Category: Career in the Collaborative Age

This interesting Bloomberg post ‘The Enormous Numbers Behind Amazon’s Market Reach‘ proposes a nice visual history of Amazon’s growth and reach. It also provides an interesting status report of the weight of the company across several markets.

It shows that Amazon is not entirely dominant (yet!) and that it depends a lot on the particular industry or products. In reality, “Despite being the largest e-commerce player, Amazon still accounts for roughly 1 percent of global retail. In the U.S., the company’s share of all retail sales is as high as 7.7 percent, including sales made by other retailers who sell on Amazon’s Marketplace. Absent that, Amazon itself accounts for less than 3 percent of U.S. retail sales, according to Euromonitor International.”

The most impressive is the market share in e-books thanks to the Kindle, where Amazon is really dominant.

The exponential growth is also linked to a disciplined re-investment of its surplus over time (hence almost no profit since the start), in a real entrepreneurial approach sustained over time. It has also been patient when trying to develop into new fields, failing long before reaching success.

The most amazing in this story finally is that the company was able to maintain a long-term view and a startup spirit all those years, together with a strict cost discipline. A feat clearly due to its founder and the management style he embodies. What about the sustainability of the enterprise if the founder departs?

In a different dimension but quite related to our previous post ‘How Human Contact is Becoming a Luxury‘, Seth Godin post ‘Toward abundant systems‘ takes the example of college admissions to show how the world moves from an Industrial Age’s world of scarcity into a Collaborative Age’s world of abundance. But is it the right example?

“Space on the Harvard campus is highly valued and also scarce. But if we can break education out of the campus/scarcity mindset and instead focus on learning, learning at scale, learning that happens despite status not because of it–then we can begin to shift many of the other power structures in our society.”

It is true that the availability of free or very cheap online courses is an opportunity to scale the acquisition of knowledge. Still, admission to renowned university campuses remains more competitive than ever (in part because it is now global). The reason is probably that a major value of university is the human connection and network – something not so easy to scale – and for which a limited group of students is more adapted as it creates a denser relationship network.

Alumni groups still play important roles in society and in the professional world. While globalization may diversify universities of origins, those social groups are still very influential because they remain limited in size. Therefore, while access to knowledge becomes abundant, access to the social connection of university campuses becomes increasingly a luxury.

This aspect is probably not accounted for sufficiently in the development of online education programs. Developing the community and the alumni group can also be done virtually but this requires a lot of effort and possibly some face-to-face real-life interactions. This will remain, and while this can be made more efficient, it will always be a limit to scalability for educational institutions.

In this excellent must-read article ‘The Economist Who Would Fix the American Dream‘, the work of economist Raj Chetty is described. His recent works focuses on equal opportunity. And shows that since a few decades, the possibility of social mobility has dramatically diminished in the US. But not only is he a scholar providing insights from Big Data, he is also taking action.

Raj Chetty’s family story itself is an example of social mobility: his parents had a humble and poor origin in India and they rose in society through academic excellence, then emigrated to the US where Raj was educated. Excelling in academics, he became quickly part of the elite of economists in the USA.

“He has pioneered an approach that uses newly available sources of government data to show how American families fare across generations, revealing striking patterns of upward mobility and stagnation. In one early study, he showed that children born in 1940 had a 90 percent chance of earning more than their parents, but for children born four decades later, that chance had fallen to 50 percent, a toss of a coin” And he has shown that to a “surprising degree, people’s financial prospects depend on where they happen to grow up“.

Some of his most interesting research about a town in the US that had a dramatic positive growth showed that “All the data-scientist and business-development-analyst jobs in the thriving banking sector are a boon for out-of-towners and the progeny of the well-to-do, but to grow up poor in Charlotte is largely to remain poor.”: nomads and well-to-do benefit from opportunities, not the local poor.

And he went on further to show that social limits in place many years ago at the time of slavery and segregation continue to influence heavily the level of opportunity for children.

It is probable that the same issue of a harder social mobility is at play in most developed countries, and this also explains the disarray of a new generation that does not believe it will have better opportunities than their parents. At the same time, the work of people like Raj Chetty shows ways to understand and fix those issues.