Category: Change

How Self-Help Approaches Can Be Summarized

I liked this quite ambitious post ‘Every self-help book ever, boiled down to 11 simple rules‘. And as we speak of apparently a $11 billion self-help industry, that’s even more ambitious!

Here’s a summary of those eleven points reworded by me

  • take a small step at a time – change should come in small chunks
  • visualize where you want to get to
  • struggle is good because you need to get out of your comfort zone. It will necessarily be scary
  • be emphatic and take some time to judge people
  • contemplate your mortal nature to act with a sense of urgency
  • be playful in change, cultivate your specificities
  • help others and be useful in life
  • avoid perfectionism, which leads to procrastination. Just ship to the world
  • accept human limitations and play the long game recharging your batteries when needed
  • write down objectives and do lists
  • don’t just read, go out in the world and try

I am not sure this summarizes all self-help books around but it is certainly a good try. And like me you’ll find probably a pair of points that are worth remembering now because we may not have been sufficiently careful about them in the recent past.

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How Opportunity Is Always in Existing Gaps – At the Edge of Our Comfort Zone

I very much like this post by Valeria Maltoni: “Opportunity is in the Gap Between What you Know and What you Don’t“.

“The longer you can hold yourself in the space between what you take for granted and what could be next, the more you can learn about potential futures. That’s where the opportunity is.” Valeria Maltoni continues by recounting how she was able to unlock substantial business opportunities just by getting different departments or diverse people communicate at a higher level. The previous gaps between departments or people could easily be transformed in substantial opportunities.

Opportunity is always in a gap between two different and diverse ecosystems or environments. The point made here is that it is also between what we know and what we don’t know, where we need to rely on others and develop ourselves.

In any case, opportunity is not just where you are right now. Get up and seek to exploit those gaps at the edge of what you know and are comfortable with!

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How a Crisis Dramatically Accelerates Changes

What I find absolutely amazing in the current world Covid crisis is how it is accelerating changes. In particular, how it is accelerating changes that had already started but were not obvious or where inertia let unstable situations be maintained.

This is the case in the economic and business field where there is an increased differentiation between winners and losers of the current crisis. And the losers were often those that had a precarious market and financial situation. They could survive, sometimes barely, in a stable world; the crisis acts as a revealing factor.

This is also the case in world politics and strategics; the Covid crisis has been a substantial catalyst for China actions in Hong Kong and more generally on the world stage, and here again the crisis has acted as an accelerator of events which could be anticipated in the future.

Finally it is often the case on the personal level; the changes in the way we work and in our world vision, and in our daily lives, accelerates a transformation that was to happen as digital and communication become more widespread and available.

The Covid crisis provokes a deep transformation of the world, but as I see it, most of it is just an incredible acceleration of changes which were already written or in the works.

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How Car Software is the New Automotive Battleground

This excellent post by Philippe Chain ‘Code, on wheels‘, explains how software is becoming the main differentiator in the automotive industry. And that the industry is becoming ripe for disruptors not originally from the automotive industry.

“Software will play a central role in the upcoming car revolution. Unless legacy carmakers quickly reinvent themselves, new players will fill the gap to provide an OS and an app ecosystem.” The author explains how Tesla is actually run as a software company at its core, upending the traditional organisation and approach of historical automotive companies. More than half of Tesla engineers are software engineers! Software updates are performed on a continuous basis in pure agile style.

This is very different from the traditional approach where everything needs to be specified in advance, and where development is split between various suppliers which need to be strictly coordinated.

The industry begins to understand that the company that will build the standard for the next automotive operating system will have a substantial competitive advantage. Seeing the danger, VW has announced that it gets in the race. Cars have today 100 million lines of code and very soon 200 to 300 million! “the likeliest evolution for the car industry is to see a competition between traditional carmakers and tech giants — with Tesla as the maverick — to come up with a car OS that will set the standard for the entire industry“. Not to mention the possibility to have an app ecosystem built on those standard OS.

The automotive industry is ripe for a revolution and not too many historical players may survive. Exciting times ahead!

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How to Identify Clues That the Universe Points Us to a New Direction

One nugget from the book ‘What I Know for Sure‘ by Oprah Winfrey: “One of my greatest lessons has been to fully understand that what looks like a dark patch in the quest for success is the universe pointing you in a new direction . Anything can be a miracle , a blessing , an opportunity if you choose to see it that way.”

What I find interesting in this quote compared to the usual ‘the universe is pointing you to where you should go, just pay attention’, is the concept of the “what looks like a dark patch“. It is interesting because it highlights how the difficulties, or possibly the failure areas, can be also seen as signs that we need to change the way we do things or the way we look at things.

How often do we identify a difficulty and try to find a way around it. Maybe we should pause for a while and wonder whether this is not a clue to something we should do differently.

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How to Deal with Stress

Following our previous post on ‘How You Should Start By Being Cheerful‘, this post by Leo Babauta tackles a related topic: ‘A Guide to Letting Go of Stress‘.

Leo Babuta reminds us what is the real reason for our stress: “Things are out of control, not orderly, not simple, full of interruptions and unplanned events, health problems and accidents, and things never go as we planned or imagined. But this is the way the world is — the stress comes not because the world is messy and chaotic, but because we desire it to be different than it is.”

This is a very important statement, and one that we tend to forget. Stress is generated by the difference between reality and expectations. Since there are quite many things we can’t change in reality, we need to manage our expectations and ideals (the alternative, to alter reality to align with our expectations, is not a sustainable solution).

Therefore the recommended practice is to put together the conditions for self-awareness of this misalignment between reality and expectations, and let go of that difference (more details in the post). And then, “Even in moments of chaos, you can be free, and even appreciate the beauty of the chaos.”

Let’s remember that stress is indeed a misalignment between a messy reality and inner hopes and expectations, and that the solution is to realign both by letting go.

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How a Diverse Team Is Needed for Innovation

In his post ‘Are You A Maverick Or A Heretic?‘, Howard Getson makes the point that throughout history, many innovators have been rejected (or even burnt at the stake) for their ideas that would prove right later. Thus if innovation is to take hold, the visionary innovator needs to be supported and surrounded by people of various personality types that ground him or her in real life.

“I love being around entrepreneurs because a lot of them are Quick Starts, and they share this future-focused perspective. The problem, however, is that when you say something’s possible that hasn’t been proven yet, the average person responds with “no it’s not.” I’ve seen the pattern over and over“

“if you’re naturally a visionary, feel free to embrace it, but surround yourself with people who keep you grounded in reality. We’d never have innovation if it wasn’t for you, and innovators wouldn’t ever get anything done if it wasn’t for other personality types.”

Innovation is not just having a great idea. It is also about inducing change in society and creating conditions for the internalisation of innovation as a foundation for future progress.

Innovation and disruption is not an individual game. It’s a team game, with diverse people supporting and helping spread the idea. It is a community game, because building a community is today the engine for spreading ideas.

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How the Carlota Perez Framework Explains Major Technological Disruptions and Related Financial Crashes

Carlota Perez is a well known economics scholar and her framework to explain major technological disruptions is well quoted. Basically she distinguishes an initial installation phase, followed by a deployment phase. But more importantly, her framework predicts a major crisis between both phases, generally in the form of a financial or stock market crash.

This approach is quite interesting historically and tends to explain some major crashes like the internet-induced crash of 2000, and previous crashes linked to the disruption of certain technologies (from railways to gasoline engines, see the summary of her book ‘Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital’ on Wikipedia). The point is “nothing important happens without crashes“.

Hence, destructive creation due to innovation also means financial crashes. They can’t be avoided because this is the crisis period where the previous technology becomes obsolete and leaves the way open to the new, disruptive technology. There is necessarily a switch in capital allocation and this happens through a financial crisis.

The argument is interesting, and one can wonder whether we may not take it the other way around: is each major financial crisis the reflection of an underlying disruptive technology taking hold, creating a deep transformation of the world?

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How Organisations Need Both Designed and Emergent Structures

A recommended book about system thinking is the textbook ‘the systems view of life’ by Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi. It is a quite enlightening read. One of the topics addressed in the books is emergence. In complex systems, emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own. And the point made by the authors is that organisations need to have both at the same time and established formal organisation, and an informal emerging one.

“Human organisations always contain both designed and emergent structures. The designed structures, as described in its official documents. Ther emergent structures are created by the organisation’s informal networks and communities of practice. The two types of structures are very different, and organisations need both kinds.”

The future of the organisation is generated by the tension between both types of organisation. “In every organisation there is a tension between its designed structures, which embody relationships of power, and its emergent structures, which represent the organisation’s aliveness and creativity.”

While I have always observed the importance of the informal organisation for the formal to work properly, the new point here is to see it also as part of the emergence. And this also means that somehow, the informal organisation is in some ways the draft of the future organisation.

How is your emerging informal organisation doing? Can we accelerate transformation by leveraging on this informal organisational emergence?

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How Remote Work Will Extend But Still Not Become the New Normal

The experience of remote working has dramatically spread this year with the pandemics. As soon as the worst was over however, many employers tried to revert back to the previous normal, but many employees actually enjoyed the experience. Cal Newport in this New Yorker column ‘Why Remote Work Is So Hard—and How It Can Be Fixed‘ provides interesting insights.

In this post we learn that the concept of ‘telecommuting’ was actually created in the 1970s to address congestion. But the concept struggled to spread, ““Flexible work” arrangements tend to be seen as a perk; a 2018 survey found that only around three per cent of American employees worked from home more than half of the time.”

“But there were other, entirely legitimate reasons for companies to retreat from [remote work], and they are just as relevant today as they were a decade ago [when Yahoo asked everybody to be back at the office.” The issue is about informal interaction, integration of newcomers into the community, the need for individuals to have interaction. “Face-to-face interactions help people communicate and bond, but that’s only part of their value. The knowledge work pursued in many modern offices—thinking, investigating, synthesizing, writing, planning, organizing, and so on—tends to be fuzzy and disorganized compared to the structured processes of, say, industrial manufacturing.”

Cal Newport continues by seeing the transformation into full remote work being a slow process, and offices – and office time – remaining an important part of everyone’s life in the next decades. Still, there will be more remote work. New personal discipline and habits will need to be introduced, and new collaborative tools and approaches will be perfected as well.

Aligned with Cal Newport views, I observe that during the pandemics some companies commented that remote work would become the new normal, only to relent as soon as restrictions were lifted, most companies seeing only maximum one or two remote days per week being the maximum allowable. Still it will provide knowledge workers with a new rhythm and possibly a new way of living.

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How Modern Learning is On-Demand, Bite-Sized

In this post ‘The Upcoming Journalism School Overhaul‘, Frederic Filloux expands about modern education and learning in the specific context of journalism. One of the aspects he highlights is how differently people acquire skills today, thanks to inline bit-size tutorials.

Before, one had to master extensively and widely all techniques associated with its trade before being considered competent (hence, the master and companions approach). Now, “Today’s generation has a completely different approach when it comes to acquiring technical knowledge: they will call for it on a need-to basis, in response to a specific project requirement. They will go on YouTube, which is also an unfathomable resource for skill-learning, to understand how to do a specific kind of shooting or mastering a particular editing technique. This is the way things are done now.“

Modern learning is on-demand, bite sized, and leverages on shared platforms, possibly with collective knowledge sharing. Industrial-age learning models, based on classrooms and large institutions, will get upended up to a certain point. And this is a good thought to have when developing new learning offers. It is important to fit with the new expectations of on-demand, bite-sized learning experiences.

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How the Silicon Valley Origin is Actually Related to WW2 Defense Effort

I can only encourage you to take some time and read the series of blog posts by Steve Blank (an entrepreneur and Stanford professor) about the secret history of the Silicon Valley (first post of the series: ‘If I Told You I’d Have to Kill You: The Story Behind “The Secret History of Silicon Valley”‘). There is also a Youtube presentation by the same Steve Blank.

This series of posts is incredibly instructive and starts with electronic jamming devices developed during World War 2 to jam German anti-aircraft radar during bombing raids over occupied Europe. Subsequently with the Cold War, many efforts were made in programs financed by the military to continue to develop advanced electronic warfare devices. One particular challenge was to be able to get bombers in the Soviet Union for a first nuclear strike, overcoming the extensive radar and electronic defense coverage.

Beyond the extremely interesting accounts for this period, we find that most of the initial Silicon Valley innovation ecosystem was centered around Stanford and defense efforts in the electronic warfare field. Arpanet, the origin of internet, is of course another defense programme designed to sustain communications even in case of nuclear damage. Therefore the Silicon Valley is the child of a large government, defense related program. It is the consequence of another breakthrough of WW2 and, industrial-age like, is a centrally financed effort.

Therefore, if you seek to emulate the Silicon valley today (like half of the governments would dream to), that may be a bit hard, because the roots of this unique ecosystem go back a long time, to a heavily funded, continuous effort from WW2 to the Cold War over five decades.

Hat tip to Nicolas Colin as I found the reference in his excellent book ‘Hedge: A Greater Safety Net for the Entrepreneurial Age‘ – more on this book reading notes in future posts.

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