Category: Career in the Collaborative Age

How Companies Manage Hundreds of Employees Remotely

The Covid-19 crisis has highlighted the practice of some modern virtual companies that can source and manage their employees globally. An interesting case study is developed in this post ‘Managing 185 people in 40 countries. How they do it‘.

In this case study the company Platform.sh is typical of those digital companies that have no office space and coordinate hundreds of employees globally. In this case, the company has been built that way since 2010 and seems to be quite successful on its market.

A few take-away points for me from this paper:

  • basically the money that would otherwise be spent on office amenities is spent in having meetings, including a long all-hands meeting every year for people to know each other and exchange in a physical space. Hence, those setups do not preempt the need to invest in building the relationships – and rely also on the ability to travel globally at least once a year!
  • a focus on the right mix of communication (synchronous / asynchronous) seeking the best effectiveness
  • Lots of writing and explicit behavior expectations to compensate for the missing informal expectations transmittal.

There is a strong benefit at being able to hire talent anywhere without any geographical constraint – and not be limited to some hot spots of coding talents. This in turn allows more diversity and apparently also less cost overall.

All in all, an excellent case study to meditate as we enter in a new era of much more frequent virtual remote work.

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How Companies Can be Expected to Become Smaller and Decentralized

In this post focused on journalism ‘What will a post-COVID-19 media look like? I asked my students‘, Frederic Filloux makes the point that in the future, media outlets will be smaller organizations increasingly run as a group.

Crisis are known to accelerate natural trends and it is quite interesting to observe that in the current situation which allows to seek new foundations, the idea that with the new technology, smaller outlets could be more successful is quite interesting.

“The media outlets that will emerge from the global crisis will be lightweight, decentralized, less reliant on advertising, and will bring more explanations and expertise to the table”; and probably they will be also more niche and focused.

Add to the discussion that smaller outfits are also more prone to be generative rather than extractive, and this gives a vision of a new organisational ecosystem that is increasingly focused on making people grow rather than to exploit and produce profit. A quite comforting picture of our common future!

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How to Define Levels of Remote Working Organisational Proficiency

This Medium post ‘The Five Levels of Remote Work — and why you’re probably at Level 2‘ mentions how Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Automattic (managing amongst other products the WordPress platform) defines 5 levels of remote work.

Those 5 levels are (summarized with my interpretation):

  • level 1: majority office-based with some remote work
  • level 2: recreating the office online (fixed hours, large meetings, office-type rituals)
  • level 3: adapting to the remote working medium by changing rituals, minimizing meetings and maximizing asynchronous written information
  • level 4: fully asynchronous work, with no requirement for time coordination. This has also the benefit to avoid interruptions and allow longer focus times
  • level 5: nirvana. Not so clear for me. “Mullenweg equates this level with having more emphasis on ‘environment design’, insofar as the organisation’s culture, and the physical environment people work in is concerned“

The post mentions that “Companies that truly practice asynchronous communication have stepped out of the industrial revolution, and no longer conflate presence with productivity, or hours with output, as one might on the factory floor.” This is probably more like the Collaborative Age will look like.

Also it is worth mentioning that it is recommended to organise physical team bonding events on a periodic basis to support a majority of remote work time.

It is true that most of my corporate clients are stuck on level 2. What remote work level have you achieved so far?

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How Data Hygiene Becomes Essential

In an AI conference lately I was struck by the mention of new jobs such as data hygienist and AI trainer. I did not realize how important data hygiene was – up to becoming a new profession!

Data hygiene is in reality quiet critical to AI development. Poor data hygiene is certain to create all sort of issues and false positive, and to lengthen dramatically the time it would take for an AI algorithm to learn its part.

Data hygiene is actually hard work because of the sheer size of the data bases to clean up, and the need to distinguish between rubbish and actual legitimate data points. It requires specific tools and particular attention, not to mention time. Hence it is a significant investment, but is found to be quite worthwhile apparently compared to the benefits.

Before we did not care so much about the quality of data in our databases – although there is still this old adage about garbage in, garbage out. Now we need a much higher quality level and apparently it is quite a challenge to achieve it.

Welcome to the world of data hygiene and data hygienists!

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How We Should Worry About Who We Have Helped Become Better People

Clayton Christensen, the innovation scholar that wrote so many books about innovation, passed away recently. He wrote “Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people.”

This quote if of course inspiring, and coming from someone with the life experience of Clayton Christensen, quite interesting too – since he had certainly reached a very high level of prominence.

This probably explains his drive to be a university professor while he could have had a very successful career in consulting and private ventures.

Still its reminds us that what people will remember is how much we helped them become better people. How can we work to achieve this better?

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How Long Term Work Motivation is Related to Alignment with Purpose

Following up from the previous post ‘How Sexy Startups Can Also Sometimes Be Toxic Workplaces‘, one important aspect is that poor alignment with purpose generally don’t make it a sustainable venture. Toxic workplace cultures can’t be sustainable. Because if we want to remain individually motivated, our work needs to align with some purpose – and not just external motivators like compensation. This is developed quite well in Steve Pavlina’s post ‘Numbers vs Alignment‘

I find the point well written “If the numbers in your work (like sales and profits) matter more than the alignment of your work (like fulfillment, purpose, and appreciation), then even if you succeed on those terms, you may end up with bigger numbers but with lower alignment, which can strangle your motivation.”

And the corollary “People so often underestimate how much motivation matters – and especially how sensitive it is to alignment. It’s so easy to make misaligned decisions that eventually drag down motivation and lead to a place of stagnation, where it’s possible to be stuck for years.”

How aligned is your work with your purpose and what fulfills you? Is your motivation thus sustainable and not just temporary?

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How Sexy Startups Can Also Sometimes Be Toxic Workplaces

Startups are trendy and many young people dream working there in all the excitement of creating something that will change the world. Still some startups are also incredibly toxic places to work, as reminds us this Gapingvoid post ‘Beware Supersexy‘.

The point is particularly important to make because startups are by essence, stressful places to be where a substantial commitment is expected from employees, and change is prevalent on a daily basis as the venture grows, pivots and struggles. Like in projects, the pace of action is quick and some employees can sometimes feel overwhelmed.

Some examples have recently come to light of cultures of mental and even sometimes sexual harassment, and more benignly of certain toxic work cultures in some startups even some that were very much under the public eye and heavily funded.

It is not rosy everyday in startups, and the strong will that is needed from founders do not always translate in a nice way to work. At the same time I do know a number of startups that have developed very nice ways to work together and where employees are incredibly happy to the part of the adventure.

It’s just a fact that startups, like other organisations, can sometimes be toxic places to work, and that because of the specific pace it can be quite extreme. Startup are exciting, and also demanding. As always it is important to get proper insight about how it is to work there before committing to contribute!

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How the Collaborative Age Requires A New Leadership Mindset

This MIT-Sloan paper ‘Leadership Mindsets for the New Economy‘ takes the perspective that the new economy requires a shift in leadership practices.

It starts with the excellent quote by Patty McCord, former chief talent officer, Netflix: “In today’s world, everyone has to adopt a leadership mindset. We have to think of ourselves as members of a leadership community“. This means that it is recognized that in the collaborative age, leadership capabilities need to be more widely spread inside organisations.

I find the rest of the paper a bit disappointing and too MBA like, with the identification of four key traits of leaders in the modern economy – producers, investors, connectors, and explorers. It does not go back to the question of how to make everyone in the organisation a leader – and how to make sure everyone plays the part he or she is the best about among those four traits. And that’s clearly the most important.

While this issue is recognized (“building a collective leadership capability is the strongest route to competitive advantage in today’s fast-paced world“), tomorrow’s determining leadership trait is indeed to allow the growth of leaders in all levels of the collaborative organisation. I’d rather see research exploring that direction.

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How I Actually Am a Modern Artisan

As a consultant I realized I work as an artisan. An artisan in intellectual work, of course, but nevertheless an artisan. And I am perfectly happy doing this without trying to grow into an industrial approach.

old-fashioned artisan

In my daily consulting work, I spend my time adapting my knowledge and material to my clients’ situations, polishing it with a view on excellence, never twice producing the same although every time it is similar; learning from master and from practice to deliver ever better solutions and insights.

Thus we should see today artisans in a much wider sense than the usual touristy ‘artisan craft’ of old-fashioned love for manual work. And there are actually many artisans all over the modern world putting their love of things well done in their creations for needing clients. There are many more artisans that what you’d believe. And everyday I discover new small niche companies providing artisan-ware and services to many different parts of our societies.

Artisans are not disappearing, they are rather thriving in the new collaborative work as it allows them to have a wider audience and thus sustain their work. It co-exists with industries that are also needed to deliver the benefits of scale. Still we need dedicated artisans, and I am one of them.

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How Demographics Can Only Explain Part of the Millennials’ Economic Situation

I found this speech by Lord David Willetts ‘Have the Boomers Pinched Their Children’s Futures?‘ quite instructive, although I do not completely concur with the conclusions.

The main message of this speech and the associated book is that due to demographics in developed countries, baby boomers (born between 1945 and 1965) would have developed substantial benefits to the detriment of the younger generations (the millennial). While it is quite obvious that the economic situation of the younger generations is not quite as good as young people some decades ago, I believe there is a mixture in the analysis between a general trend of economics and inequality increase, and a demographic effect. Everything can’t just be put on the demographics.

I still believe that the dominating economic effect today is globalization and digitization, making it harder for people with low qualifications to get adequate compensation and putting a premium to those that are globally competitive.

Still the weight of the retirees of the baby boom in western countries will be an issue to deal with, albeit a relatively temporary one. And yes, younger generations will possibly have a less easy time in retirement and there will need to be put some limits on economic transfer towards retirees. But that may not be the biggest driver of today’s economical transformation.

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How Having the Right Type of Competition is Great

I like Simon Sinek’s argument ‘How having the right kind of rival can help you thrive in a changing world‘.

“By identifying a Worthy Rival and looking at their strengths and abilities, we can keep improving and innovating“.

According to Simon Sinek, to really understand this we also need to understand we live in an infinite game and not just in a finite game. In a finite game, competition for limited resources means the loser gets less. In an infinite game, there can be mutual benefits based on an expanding playground, with everyone winning.

Having a worthy rival is essential for improvement and progress. If that happens in a fair and almost cooperative manner it is the recipe for great mutual success. However I observe that too many people and corporations still view the world as finite and competition as a war where competitors should get destroyed.

I am myself trying often to get into a positive relationship with competitors, but I must admit that I’ve been often told that it was too naive.

Well I’ll continue until I find a worthy rival with an open infinite mindset which will help me – and me help him – get to greater heights.

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Why We Need to Work on Unfashionable Problems

I am getting fed up by the hype around fashionable ‘Artificial Intelligence’. Everything should be Artificially Intelligent nowadays (ref my previous post ‘How Automation Should Not Be Marketed as Intelligent‘). Thus I very much like this post of Paul Graham on ‘Fashionable Problems‘. His point is that too many people work on the latest fashionable technology or problem, and too little on other important aspects.

“Even though lots of people have worked hard in the field, only a small fraction of the space of possibilities has been explored, because they’ve all worked on similar things. Even the smartest, most imaginative people are surprisingly conservative when deciding what to work on. People who would never dream of being fashionable in any other way get sucked into working on fashionable problems.”

On this other hand this consideration also shows that there are great opportunities in working on other things than the latest fashion (although of course it may be much more difficult to get funded). And this is what I like to consider: non-conventional people that follow their interest irrespective of the latest fashion. Paul Graham reminds us actually that “The best protection against getting drawn into working on the same things as everyone else may be to genuinely love what you’re doing. Then you’ll continue to work on it even if you make the same mistake as other people and think that it’s too marginal to matter.”

Thus, do not worry too much about the latest fashion on tech. There are so many other areas where progress would be profitable for humankind. Don’t let yourself be deterred. Find what you’re passionate about and go for it!

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