Miracle of the Fourth Revolution, my new book is now out to the world even before I have received the copies from the local printer!
It took less than 10 days to get the title setup on LightningSource and disseminated to all e-bookshop worldwide!!
And I can now announce also the launch of the Project Soft Power website where you can know more about the Project Soft Power concept, find extracts of the book…
Can’t wait? Here are some links to buy the book. Enjoy!
and on Kindle
The graph below is an extract from the report “Entrepreneurship in the EU and beyond” by the European commission. It shows that overall, school does not make people interested in entrepreneurship.
Did you remark the funniest thing in this graph? School makes people much more interested in entrepreneurship in China (CN, at the bottom) than in most European countries, and even than in the US!
Isn’t there something wrong here?
My new book, ‘Project Soft Power’, will now be published very soon (the final production process has started). In this blog post as well as in 6 weekly sequels leading to the book’s publication, I will share with you what is Project Soft Power and why it is important to the world of the Fourth Revolution.
In the Collaborative Age, beyond the Fourth Revolution, organizations will be open and fluid. They will be organized around temporary projects. Yet, we don’t have today a consistent framework that allows a reliable project delivery, in particular when it comes to complex projects (those projects that involve many inter-related participants that all have different aims and interests). 
Although much progress has been done in the past decades to formalize specific tools around project management, the percentage of projects that fail outright or that does not deliver the expected value is staggering (depending on the sources, between 60 to 80% of projects). And research shows that it does not significantly improve through the careful use of processes described in thick manuals, and the increasing number of certified professionals in the use of these processes.
What is then the difference that makes project delivery a more reliable endeavour? I believe it is ‘Project Soft Power’, or the application of personal and inter-personal skills to project management. Project Soft Power is deeply rooted in emotional work, and is closely related to some of the key skills of the Collaborative Age K.E.E.N.
First of all, the “project manager” should not manage; she should lead. An unknown situation cannot be managed; we can only lead through it. Thus we have have decided from now on to use ‘Project Leader’ instead of ‘Project Manager’. In the Collaborative Age, the manager, a concept from the Industrial Age, will be obsolete anyway.
We have identified 5 main Project Soft Power skills that correspond to the following roles:
In the next weeks I will publish on a weekly basis a description of each of these roles. Get ready for a mind-changing description of success factors in the Collaborative Age!
Coming soon…
Being now an independent entrepreneur I forget how many people still live in organizations that are still deep into the Industrial Age. Lately I was visiting an organization in the US and I was struck by the lifeless office.
Long, dull corridors. Light grey walls and dark grey carpets. People each in an individual office with standard furniture, padding away at their keyboard, eyes stuck on their screen. Silence. Few interactions save the weekly shared breakfast. Don’t know who my neighbour is.
Discussing about the next possible pay raise, about the pay grade, moaning about the work conditions and the boss. Moaning a lot.
Stuck in a box, doing the work from 8 to 5. Gone Friday at 1, exactly.
Bureaucracy as soon as I ask for something out of the ordinary (why on earth would you want two colors of post-its?).
I felt like I suddenly was in another world. I was so used to dynamic project open spaces with people moving around, discussing freely, interacting constantly!… Used to people working hard and passionately, where time flies!
Ouch! The worst is, the office I just described is normal to a majority of people. That’s normal to a large number of organizations. Actually it is the norm, anything different is looked at suspisciously.
Hey, there is another life out there! And as I was discussing with the senior management what to do to make the organization more dynamic, it was obvious: break the walls. Put in some color. Do everything you can to increase interaction. Get project teams to sit together instead of having its members sit in their respective departments at the other end of the building. Is that so complicated? No. Is that scary? Yes. That’s probably why I was served the argument of the budget as an apology not to change.
Release the potential of your people. Just create a conducive environment, and you’ll see the change. And above all, don’t be scared!
OK, the title is a bit over the top. That’s the marketing part.
But that is quite a good, short manifesto to get you moving in the world of the Fourth Revolution.
Here is a quote from the book introduction
“Once in a while it really hits people that they don’t have to
experience the world in the way they have been told to” – Alan Keightley
Tell me about what you’re going to do to get your way in the world.
A world that, thanks to the Fourth Revolution, is opening so many opportunities for us all!
Crisis are always moments of accelerated changes. Recently, some key icons of the Industrial Age collapsed, bankrupt: General Motors in 2009 and Kodak in 2011.
General Motors was the icon of manufacturing, producing the most coveted american symbol – the car. 
Kodak was the icon of modern broadcasting, with the film – motion and still pictures.
It is the end of the Industrial Age they represented for sure, but some of their competitors have survived the crisis and are even thriving. These two companies did not manage to change their mindset. They did not manage to let go of the milk cow before it would be aged and dry out. They did not manage to go global. They did not see all the good ideas that were created in their organizations. Here they stood arrogantly in their fortresses, misunderstanding the evolution of the world.
There have been some enlightening posts on the case of Kodak lately – read for example “What’s Wrong with This Picture: Kodak’s 30-year Slide into Bankruptcy” from Wharton school.
What can these failures teach us personally?
Thus two questions for us on the way to become successful in the Fourth Revolution:
Let’s not become like GM and Kodak. Let’s let go of sunken effort and let’s experiment with new things. When do you start?
Education is a key institution that will necessarily be fundamentally changed by the Fourth Revolution. Traditional education was created during the Industrial Age to produce people for Manufacturing. Still, today, the education model is already changing, deeply and more quickly than we think. And voices start to be heard on that topic.
Lately, high education had become a very profitable market and some countries like Australia openly develop Higher Education as a great activity sector that also serves to attract foreign currency and talents. Advertisements for Universities is at an all-time high in all South-East Asia countries! At the same time, the cost of education has soared, leaving many youngsters in deep education debt in countries like the USA.
How much is higher education a good investment? The model used to be that investing in a great university would be greatly profitable on the long term, over one’s career. That it would be the safest investment of all. It is not so straightforward today, of course. Some people like Peter Thiel announce that we are in a ‘higher education bubble‘ where education is overrated and its cost will collapse soon. In this article on “the education bubble has popped“, Doug French argues that the profitability of investing in (formal) education becomes more and more elusive as tuition soars and under-employment looms. He also gives some interesting numbers: tuition increasing four times quicker than inflation, more and more credit-based funding (education debt would have outgrown credit-card debt!).
Indeed as we have argued in this blog (see the post “Leave alone the academic executive programs. Go and learn real life leadership! It’s cheaper and better!“), it might be much more relevant today to seek education by creating one’s own startup rather than paying a high range MBA.
Good education was supposed to lead to good jobs, at least at the beginning of a career. More and more authors argue that 1) “jobs” in the traditional meaning of “slots inside an organization that provide a steady income” are disappearing; 2) to find good income in one’s occupation, other skills are needed than those that are supposed to be learnt at school. Daniel Jelski in this post “the three laws of future employment” states that
As a consequence his advice to students is quite different from what conventional education would advice: follow your passion, work your way into mastery (the 10,000 hours practice), and work on emotional connection and beauty.
The crisis in conventional education can be seen coming. If that is really a bubble, it will hit hard when it will burst. The Fourth Revolution is at work!
Thanks to Laurent Riesterer for pointing out the post “the three laws of future employment“
During a talk given on 6 March, 80 members of the Singapore project management community discovered my new concept of Project Soft Power™!
It is basically a cross over from the Fourth Revolution and Emotional Intelligence applied to Project Management. Do you recognize the slide at the back?
This talk sponsored by the Singapore Chapter of the Project Management Institute was very well received. And more over we all had fun through the exercises that were designed to have the participants discover more about themselves! See here the summary report on SPMI website. Click here to access the Project Soft Power slides on slideshare.
The Project Soft Power book is now in the last stages of production for a publication in May of this year. Or, you can also ask us for a keynote speech. In any case, stay tuned!
The Fourth Revolution also creates revenue opportunities for the citizens of emerging countries in more surprising ways than being service providers for commodity services that still require creativity and intellectual initiative.
According to a World Bank report, the market of gaming-for-hire, where people get hired to play games and earn rewards or virtual money on behalf of richer players living in developed countries, was worth… 3 billion $ in 2009. In China and India alone, more than 100,000 “game laborers” would be playing day-in, day-out to be able to earn precious tokens, levels and virtual treasures to resell them to richer players that don’t want or cannot put in the time!
And a definite market for “microwork” develops where people implement simple tasks like tagging pictures, removing double pages at Amazon, and get paid a few cents per task, . More on microwork in this interesting article from the Economist on “Jobs of the Future”.
These are not necessarily jobs people would dream of, but they start to provide, and will provide more an more livelihood to developed countries.
Who doubted the Fourth Revolution was not happening?
I have had some interesting reactions to the blog post “The art of overcoming the lizard: make U-turn impossible for some time!“. Is the ‘no U-turn’ metaphor the right one? Actually the popular imagery for making sure you move forward and you can’t move back is ‘burning bridges’. I had thought using this image first, but actually that’s wrong!
Burning bridges (or boats) was a very common tactic from military generals that wanted to make sure their army would not flee – one of the most famous examples is Cortes burning the boats that had brought the conquistadores to America in 1519. Even since time immemorial that was a motivation tactics: in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, we are told: “When your army has crossed the border [into enemy territory], you should burn your boats and bridges, in order to make it clear to everybody that you have no hankering after home.”
Is that really what you need to do? Right, after you burnt the bridge, the lizard brain can say what it wants, you need to move forward, or at least you can’t move backwards. But you have severely reduced your options; you might also have alienated a number of people, which will have negative influences in your future activities.
I believe it is enough to make sure you are in a “no U-turn” situation that makes sure you have to cross the bridge and taste the air on the other side. In particular when the “no U-turn” situation is linked to your ego, it is enough to calm down the lizard (I just resigned, I’m not going to come back to beg for my position, do I?).
So, simple piece of advice: don’t ever burn your bridges unless you are really compelled to to tame an insistent lizard brain. And that should never happen in normal life, only in life-and-death situation.
Take the highway and don’t look back, that’s enough!
I needed some graphical work done for my new book and I went online to try Elance.com, one of the networks of international freelancers (cf the post on “Today, the freelancing market is without borders. Did you realize it?“). I must say, the experience was very positive.
It is very simple: after opening an account for free, I put in a one-page description / specification of the job. After 72h I had already 15 to 20 proposals from contractors. Each of them had a link to their previous work so that I could see whether I liked the style; they also proposed a price. Contractors were from everywhere: Europe, USA, South America etc…
After a few days I finally made my choice for a contractor located in Argentina. After two weeks of collaborative work online (the graphic designer sending rough sketches, me commenting), I finally got what I needed, 5 characters to illustrate my book.
Elance.com secures the payment and delivery process and gives a lot of information on the contractor’s ratings on previous jobs, the comments of the previous clients etc, which is really helpful in selecting the contractor you need. Actually it appears there are many companies from emerging countries that seem to derive much of their income from platforms like Elance.com.
You are following this blog, so I know you understand what the Fourth Revolution is. Still even I can’t stop to be amazed at what we can do today with a computer and an internet access. Do you realize, I hired in less than one week a contractor who worked for me from the other side of the planet, in Buenos Aires, Argentina and it was like he was working close-by!
As I just arrived in Singapore I don’t have the network of local contractors yet. It is at a point where I won’t even look for a graphic designer or a translator locally! I’ll just go online and hire on the global market!
No profession is really protected anymore from the Fourth Revolution. Borders don’t really matter much.
And consider your own market, your opportunity field: it is worldwide, wherever you live. Did you realize it? When will you leverage on it?
PS: Wonder what these characters mean? I will share with you in a future post the five roles of Project Soft Power!
Today, for relatively simple services (graphic design, translation, virtual assistant, all sorts of website development etc) that can almost be called commodity services, the market is… worldwide. You can hire easily, from your desk, a service provider at the end of the world, North America, India or South America.. it does not really matter. Did you realize it?
Not convinced? Visit Elance or Freelance.com to see how those platforms propose to connect buyers and service providers, and what are all the possible jobs that can be done. Like E-Bay, these companies provide a platform that secures transactions, and they allow to examine the track record of buyers and sellers and the evaluations by previous users. Service providers can also show some samples of their work.
Those platforms for e-freelancing started typically in the early 2000s. Elance mentions a 100% increase of activity in this market in the last year and foresees another doubling in 2012. The overall market can be estimated to be far more than 500M$ in 2011, and will thus pass the billion $ mark in 2012.
Moreover, these services allow talented artists and individuals from emerging countries to take part to the worldwide market and benefit directly from the economy. Clearly that puts also pressure on the prices that can be proposed by service providers from developed countries. This is a fact today: for commodity services, the market is worldwide and that won’t change. The only way to charge higher prices is differentiation and creating longer term, emotional connection with the buyer. And career or business development can also be considered from home, using only internet to sell your services!
I remember how in Europe, a proposed regulation by the European Commission to allow the liberalization of services across borders was a big political issue in the middle of the last decade. Well, it looks that this debate has been made completely obsolete by the Fourth Revolution, at least for those services that don’t need physical work or presence.
In the next post I will describe my experience in using Elance, recruiting a… Argentinian (!) designer to produce the characters I needed for my next book, “Project Soft Power”.
Stay tuned! The Fourth Revolution has not finished to astonish you!
