Category: Collaborative Age value production system

How Physical and Knowledge Work Are Not Independent

In this interesting post ‘The Ingredients for Making Something that Lasts’, I noted an important statement: “We forget that there’s physical work involved in knowledge work, too. That we learn with our whole bodies and not just with the head. And it works both ways.”

The prime mover is work, and work involved our entire being, not just our head or our body. It is important to remember because this needs to influence many aspects of our activities, be they mostly intellectual or physical.

The way we feel or behave physically will influence our creativity and intellectual production. The way we feel mentally will heavily influence our physical performance. As humans both dimensions are intertwined, something we need to grow to respect and build upon.

Physical work and knowledge work are intertwined and indisociable. Let’s remember this in everything we do.

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How Sustainable Growth Also Has Physical Limits

This interesting and well remarked Scientific American article ‘The Delusion of Infinite Economic Growth‘ reminds us that there are physical limits to growth, whatever more “sustainable” technologies are implemented. Any technology that scales find its physical limits.

“Every stage of the life cycle of any manufactured product exacts environmental costs: habitat destruction, biodiversity loss and pollution (including carbon emissions) from extraction of raw materials, manufacturing / construction, through to disposal. Thus, it is the increasing global material footprint that is fundamentally the reason for the twin climate and ecological crises.”

While “Technological innovation and efficiency improvements are often cited as pathways to decouple growth in material use from economic growth. While technology undoubtedly has a crucial role to play in the transition to a sustainable world, it is constrained by fundamental physical principles and pragmatic economic considerations.”

In addition, economic growth is exponential and not linear: “unfortunately, the situation is even more dire. Economic growth is required to be exponential; that is, the size of the economy must double in a fixed period.” Thus, “the inescapable inference is that it is essentially impossible to decouple material use from economic growth.” As a result, more is required today than to develop ‘sustainable’ solutions: solutions to the future raw material crises also need to be investigated.

Even sustainable growth will find its limits – as the economy and technologies scale, they require increasingly raw material and space, often in an exponential manner. But the world is finite, therefore a change of paradigm may be required.

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How Challenging the Energy Transition Will Be

This excellent article in The Atlantic ‘Why the Energy Transition Will Be So Complicated‘ provides an important reminder and insight into how dependent we are on carbonated fuel, and how tough it will be to change: “The degree to which the world depends on oil and gas is not well understood“.

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The article underlines how much we are dependent on oil&gas for a variety of materials in addition to energy, and how pervasive usage of oil can be in our societies. As a result, some warn “that going into overdrive on transitioning away from fossil fuels would lead to major economic shocks similar to the oil crises that rocked the global economy in the 1970s. “Policymakers,” [Jean Pisani-Ferry] wrote, “should get ready for tough choices.”“

“The term energy transition somehow sounds like it is a well-lubricated slide from one reality to another. In fact, it will be far more complex: Throughout history, energy transitions have been difficult, and this one is even more challenging than any previous shift.” In addition, it is supposed to happen much quicker than any other such transitions in the past, necessarily impacting the value of assets and making investment into anything related to energy more hazardous. Previously such energy transitions typically took more than a century to be established and to replace previous energy sources.

I am personally convinced that oil & gas will remain an important industry in the next 2 decades, while coal may start to whither. The solution may lie more in carbon capture than cutting too fact our dependency on oil & gas.

The current energy transition will be more challenging and complex that usually anticipated, in particular because it is supposed to be much quicker than any such historical transition. Let’s not forget this in our anticipations.

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How the Project Economy Has Finally Arrived

It has always be my conviction that economic activity would be increasingly driven as a multitude of temporary projects – thus my main activity around project management. This is finally recognized in this HBR piece ‘The Project Economy Has Arrived‘.

“Quietly but powerfully, projects have displaced operations as the economic engine of our times. That shift has been a long time coming.” “In Germany, for example, projects have been rising steadily as a percentage of GDP since at least 2009, and in 2019 they accounted for as much as 41% of the total. Precise data is hard to come by for other countries, but similar percentages are likely to apply in most other Western economies. The percentages are probably even higher in China and other leading Asian economies, where project-based work has long been an important source of growth.”

“This transformation to a project economy will have profound organizational and cultural consequences. The problem is, many leaders still don’t appreciate the value of projects and write them off as a waste of time.“

The author has been very active in the Project Management Institute and can thus slightly partial to the subject. However the reality is here and many leaders do not necessarily understand the implications of this shift in terms of work organisation and leadership. The image in this post is one of a turbulent flow, which is how I see the organization of the future: a number of projects (the vortices) that appear and disappear in the flow like projects with a limited time span.

Leaders must now account for the fact that probably a majority of value-creating endeavors is project-based. This must lead to significant shifts in organization and competencies to deal with those projects effectively.

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How Marketing Rules Have Changed Significantly In a Few Years with AI

Since the beginning of the Fourth Revolution there is a growing concern of the gap building between technology have and have nots. This has been quite alleviated since the arrival of the smart phone. However, there is still a growing issue when it comes to understand how algorithms work and take advantage of them. In this eye-opening piece ‘What’s On My Mind: What About the Gap?‘, Christopher Penn provides a compelling example about the difference it can make in marketing to understand AI-driven algorithms, because it drives directly what potential customers see or not.

“In the era before popular, commercial use of machine learning, success in business was largely a combination of effort and luck. Effort encompasses the skill needed to make a good product and sell it well, and luck encompasses being in the right place at the right time, whether you’re the local burger joint or a multinational corporation.”

“Today, data science, machine learning, and AI have thrown a bit of a wrinkle into this. So much of our lives are intermediated by machines and machine learning. What products we see, what ads we see, what news we see, what friends we see in the digital realm – which is the primary realm now for so many of these tasks ever since the smartphone became our external brains – are all controlled by machines and algorithms.”

Christopher Penn then continues to provide the example of what he could achieve easily given his background in data science for a florist shop friend, substantially increasing ranking and visibility on the internet through clever understanding of data analytics.

“For a while, the Internet presented a level playing field where a small business could appear larger than it was, where relevance and not budget could win the day. That 20-year golden era of Internet marketing – 1997-2017 – has been supplanted by the AI-powered marketing era, and this is an era in which whoever has the technical resources to win will do so.“

“To be clear, having great products, good prices, and phenomenal service will still be fundamental to succeeding at business. No amount of AI will change a crap product, prices that aren’t competitive, or abusive service and get people to buy, long-term, who would not have bought before. But becoming visible, being seen, will be harder for those without skillful use of AI.”

Certainly a very useful warning. AI and data analytics knowledge is now the key to being visible and we all need to understand that the game has changed only a couple a years. Marketing is now different, rules are different and thus the game changed.

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How Telling a Story Makes Start-Up Pitches Successful

This article ‘I Boiled Down Hundreds of Successful VC Pitches to One Winning Formula‘ provides some advice as to how to build start-up pitches for them to be successful in funding.

“My answer is always the same: tell a story. Humans have responded to storytelling for all our evolutionary history — we’ve been passing down oral history and painting tales on cave walls for literally thousands of years. When you want to nail your pitch deck, the best way is to lean on that common love of stories we all have — and the fact that stories are far more memorable than facts, figures, data, numbers, bits and bytes.”

According to the author, this includes a vision of where the company will be when successful, how to resolves the pain of the future customer, how your product will slain the villain pain, and how the world will be better ever after.

From my experience it is certainly an excellent advice because it will create an emotional connection with the audience, even more so if it can relate to the story somehow; and we are all longing for a story where everything ends well.

For successful pitches, try to tell a compelling story providing at the same time a comforting vision of a bright future.

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How Intrapreneurs and Entrepreneurs Can Both Spark Innovation

This article ‘Leaving the cult of entrepreneurship: Intrapreneurs are the true drivers of innovation‘ takes position in the debate between intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs as sources of innovation. I don’t think it is as simple: it all depends what kind of innovation we address and we should not oppose the two categories.

Intrapreneurs have the advantage of being able to mobilize considerables resources from their company to get their idea developed, once it is approved and recognized. Those means will dwarf those of the start-up entrepreneur, however one has to overcome the hurdles of internal approval and politics, and recognize the inevitable longer delays in getting things done in large organisations.

Independent entrepreneurs on their side will be more nimble, able to start on ideas without waiting for more approval than their friends and families’ dime. They can thus start on ideas that may be considered ridiculous by corporate committees. They can also often pivot more easily.

I thus think that intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs are both potential contributors to breakthrough innovation, and that frustrated intrapreneurs can also easily become entrepreneurs. They should not be opposed and both can certainly change the world.

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How Bionic Gloves Support a Professional Pianist to Play Again

This excellent article ‘How the Maestro Got His Hands Back‘ explain how world-renowned pianist João Carlos Martins got back the ability to play thanks to special gloves.

He was a prodigy and celebrated as a great pianist until he could not use his hands properly any more. He reinvented himself as a conductor at that stage. But still expecting to play piano, an admirer found a way by getting people to build special gloves for him.

“Then along came these bionic gloves, created by an industrial designer named Ubiratan Bizarro Costa, who became familiar with Martins’s problems after he saw the maestro on a Brazilian television show in 2019. There is nothing high-tech about the gloves Costa invented, which is how he prefers it. […] The gloves are both deceptively complicated looking and incredibly precise. The hand slips into a neoprene sleeve outfitted with a 3D-printed frame and stainless steel bars on the fingers. Costa, a fan of Formula One racing, was inspired by the cars’ rear suspension mechanism: When weight bears down on it, it springs back up. Without the gloves, when Martins’s fingers hit a key, they stay depressed; the steel bars pop them back up.“

Watch this moving extract on YouTube about his happiness to be able to play again.

Modern technology can improve significantly lives and overcome disabilities. The potential is limitless, even without excessive technological complication.

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How AI Can Support Creative Scientific Research

This provoking Scientific American article ‘AI Generates Hypotheses Human Scientists Have Not Thought Of‘ actually provides an excellent example of how AI can supplement human thought and together create a more productive and creative ecosystem.

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“Creating hypotheses has long been a purely human domain. Now, though, scientists are beginning to ask machine learning to produce original insights. They are designing neural networks (a type of machine-learning setup with a structure inspired by the human brain) that suggest new hypotheses based on patterns the networks find in data instead of relying on human assumptions. Many fields may soon turn to the muse of machine learning in an attempt to speed up the scientific process and reduce human biases.“

The interesting part here is around reducing human biases, a topic which comes back several times in the article: avoiding preconceived ideas and theories and probably the burden of the institutional view on things. AI can provide an independent view and the combination can spark creative and innovative outputs.

I am convinced that we will find AI to be a great help rather than a competitor in all creative endeavors, like scientific research. And this is just the beginning!

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How To Regulate Essential Services Like Residential Real Estate

This interesting post ‘Housing, money laundry, speculation and precarity‘ addresses the issue of speculation in real estate. It revolves around the re-regulation of real estate and the limits of deregulation in that area.

Confronted to a meteoritic rise of rents in Berlin the decision was taken to propose to renationalise a part of the real-estate A referendum supported this decision in September, however it still needs to be put in effect.

Real estate was privatized and financialized as bonds and Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) focusing on profitability without taking into account the usage of the underlying assets. Moreover, “REITs are private equity, and they’re a devastatingly effective tool for money-laundering. REITs are typically backed by anonymous shell companies from financial secrecy havens and onshore-offshore zones like Delaware, Nevada and Wyoming.“

According to the author the situation is worse in the US where homeowning has been transferred to opaque companies with unknown beneficiaries, which may create substantial issues in the medium and long term. All sorts of unhealthy practices seem to develop in particular in distressed communities. This raises the question of how to put some limits on the financialization of such essential services like personal accommodation real estate.

I am convinced that some essential parts of the economy require proper regulation, however the market principles still need to be at play. What is absolutely important is to make that abusive or fraud behavior is avoided, and that certain financial mechanisms are not a conduit to money laundering.

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How Amazon is Changing the Novel Format

In this interesting article ‘Is Amazon Changing the Novel?‘, the author takes a historical tack to explain how publishing media has always influenced the format of novels. And how the new diffusion channels like Amazon are now changing it again.

In the 19th century, novels were often published in episodes in newspapers or, as explained in the article, in several bands that could be borrowed from public libraries one at a time. This definitely had an influence on the way they were written, including the need to maintain attention through suspense at the end of each part.

Now “Amazon […] controlled almost three-quarters of new-adult-book sales online and almost half of all new-book sales in 2019” (in the US one can presume), and in particular through the publishing possibilities of e-books through Kindle publishing, is definitely changing how novels look like. What are the influences at play?

“The platform pays the author by the number of pages read, which creates a strong incentive for cliffhangers early on, and for generating as many pages as possible as quickly as possible. The writer is exhorted to produce not just one book or a series but something closer to a feed—what McGurl calls a “series of series.” In order to fully harness K.D.P.’s promotional algorithms, McGurl says, an author must publish a new novel every three months.” I also believe it tends to make novels shorter on average, as well as part of a series. A bit like Netflix promotes series over movies, with the result a much longer total time spent in front on the screen!

The rise of Amazon as a major publisher and a driving force in e-book publishing will shift the novel genre to shorter formats and new ways to consume them. The impact of the publishing media on the novel has always been there and continues.

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How the Debate About Shorter Work Time Has Reignited

This Wired article promotes the 5-hours day: ‘The perfect number of hours to work every day? Five‘. Based on some experiments, the concept of compressed working is being more widely tested, sometimes with mixed results.

Some companies that have tested the concept reported mixed results. Shorter workdays result in people being more focused on their tasks, but also some stress about getting things done. There is also a debate between 4-day week and 5-hour days concepts.

Promoter of the 5-hours day assert that “Research indicates that five hours is about the maximum that most of us can concentrate hard on something. There are periods when you can push past that, but the reality is that most of us have about that good work time in us every day.” In that sense some organizations report significant effectiveness increase of having shorter days with no breaks. However “not all jobs are suitable to be done in five-hour bursts. Research may have found that people’s creativity dwindles after five hours of concentration, but not all jobs require people doing them to be creative. “There’s an awful lot of work that doesn’t require deep focus,” Pang says. In call centres, care homes and factory lines, staff are needed simply to get the work done and, as Ford Motor Company demonstrated, there is a very good reason to ask them to do it in eight-hour shifts“.

In any case, the debate about the best working timetable remains open. For creative work it would seem that shorter but more intense worktimes is favorable, and this needs then to fit around personal schedules.

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