Category: Career in the Collaborative Age

How Careers Will Include Much Less Front-Line Work

This interesting Financial Review ‘Why this ship marks the end of your job‘ reminds us that modern equipment tend to remove the need for large crew on the front-line. In this example of an actual warship, the actual crew has been shrunk by 80% compared to traditional warships of the same size. 80%! From 200 down to 40 sailors! This trend will be observable in all occupations requiring dangerous, remote or costly human deployment. But also for a lot of front-line work that can be automatized.

We can of course observe that trend in the military with the apparition of drones of various sized and capabilities that avoid putting lives in jeopardy. But we will also observe the trend in more and more commercial ventures.

An interesting side effect of this approach is that the equipment itself is considered to be more disposable and replaceable than the previous equivalent equipment. This is apparently even true for this warship type – the limited crew will not allow to respond to all emergency situations and it is accepted that it may have to be lost with a higher frequency than previous warship generations.

The new approach comes with the benefit of exposing much less people to hazardous occupations. At the same time there is a substantial risk of loss of know-how: the current solutions are put in place with the help of those that currently do the work, but in the future no-one may remember how to do it.

As a result, there will be a deep need to review the usual career paths that have been inherited from the Industrial Age to ensure that the competencies required will still be available, as they evolve. And people that are still in the front-line will need to be better educated, more flexible and will have much greater responsibility than today. The landscape of work is already changing dramatically!

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How Important It Is to Understand the Root Causes Before Treating the Symptoms

This post is written in the context of business for professional services, but of course the title applies more widely. Nevertheless, it is an essential aspect to be considered because as consultant we are often contacted because of some symptoms that have been noticed. And we should seek to understand the root causes before jumping into solely treating the symptoms.

Understanding the root causes often requires to take a more systemic view of the organization or the situation, looking in some details at all relevant aspects to identify if the symptom is isolated or only revealing a deeper issue. This should be the first step of the intervention, what I call the ‘discovery phase’. And it is essential that it is addressed in the most comprehensive manner so as to identify and treat the relevant root cause.

The ‘systematic’ approach here is essential as in any complex system: it needs to be considered in its entirety including the interfaces and relationships with external stakeholder to allow to identify the root causes.

In the past months I have been continuously amazed, as we have made this approach more systematic, at how we uncover root causes that are unexpected but relevant – requiring a lot of discussion with our clients.

This approach is not always understood even from clients who want a ‘quick fix’ solution, but that should be part of our ethics as professionals not to allow to just put a band-aid on a situation, but have a wider view of its causes. It is in any case absolutely essential for the sustainability of any change we intend to bring in the client organization’s or way of working.

It also applies in coaching situation and any situation of dysfunction: take the time at first to carefully assess the situation of its root causes so that you can treat the issue at its root.

This post is a follow-up from the post ‘Useful Lessons Learnt for the Professional Services Business‘ based on Pamela Slim’s post ‘23 Lessons from 23 years in business‘.

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How We Should Prioritize Impact over Income in Professional Services Businesses

While the title of this post is a bit provocative, I am convinced that it is essential in professional services businesses to ensure to have sufficient professional impact. Beyond the fact that it should be the essential objective, it is an essential condition for sustainable success – and hence income. And this should be a priority, which means that a number of activities must be undertaken that generate impact even with low or limited income.

Of course income is important but it should be viewed as a means to generate impact. And success means more income, that allows to generate even more impact.

Impact is an essential pre-condition to be noticed and respected as a competent contributor. It must hence be publicized for a large part (which may sometimes be difficult in services of a confidential nature – in that case some general publications are needed). It is also essential to provide clients with sufficient confidence to hire our services and have some idea of the benefits they can expect.

And finally, what are we here for if it is not to generate impact, if possible much, much larger than the cost of our services? And develop ourselves and our business to generate even more impact? The impact we should seek should also of course be ethically positive impact, i.e. provide our clients with tangible, positive and ethical benefits.

I encounter too many professional services professionals that don’t prioritize sufficiently impact and prefer to seek income. This is not a sustainable proposition, and they miss the point of providing this type of services. Let’s prioritize impact more consciously in our daily activities!

This post is a follow-up from the post ‘Useful Lessons Learnt for the Professional Services Business‘ based on Pamela Slim’s post ‘23 Lessons from 23 years in business‘.

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Useful Lessons Learnt for the Professional Services Business

I love this post by Pamela Slim ‘23 Lessons from 23 years in business‘, because it resonates with my experience while providing a useful perspective. Of course it is mainly applicable to professional services such as coaching and consulting, although after consideration, its relevance is actually quite far reaching. I really recommend the short read.

Here are some of the lessons that resonate the most with me:

  • we often don”t know but we have the find out attitude (through the depth of our network or reference basis)
  • the importance of professional ethics – any lapse will catch up later
  • be conservative on the financial side and on the commercial expectations to survive on the longer term
  • it’s actually more work and pain than you’d expect first!
  • seek impact rather than income
  • the importance of the client in our success and development
  • the need to look for root causes instead of going straight for the symptoms brought to our attention initially by the client

In some follow-up posts, the last three specific topics will be developed further because I believe they are so important.

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How the Number of Taxis and Hire Cars Drivers Have Tripled

According to this Quartz post ‘More Americans are Driving Taxis Thanks to Uber and Lyft‘, the number of drivers for taxis and other hire cars has apparently tripled in the past few years in the US. This is consistent with the increase in cars in city centers (see previous post ‘How Changes from New Technology Will Lead to Unexpected Results‘)

This shows certainly that there was an un-served demand with the traditional taxi system for point-to-point ground transportation. At the same time it does ask questions as to the actual revenue of all those drivers (some are of course now part-time with the likes of Uber and Lyft); and about what they will become if autonomous driving becomes successful, which it will effectively some day.

This example is excellent because it definitely shows how internet can disrupt the traditional economy (taxi plates’ value has dropped off significantly); create abundance where there was an artificial constraint; give opportunities for revenue to more people including additional side revenue, and more generally promote self-entrepreneurship. At the same time it also draws attention to the social consequences that ensue in terms of limited social protection for the drivers. A tripling of numbers make private hire car drivers a substantial percentage of workers and there are long-winded consequences to be expected.

The Fourth Revolution tangibly changes our world, our careers and opportunities. And not marginally!

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How Small Groups Can Now Bring Change Even Inside Large Organizations

It is well known that “A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has” (Margaret Mead). It would seem this also applies from within large companies such as Google or Amazon, as explained in this interesting post ‘Small Groups United by a Shared Purpose are Changing Big Tech Companies. Here’s How‘.

The examples developed are how a group of Google employees have successfully raised the issue of the company getting involved in defense program; and how Amazon employees have pledged the company to do something active in the field of climate change.

The capability of communicating in groups, broadcasting and receiving feedback, allows easier self-organization of groups with a purpose. It may be the most visible in ‘Big Tech’ where it may be more natural, but it will undoubtedly also change how large companies address certain issues.

Employees, like citizens, are increasingly empowered to raise to their leadership topics of concern and obtain a voice for change. Welcome to the Collaborative Age!

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How to Increase Happiness After our Professional Decline

In this follow-up post from ‘How Professional Decline is Coming Sooner than We Think‘ we continue to investigate the excellent and deep material of the paper ‘Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think – Here’s how to make the most of it‘. Once we have recognized that professional decline is inevitable and probably occurs around 50 or 20 years after you started your current career, how can we deal with this to maintain or increase our happiness?

The author quotes ancient Indian wisdom about the different phases of life. It also quotes some modern wisdom about happiness of mature people. In sum, it appears to be essential to pro-actively start a new phase of life around sharing one’s knowledge and experience, connecting, and serving.

People do that in different ways, from consultants to interim managers to serving their community and becoming teachers. Many also develop their spiritual self. The way is to recognize that this phase in life calls for a change, stopping competitive behavior and sharing more.

Be proactive in recognizing that your professional decline starts earlier than you think; and increase your happiness by taking the time for yourself and to help grow others. That’s a quite good recommendation that I will endeavor to follow!

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How Professional Decline is Coming Sooner than We Think

I strongly recommend to read this long article ‘Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think – Here’s how to make the most of it‘ because it contains much profound wisdom about professional career and happiness.

In this first post, let’s concentrate on the fact that our professional decline happens earlier than we believe. “According to research by Dean Keith Simonton, a professor emeritus of psychology at UC Davis and one of the world’s leading experts on the trajectories of creative careers, success and productivity increase for the first 20 years after the inception of a career, on average. So if you start a career in earnest at 30, expect to do your best work around 50 and go into decline soon after that. The specific timing of peak and decline vary somewhat depending on the field.” It seems that creative fields see an earlier decline, while fields relying more on building up experience over time have a somewhat later decline.

In any case, “The biggest mistake professionally successful people make is attempting to sustain peak accomplishment indefinitely, trying to make use of the kind of fluid intelligence that begins fading relatively early in life. This is impossible.”

It is essential that we recognize that we can’t sustain our performance indefinitely, and that there should be space for our younger successors to take over and put a new spin into our works. This is probably the number one happiness issue with high level professionals.

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How Fake Science is Strongly on the Rise and Endangers Us

In this excellent paper ‘The Rise of Junk Science‘ the issue of increasing number of improperly reviewed publications is described. They now substantially dominate in number more professional scientific publications. Some even believe that there is a “global “epidemic” of scams by academic journals that was corrupting research and, in effect, endangering the public“.

With much easier access to publishing, there is an increasing number of scam scientific journals that are easily accessible, do not practice rigorous peer reviews. There are also an increasing number of fake conferences, that even name recognized scientists that don’t even attend in an attempt to attract other reputable scientists.

While this issue is probably not new – it was always possible to do vanity publishing – it spreads to an unprecedented level, and in a context where it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between legitimate and fake science. “for the first time in history, scientists and scholars worldwide are publishing more fraudulent and flawed studies than legitimate research—maybe ten times more. Approximately 10,000 bogus journals run rackets around the world, with thousands more under investigation, according to Cabell’s International, a publishing-services company. “We’re publishing mainly noise now,” Franco laments. “It’s nearly impossible to hear real signals, to discover real findings.”

Luckily there seem to be an increasing awareness of the issue and modern technology also allows to develop powerful tools to distinguish between junk science and legitimate science. Still we need to be careful that something looking like a scientific paper might also be fake or junk!

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How Ideal Clients can Accelerate your Business and Personal Developments

In the professional services business, we generally underestimate the importance of the Clients in our development and our success – both as a business and as professionals. Ideal Clients are those that have sufficient confidence to entrust you with challenging issues, pushing you slightly out of your confort zone.

In general, Clients are important for the success of any business endeavor. This can be observed for any project, whether internal or external clients. Incompetent clients or clients that don’t care do not entice for success and development.

Ideal Clients are not the same as Dream Clients. Dream clients may be those for which work will be easy and incredibly well compensated. Ideal clients are challenging while establishing sufficient confidence that you can be creative, stretch yourself and experiment (within certain bounds).

As Pamela Slim remarks, it is also essential to recognize the person in the Client. We need to be able to establish a strong personal relationship. This is quite necessary to allow the confidence level necessary. Also, our intervention should also seek to advance the person of the Client as a person and within its organization. Therefore, the ideal client is someone we can relate to professionally on a personal level too.

Choosing your Clients as a professional services business is not a luxury. It is absolutely essential for sustainability to have challenging yet trusting clients that will develop yourselves and your business. I have made it an essential decision factor when considering the possibility to take on, or continue an assignment.

This post is a follow-up from the post ‘Useful Lessons Learnt for the Professional Services Business‘ based on Pamela Slim’s post ‘23 Lessons from 23 years in business‘.

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How We Need to Learn to Say ‘No’ – and Get Others to Say ‘No’ Too

Following up on some highlights of the excellent book ‘Never split the difference: negotiating as if your life depended on it‘ by Chris Voss, he has a quite convincing development on the need to be able to say ‘no’ and get your counterpart in a negotiation say ‘no’ too.

It “is difficult for many people because they go directly against one of society’s biggest social dictums. That is, “ Be nice” We’ve instrumentalized niceness as a way of greasing the social wheels, yet it’s often a ruse. We’re polite and we don’t disagree to get through daily existence with the least degree of friction. But by turning niceness into a lubricant , we’ve leeched it of meaning.” As a result it becomes quite impossible to know exactly what the person is feeling.

““ No ” is the start of the negotiation, not the end of it. We’ve been conditioned to fear the word “ No” But it is a statement of perception far more often than of fact. It seldom means, “ I have considered all the facts and made a rational choice” Instead, “ No ” is often a decision, frequently temporary, to maintain the status quo. Change is scary, and “ No ” provides a little protection from that scariness.”

Chris Voss goes on presenting a number of techniques aimed at provoking a clear ‘no’ as a starting point for earnest negotiation. He even mentions that if it is not possible to get a ‘no’ there is probably something hidden that is worth uncovering.

Let’s give ourselves and our counterpart the permission to say ‘no’. It is an excellent foundation for further discussion and negotiation.

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How Demanding Freedom Can Be

In the ‘Discourse of voluntary servitude’, La Boetie, a French philosopher of the 16th century, writes a formidable quote: “Man has a preference for voluntary servitude, because servitude is confortable and makes one irresponsible. Freedom on the other hand is very demanding.”

Those words written in the context of a political essay on dictatorship do echo in the modern organization. “Voluntary servitude” in an organization is much easier and much more comfortable than freedom. And that is something that people tend to forget when salaried workers express jealousy with respect to the self-employed or entrepreneur.

As an entrepreneur I do feel sometimes when I am tired or things are difficult that I would be certainly much more comfortable being just another piece of a large organization… although clearly the comfort is just an illusion: just notice how many people report they are stressed in the workplace.

Freedom is extremely demanding. It requires a lot of leadership and a lot of self-leadership and discipline. In the long run it is extremely rewarding too.

Choose freedom. It’s tough, but it’s worth it!

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