Career in the Collaborative Age | The Fourth Revolution Blog

8 Lessons from One Year into Entrepreneurship

It’s now a bit more than one year that I am really on my own as an entrepreneur and it’s time to look back and reflect.

Business Plan — Keep your business plan simple!

After starting my consulting company Project Value Delivery on my own as the single… everything (employee, director, accountant, webmaster, technical writer etc etc) we are now 3. Are a real Fourth Revolution company, we still have no office as in our consulting work we are mostly in our client’s premises. The market has been tested, and it is clearly there to sustain the company. The business model has been slightly revised but remains grossly what was anticipated at the beginning.

Here are 8 lessons learnt from this first year:

Entrepreneurship is not risky if you don’t over-develop before checking the market. The key is not to spend too much time developing a great glitzy product to find out nobody wants it. The philosophy is – do some homework to be sure you can do it but get the contract (i.e. a paying client) before you develop it!!
You need to define a niche where you are the best and only in the world – and have the discipline to stick to it! (say ‘no’ to other opportunities and to your other ideas if they are not aligned. Even if you are hungry, better say no to what is not aligned)
Don’t over-plan. Forecasts are wrong anyway. I am working with a 6 months plan that’s quite enough.
Be conservative in your finances. Keep sufficient money in the company. It will give you freedom: freedom to invest, to take time off to create, to say ‘no’ to an annoying client or because you want to stick to your niche.
Everything is in the relationship with the clients. Integrity and commitment are key to long term relationships
What prevents you from starting your activity (or asking for a client to pay the right price) is in your head, nothing else. It’s purely psychological. The lizard brain creates that fear of the unknown. Remember, today employment is possibly more risky than being on your own!
Make sure to have a permanent council of advisors you can rely on (if needed, get them interested in your business)
Once you have found a great idea that resonates with clients, the harder part is to figure out how to scale your idea (I am not yet there but working on it)

I am now looking forward working as a team with exceptional co-workers that have complementary skills, and not any more individually like we started working. Our biggest challenge for the year to come is to figure out how to scale and expand geographically. Stay tuned!

Why, even in a Complex World, you Need to Head Towards your Purpose!

In an ever more complex world where many events become difficult to predict, our tendency would be to follow the flow, let the events drive us.

That’s not how we’ll reach greatness. An acute observer of companies taking decisions in complex environments, Jim Collins, the famous author of Good to Great and his latest book Great by Choice, states:

“Most people start with the outside world and try to figure out, how can we adapt to it? Greatness doesn’t happen that way. It starts with an internal drive. And there is really a key question with big decisions: What are your core values and your real aspirations?”

sailing in storm — While the storm might bring you astray from the route, you sure still know where you want to go!

It is vital to have a direction when it comes to taking decisions, even in a complex world. Personal Purpose is essential, aligned with your core values and true aspirations. And actually, Jim Collin’s research shows that the most successful companies are those that maintain their heading the most consistently. Like the captain of a ship in the midst of a storm, he can accommodate temporary changes of direction to minimize the effect of wind and waves, but still knows where his goal lies.

Be agile in responding to events. But keep your eye fixed on where you want to go, and come back to your initial heading! Only then, of course, will you be able to reach it!

Quotes are from the foreword to the book The Greatest Business Decisions of All Times by Fortune Magazine editors

Three Questions to Help You Define your True Aspirations

Jim Collins gives us three questions to define our aspirations (actually, he gave it in the context of a company but it does work for us personally too!):

What are your real core values and your real aspirations?
What is the truth about the outside world?
When you intersect your drive with your reality, what’s the truth about what you can distinctively contribute potentially better than anyone in the world?

Question 2 is absolutely essential to reality-check that our aspirations and core value can find resonance with the outside world (and respond to our basic needs too!). It’s certainly tough to have a clear view of the world beyond our usual bubble (and might require some help from other people with other point of view), but it’s absolutely critical.

These questions are very powerful. What’s your answers? What’s the reality check of your current aspirations like?

Quotes are from the foreword to the book The Greatest Business Decisions of All Times by Fortune Magazine editors

How Can we Overcome the Social Safety Net Conundrum?

In the last decades of the Industrial Age, in most developed countries, comprehensive safety nets have been implemented on top of the traditional family secure base. Social security, unemployment benefits… All sorts of safety devices against unfortunate life events.

Does a Safety Net really entice people to take more risks?

Then, something strange happened: instead of enticing people to take more risks, releasing creativity and entrepreneurship, these safety nets have entrapped them in a conservative mindset where anything that might put in question their privileges is fought back violently.

In an era where the people that will be successful through the Fourth Revolution will be agile and adaptable, able to take measured risks, this behavior increasingly looks suicidal. And most developed countries today struggle to find the energy and the will to reform their institutions and adapt them to the new global situation.

The most amazing contradiction is that a safety net should, on the contrary, increase the possibilities to take risks: it provides a secure base, hence a higher possibility to go and investigate what is happening in the world. It should provide a last resort protection if one falls during a particularly challenging balancing act, and hence enable these balancing acts to be attempted.

How can we redesign the social safety net institutions we inherited from the Industrial Age to make them a source of risk-taking and entrepreneurship? One suggestion is to make them really a last-resort safety net that intervenes only to prevent a deadly fall; but not a system on which people rely even for minor events; thus, it would avoid having too many people dependent on the protection provided at any moment.

In any case, a deep reform of this Industrial Age institution is required to make it the risk-releasing tool it should always have been.

Why you Should Live with a Large Amount of Uncertainty in your Life

According to Tony Robbins, “The quality of your life is in direct proportion to the amount of uncertainty you can comfortably live with“.

dice illusion — How comfortable are you with uncertainty and illusions?

This quote can be taken in two ways. A first, protective way is to suppose that the more you can bear uncertainty, the least disturbed you will be by what is happening around you and the happier you will be. This is quite a limited view which will not lead to transforming your life.

I certainly prefer to think of uncertainty rather as a source of opportunity – a second way to understand this quote. Uncertainty is the key for unexpected success in today’s increasingly complex world. The unexpected encounters, unforeseeable events or the unexpected viral effect of an artistic production actually shape much of today’s world. Just before these uncertain things happen, uncertainty was at its maximum. Just after, our world and existence took a turn. The world branched out. If you can’t bear the high level of uncertainty linked with releasing something to the world, then you can’t shape it. You can’t shape your life.

Living with uncertainty is at the same time uncomfortable and exciting. It is not a character trait, it is a choice. So, are you ready to choose to live with a high level of uncertainty in your life? Are you ready to grab those opportunities that will come close to you?

How you Should Subtract Things Every Day from Your Life

A very famous quote by Lao Tze talks about wisdom:

“To attain knowledge, add things every day.

To attain wisdom, subtract things every day.”

Unlearning by Master Yoda — Even Master Yoda’s wisdom is that one needs to unlearn!

We are not used to consider subtracting things from our daily life, unlearning what we know, do be part of what we should do. Still a lot of very respected wise people do insist on this key skill to progress in life.

We tend to add-on, increase the clutter on our desks and lives, but not so often do be subtract. Or when we do it, it is a real crisis and it becomes counterproductive. I am personally very guilty of adding up and seldom subtracting – up to the point where it becomes too much as I tend to clean up my life (sometimes a bit too harshly).

Being able to subtract progressively and maintain an acceptable level of clutter is a key skill for happiness and success, in particular in the world of the Fourth Revolution. A few minutes per day removing things from our desks and minds is the right solution. It’s tough but it needs to be done! Would you have any other suggestion?

Hat tip to Valeria Maltoni (Conversation Agent) for the quote and more insights

Stop to be Excessively Specialized – Become a Generalist to be Successful in the Collaborative Age

In the late Industrial Age, to be successful in our careers we were supposed to be specialists. How often did I hear career advice in the form of dismissing any effort at being rather a generalist (and generally, deploring that I did not want to specialize in a well-recognized discipline).

Mutitasking (exaggerated) — Are you a Jack of All Trades?

Being specialized was great for the organization because the bureaucracy could fit you in a pre-determined box, could figure out what you should or could become, figure out what to pay you and in general, identify you as a particular commodity type. The Corporation hated types that could not be classified properly.

In the Collaborative Age, being excessively specialized is becoming a burden. We are not speaking here of being a Jack of All Trades; what we support rather is that the Knowledge Enhancing Exchaning Networker (K.E.E.N.) of the Collaborative Age needs to be a generalist with a few areas of particular excellence.

Excessive specialization precludes agility. Specialization is based on deep knowledge of something which necessarily stems from the past; it might help understand similar features in the future but certainly not significant, disruptive changes that would come from somewhere else. The specialists of the cathodic screen – a highly complicated device – have been wiped out by flat screens in a merciless manner.

Today you need to understand enough of the world to be agile enough. That is being a generalist. being well-travelled is a great way to understand the limits of personal assumptions. Of course, you also need to be world class at certain skills – and they might not be those skills that had been painfully codified by the Industrial Corporation. It might be creativity, leadership, networking, a gift for understanding computer code…

In start-ups everybody needs to do a bit of everything – which is also why deep specialists won’t fit in. Start-ups are about creating a new way of doing certain things – not repeating the old ways even slightly better. They don’t need specialists to thrive. They need generalists.

Even the Harvard Business Review makes the case for General Managers in this post “Bring back the General Manager“, lamenting that departmentalization of corporations since the early 1980’s has fostered specialist careers and that organizations are missing generalist General Managers!

Successful people of the Collaborative Age will be generalists with certain highly developed gifts. Don’t become a too narrow specialist. Open your eyes to the world and get ready to contribute through multiple channels.

Today More Than Ever, Powerlessness Doesn’t Fly! Do Something!

“Today more than ever, claiming powerlessness doesn’t fly. Excuses suck. There are people changing entire roles, departments, organizations.”

Leading Change — (courtesy of ondemandleadership.com)

“There are people starting companies because they couldn’t find one they wanted to work for. There are people changing careers, changing their lives, changing the perspectives of the people around them and earning the permission to do something new and different in even the most notoriously complex industries.” That’s a quote from Amber Naslund on her blog Brasstackthinking (read more of that post here).

She goes on – “Hell, people are reinventing industries right out from under the old models, and creating markets we’ve never seen.”

Are you still there, or already on your way to create something new and great?

Industrial Age’s Compliance Doesn’t Work any More for Creative Organizations

In the Industrial Age, the typical manufacturing worker had to be compliant. Follow orders. In the Collaborative Age, where creativity matters as a key competitive advantage, using the same approach leads to disaster.

Paramilitary training — Getting Industrial Age recruits ready for service

One of the best examples I got about the spirit of the Industrial Age comes from a plant project in a remote areas. It is important to employ locals – who had until then been only in the Agricultural Age. The key initiation for the new recruits is a paramilitary boot camp. Why? Because it trains for compliance, obedience, rigor, timeliness, self-maintenance… everything that you would expect from an Industrial Age worker. Thus the transition from the Agricultural Age to the Industrial Age is about imparting compliance. That’s exactly what the mandatory public school, after 1850, did to our economies (and still does, which is a problem).

Today, in the Collaborative Age organizations, the key is creativity and difference. In an excellent book “Weird Ideas that Work: How to Build a Creative Company“, Robert Sutton explains clearly why having people that don’t fit in the mold, misfits that don’t obey the organization’s social codes, is a key ingredient of success for creative organizations. Here are some of his weird ideas:

Hire slow learners of the organizational code and misfits
Hire people who make you uncomfortable even those you dislike
Encourage people to ignore and defy superiors and peers

Note exactly what you would expect to happen in a manufacturing organization!

Think about it. We are so much used to the Industrial Age organization that we take for granted that employees should be compliant. That’s true in manufacturing activities where you seek repeated similarity and minimum variation. That’s suicide in the creative organizations of the Collaborative Age.

Which side is your organization? Are you sure you are doing the right thing and not falling off to the comfort zone of the Industrial Age?

Why Competence is the Enemy of Change, and What to Do

“Competence is the enemy of change“, says Seth Godin in his school transformation manifesto “Stop Stealing Dreams” (free download). He continues by writing “Competent people resist change. Why? Because change threatens to make them less competent. And competent people like being competent. That’s who they are, and sometimes that’s all they’ve got. No wonder they’re not in a hurry to rock the boat“.

Let’s take a moment to ponder the depth of these words and how this effect really impacts our world. How it slows down the necessary transformation of the world.

Competence is somehow linked to people’s identity as professionals. Fundamental transformations such as the Fourth Revolution threatens many professionals in their own identity. They cannot any more assert the value of their knowledge (painstakingly built through courses and checked through standard evaluations and certificates). In deep societal transformations, there are no standard evaluations and certificates. There is no reference. Competency cannot measured any more. Actual competency might be adaptability and agility, and not fixed knowledge. And so those that define their worth through ‘competence’ resist any change. They feel on the edge of a chasm of unknown, without any fixed marker.

How can we overcome this major hurdle to any disruptive change? Probably by putting less emphasis as a society on formal competence and knowledge. That will be hard, as it has been ingrained by decades of Industrial Age where your worth was measured by your certificates and past positions.

How much do you feel that formal competence defines yourself? How much are you ready to let it go as an identity and instead, identify yourself as an experimenter of life, a human being?

How a Team’s Consistent Time-Orientation is Key in Team Effectiveness

Our time-orientation (future, present or past) is somewhat part of our personality. To be effective, teams might need to be constituted by people that share similar time-orientation. In fact it might be one of the most important recruitment criteria.

Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd in “The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time that Will Change Your Life“, argue that we have quite different perspectives on time and they are quite stable through time.

The Marshmallow Test — How do your recruits fare on the Marshmallow test?

Present-oriented people tend to be hedonistic, and future oriented people tend to defer gratification (like in the famous marshmallow experiment: leave a child alone with a marshmallow for a few minutes explaining that if he/she does not eat the marshmallow he/she’ll get a second one – observe the reaction).

In “Strategy and the Fat Smoker: Doing What’s Obvious but not Easy“, David Maister argues that effective implementation of a strategy by a team can only happen if the team’s time-orientation is consistent. If the strategy is very much about making an effort or even a sacrifice to reach an improved condition, you’d better have around the table people that share the same preference for deferred gratification, i.e. that are strongly future-oriented.

I find increasingly that personal time-orientation is definitely a major criterion for hiring in particular for a startup – you want people that are ready to make the effort, forego gratification like time for themselves and with their families, to build something better in the future – you want future-oriented people.

In other occupations you might rather want present- or past-oriented people.

How do you know people’s time-orientation? Actually it is generally quite obvious from observing and listening to people. People that are present-oriented will need to spend a lot of time caring about themselves and will generally make sure they enjoy to the most their current situation. People that are future-oriented will live stoical lives and invest heavily for some distant future.

Look at your prospective hires’ time orientation to check it is fit with your preferences and what you want to achieve! I make it an ever increasing important criteria for recruiting fro my team!

Do you want to know your time orientation in a scientific way? Take Zimbardo’s Time Perspective Inventory and compare yourself to other people!

Real leaders prove themselves in times of crisis

It is easy to be a successful leader in times of growth and economic bounty. What actually proves leaders is how they act and lead in times of crisis.

Winston Churchill, a leader proven by the WWII crisis

Real leaders prove themselves in the midst of uncertainty, when the world seems to collapse around them. It is in these situations that their determination, ruthless persistence, skillset proves itself. It is in these situations that they will lead the transformation.

A real leader is not proven until he/she is proven by a crisis. Behold to excessive adulation of leaders that seem successful just because they are lucky to be in an easy environment. They are not necessarily going to be the ones that will prove to be the leader you need in times of crisis. At the same time, many historical examples show that the leaders that prove themselves to be the one people follow in a crisis might not be the shiny leaders of an easier time. Many of them were barely noticed, struggled and were only discovered – and discovered themselves- upon the crisis.

In the Collaborative Age where discontinuities will happen more frequently, we need those leaders that will lead us through these transformations. We need avoid those easy-going leaders that will shrink at the sight of the first unknown difficulty.

Where can we find those leaders we need? How can we know if the current leader will fit the bill? There is not other alternative: throw them out in impossible situations and see whether they float or sink. Do that early enough when they are unknown. Give them the learning experience of harsh times.

Don’t rely on shiny leaders of easy times. Make sure you rely on those leaders that have seen it through successive crisis, that have mastered their inner game and know when and how to be persistent against all odds. Rely on leaders that failed hard and managed to make it through. Rely on leaders from discriminated communities that managed to elevate themselves against the odds.

The Collaborative Age will need tough and generous leaders that will lead us through the crisis. Be sure to choose the right leader.

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
						1
2	3	4	5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20	21	22
23	24	25	26	27	28	29
30