observed numerous times how cover-up cultures finally lead to disaster. The role of the leader is essential in that respect. Ben Horowitz continues: “The resulting action item for CEOs: Build a culture that rewards— not punishes— people for getting problems into the open where they can be solved“. In other words, don’t shoot the pianist!

That leadership approach is incompatible with control-and-command styles in particular when terror is part of it. It is easy to find out on what side an organization lies: just listen to people speak about senior management and whether they can be heard when they raise issues.

Of course it is also important to celebrate the good news when they happen. That should not be forgotten either, because the organization should not just look at issues. Some leaders fall in that trap as well.

Still, cover-up is not a sustainable proposal. Candidness is, and I have found over time that it is better to raise issues even if it can lead to being shot in the short term. If your leadership can’t bear bad news and goes up to dismissing you, it might not be worth staying anyway.

What Stops Change in Large Organizations

“An early lesson I learned in my career was that whenever a large organization attempts to do anything, it always comes down to a single person who can delay the entire project. […][Even] Small, seemingly minor hesitations can cause fatal delays” says Ben Horowitz in book ‘The Hard Thing About Hard Things‘.

I have the same experience and I find this quote very much to the point. In my executive and consulting years I have had much experience in large organizations of situations where an entire team wanted to change something, only to get rebuffed by a single person generally in a position of authority, or even a member of the team just not doing her work.

The decision to stop was generally taken for inadequate reasons – from selfish career considerations to belief that the person was more competent than the entire team proposing the change.

What should a leader do when a team comes up with enthusiasm with a proposal for a change that should greatly help the organization moving forward? In my view, give the keys and the responsibility to the team to implement that change, making sure that the interests of the rest of the organizations are protected. Empowering people is the best way to get great things done.

This bears a lesson for change managers – one of the most critical actions is to identify early those people that will slow down or even stop change. Sometimes they are easy to identify, sometimes they are hidden. Sometimes they are in positions of authority, sometimes they are not. Still they are always the cause for most change derailment in large organizations. Focus of change management should be to make sure they do not impede transformation.

How Following Your Passion is a New Concept

Following on our previous post “Why Following Your Passion is not (Necessarily) the Solution“, I was inpired by the author Cal Newport to use Google Ngram viewer to look at the history of the concept. The result is self-explanatory!

follow_passion — Follow your passion is a very new concept that exploded recently

So, following your passion is an extremely modern concept (currently very trendy it seems) in particular when compared with some other related concepts such as life purpose, love work:

In summary we’ve been having life purpose for a century, we’ve been substantially loving work for even more than that, but we’ve only considered following our passion for two decades. Isn’t that strange? I guess we can all draw an interesting conclusion from this observation!

Why Following Your Passion is not (Necessarily) the Solution

At last a contrarian book about the general advise “Follow Your Passion”! – and I do love all things contrarian in particular when they are well argued. In the book ‘So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love‘ (which I highly recommend), Cal Newport argues that it is not useful and even possibly a dangerous piece of advice.

Cal argues that you need to earn career capital before you can really concentrate on what you like best, and that most people actually discover their passion by developing their skills (and not the reverse where people develop skills to fit their passion).

Hence his conclusion that skills and ability trump passion, and that you need first to be so good at something that you basically can then carve out a freedom space to specialize further in what you particularly like.

An interesting career consequence for young people is that the advice is then to first develop a career in a conventional way to learn and enhance skills up to the point of becoming indispensable, where it is then possible to gain freedom and do new creative stuff.

I found this book enjoyable and useful, so in a few next posts I will continue to comment some of its ideas.

How Salaried Work in Large Corporations was a Historical Exception

We need to remember that salaried work in large corporations as we know it is an invention of the Industrial Age. Before that, most craftsmen were on their own, selling their services. They learnt by being an apprentice for a while and by travelling around places to gather the best practices.

craftsman middle-ages — Like the craftsman in the middle ages, the KEEN is nomadic independent worker

What is happening now on the labor market can be seen in fact as a return to a situation quite akin to the previous Agricultural Age for learned ans skilled labor: independent craftsmen that move from project to project and learn through experience and travel.

Of course there are quite a few differences: many valuable crafts are now intellectual and not necessarily manual, a much larger proportion of total population is sufficiently learned to enter the category, apprenticeship still exists in a somewhat less formal way in the form of years of experience and mentoring, etc.

The interesting part is the similarities: craftsmen need to know how to market themselves and not just be good at their craft; their value increases with international exposure and nomadic habits; they are engaged on a project basis rather than a continuous basis; and this creates a higher inequality in compensation, where common skills become a commodity and rare skills are highly valued.

Salaried work in large organizations governed by scientific management methods is what we consider normal employment. In fact it will just be a blip in the history of labor relations. Let’s make the best of it and look in the future of the independent craftsmen that join to realize incredible projects like the cathedral builders of old!

You can continue this exploration of the new labor contracting approaches in a very interesting paper in ParisTech review about the new forms of employment (in French or English).

How We Underestimate What We Can Do in Ten Years

“People always underestimate what they can do in ten years and overestimate what they can do in a week” says Hugh MacLeod of Gapingvoid (great daily cartoons and inspiration!). For the ten year time-frame, the cause is easy to find: it is clearly another effect of the ‘Exponential Deception‘.

A great approach to time, from day to decades! — A great approach to time and life, from day to decades!

I can confirm personally and in my project execution experience that people do for sure overestimate what they can achieve in a day or week, and have difficulty figuring out what they can really achieve in a year.

The decade is an interesting timeframe for further contemplation. In reality, trying to look in hindsight we can probably do so much in a decade that we can change our life and our worldview completely…

Ask yourself right now: what did you think you would become ten years ago? What did you think you would do?

If you are like me, what happened is vastly different from what I could just even envisage ten years ago (from civil service in France to expat consultant-entrepreneur in Singapore!).

And the thing is, achieving a transformation in a decade (just 3653 days) does not require to work harder or to improve much more on a daily basis – the power of the exponential secures dramatic changes even for minimum daily and weekly improvements.

Come on, what will you do in ten years? What do you want to do? Don’t limit yourself, the sky is the limit!

What Makes a Great CEO… And How It Applies To All of Us

“Whenever I meet a successful CEO, I ask them how they did it. Mediocre CEOs point to their brilliant strategic moves or their intuitive business sense or a variety of other self-congratulatory explanations. The great CEOs tend to be remarkably consistent in their answers. They all say, “I didn’t quit.”” – Ben Horowitz in his book ‘The Hard Thing About Hard Things‘.

Don’t quit… be persistent against adversity. It is true that I have observed that many successful top executives do show this capability. Weathering the storm, keeping calm but decided as to the general direction, getting all sorts of scolding and social pressure, and still persisting.

Your business, or your project, if a bit ambitious, will go through ups and downs. And sometimes the down moment will look abysmal. Note that’s where most people give up. That’s the great filter that separates the people who will make a difference and will create their mark for all to see. Not giving up. No quitting when (almost) everybody would quit. Sticking to it.

If you want to be successful, just don’t quit. Just stay when everybody else leaves running for cover.

How to Become Quickly Better than the Best Experts

Also described by James Altucher as the ‘Tony Robbins Method‘:

at first you don’t know anything.
you find 5 people who are the experts in the world.
you extensively interview them.
you figure out the most simple things they have in common with each other.
you do that simple thing over and over and over and over (repetition).

Actually that is a great recipe to be even better than an expert in much less time – because you will thus figure out something none of those best experts had figured out as a key finding in their field.

Ready to try?

Hat tip to James Altucher in his interview with Tony Robbins about his new book

How Collaborative Organizations Should Work

There is a great slideshow on ‘How Google Works’ by Eric Schmidt & al that is a good inspiration on how organizations will work in the Collaborative Age.

The key message of the presentation revolves about how to attract and foster great work from “Smart Creatives”. I like the concept in how it represents the key value creation of the Collaborative Age. Of course, the slideshow also revolved around such usual topics like failing often and well, and how to create the right company culture to get creative people to create and not to produce powerpoints and MBA type business plans.

Enjoy the slideshow:

How Google Works from Eric Schmidt

Why Overcoming our Fear of Freedom is Key to Success in the Collaborative Age

Seth Godin states in his excellent post ‘the Fear of Freedom‘ that: “We live in an extraordinary moment, with countless degrees of freedom. The instant and effortless connection to a billion people changes everything, but instead, we’re paralyzed with fear, a fear so widespread that you might not even notice it. We have more choices, more options and more resources than any generation, ever”

Our individual freedom has never been so great, never since the Agricultural Age have we had so many hours of leisure and never have we had so many resources at the touch of the fingers. It will only increase with the Fourth Revolution into the Collaborative Age. What do we do of this freedom? What do we do of that knowledge? What do we do of these possibilities?

Most of us have not found the answer yet. Most of us are paralyzed and even dream to come back the 1950’s where life seemed much simpler and straightforward – albeit with much less possibilities than today for the average person.

The ability to overcome our fear of freedom is key to our success in the world that opens to us. Going beyond our habits, connecting beyond our circles, broadcasting on the web, reaching out to the world with our own voice. That is what will distinguish those that will succeed in the new world.

Do you fear freedom, uncertainty? Let’s practice freedom. It is possible to do it in small doses, and it is necessary.

When do you start practicing your freedom?

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