Collaborative Age value production system | The Fourth Revolution Blog

How to Benefit of Reality Distortion Fields While Avoiding Total Disconnect

Reality Distortion Fields are essential for visionary leaders like Steve Jobs, but they can also be dangerous if too strong – reality often catches up rather quickly when ignored for too long. This is in particular the case for distortions of time (the most common maybe).

There is thus a fine balance to be maintained so as to allow visionary jump forward while at the same time, retaining sufficient connection with reality.

It is very possible to keep a moderate reality distortion field, which most people do even if unaware, and sufficient realism too. The issue is when the distortion strength becomes significant.

It is then easier to have this balance maintained by a team rather by a single individual. The visionary leader with his distorted vision of reality must then be paired with a down-to-earth realistic counterpart, and sufficient trust must exist between those individuals, which must rely on mutual respect. Sometimes leaders themselves must try to maintain this balance, but this often leads to unease and sometimes to accidents.

Strong reality distortion fields are essential for creativity and for leaps forward. They need to be managed and counterbalanced for a healthy progression.

When Will We Have Health Warnings on Social Networks?

Social networks create significant disruption in our lives. Some people get addicted and they indirectly generate accidents when people can’t help looking at their friend’s latest posts while driving or walking…

So, when will we have health warnings on social networks like on cigarettes?

Joke apart, this may happen sooner than you think!

How Creators and Artists still Thrive in the Collaborative Age

With the Fourth Revolution came the collapse of creative industries such as the music industry, the publishing industry etc. It is relevant to ask what became of the artists and creators. Were they also destroyed by the tsunami? In an excellent piece ‘The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t‘, the New York Times Magazine gives a clear answer: no, actually the artists are rather thriving. It is the industry around them that crumbled.

Focus the value on the artist, not the industry around him

The entire business model of creativity has been put on its head. The collapse was incredible: “The global music industry peaked just before Napster’s debut, during the heyday of CD sales, when it reaped what would amount today to almost $60 billion in revenue. Now the industry worldwide reports roughly $15 billion in revenue from recorded music, a financial Armageddon even if you consider that CDs are much more expensive to produce and distribute than digital tracks.”

Obviously, recordings don’t sell so well any more and their value has decreased. To compensate, live shows are an increasing part of the value creation, and their price has increased tremendously (“In 1999, when Britney Spears ruled the airwaves, the music business took in around $10 billion in live-music revenue internationally; in 2014, live music generated almost $30 billion in revenue“). And, in general, there are more professional musicians now than before, which shows that one way or the other, they get a share of the remaining value.

I definitely concur with the conclusion of the article: “I suspect the profound change lies at the boundaries of professionalism. It has never been easier to start making money from creative work, for your passion to undertake that critical leap from pure hobby to part-time income source. […] From the consumer’s perspective, blurring the boundaries has an obvious benefit: It widens the pool of potential talent. But it also has an important social merit. Widening the pool means that more people are earning income by doing what they love.”

Overall the Collaborative Age encourages expression and creates value and income for creators. The border between full-time and part-time professional is just blurring like in many other occupations.

How Social Ratings Determine Our Choices

In a well-known but scary experiment on the music market, Duncan Watts and a team of Princeton researchers showed in 2006 that the popularity of songs was only very partially related to their appeal and quality – most of it is influenced by our peers’ rating.

In this experiment, people were either able to see or not the ratings from others. This created very significant differences in behavior. When rating was present, there was a big “luck premium”: whoever had some good ratings first would emerge as the uncontested winner at the end.

Hence, funny articles such as ‘Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?‘. As mentioned in this paper, “The reason is that when people tend to like what other people like, differences in popularity are subject to what is called “cumulative advantage,” or the “rich get richer” effect. This means that if one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still. As a result, even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors — a phenomenon that is similar in some ways to the famous “butterfly effect” from chaos theory.” We come back to one of the main characteristics of the Collaborative Age.

There is no way to predict the popularity of your creation. But early support and excellent ratings from your tribe might be a good place to start!

Why Creating a Startup is About Building a Different Future

“Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future” writes Peter Thiel in ‘Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future‘.

early-google-employees — Early Google Employees

This vision of a different future may be more or less ambitious, and intend to touch more or less people in the world. It might be within a small specialized niche or intend to take the world by storm. However, any real startup will be built on the premise of bringing a change to the world.

Actually this criterion might be an excellent differentiator between real startups and new companies that only intend to milk a situation.

Peter Thiel continues along the same trend of thought: “A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think”

In my experience, the quick iterations around product, marketing, and business model do mobilize a significant dose of mental power and unending discussions. And indeed, the need to create value in a commercial startup (get revenue before funding is exhausted) is a great incentive to create something that will change the world somehow.

If you want to build a different future in a context where you’ll really mobilize your thinking, creating a startup is the way to go.

Why the Historical Trend of Interest Rates Should Be to Get Lower

Interest Rates represent our preference between a dollar today and a dollar in some time in the future. In effect, they represent our preference between now and later.

Real interest rates getting lower over long times: an illusion or a reality?

Because of the increased life expectancy and hence, capability to make plans for the future, the availability of future money should be less discounted than when we had short life expectancy and had to enjoy more the moment! We should thus observe that over time, the interest rates should decrease.

Of course, it is difficult to observe this trend with the high variability of the interest rates (real interest rates, i.e. interest rates minus inflation, should be considered here). Lately since the 1960’s it has decreased; and it is quite lower than the 5% per year without inflation that was enjoyed in the 19th century. It can be expected to rise again in the next few years, but probably not to very high levels.

I believe that it is possible that in the Collaborative Age we live with generally lower interest rates than the historical averages. Value will be created otherwise through creativity, but because we can plan for decades ahead on average, there will be a less steep discount of the future.

How the Rise of Ad-Blocking Software Questions Internet’s Business Model

Most of large internet companies are funded by advertising, such as Google and Facebook. In exchange for the provision of some free services (of high value to us, but highly scalable), they use the data collected to target advertisement, with the expectation to increase the advertisement click-through rate hence their revenues.

Adblock software is a response to this, as it blocks ads from showing up on pages. It definitely improves performance. The most successful of these software originated in Germany, which has a fierce data protection approach shaped by a reaction to the years of internal state-spying in East Germany.

While these software remained marginal they were a limited threat. But it tends to grow exponentially, reaching 40% of the users in Germany! (see ‘Ad Blocks’ Doomsday Scenarios‘ by Frederic Filloux) Now it appears that Apple has included one of such software natively in their latest browser (see ‘What the Adblocker debate reveals‘) and that might change significantly the industry. Of course it is a nice strategic coup from Apple to weaken Google, as Apple does not depend on advertisement as a primary source of income. But it nevertheless poses a great threat to much of the internet industry, as the advertising community does not seem to have done anything against it yet.

The balance between intimacy, the usefulness of targeted ads and the economy of internet is still not settled. The next few months will be quite interesting to monitor as it might be that a few cards will get redistributed in the industry!

How the Value of Social Networks Could Correlate to their Emotional Impact

I have a theory which is that the value of social networks could be directly connected to their emotional impact.

Following our post on ‘Why Facebook’s Power is About Fostering Emotions‘ we could maybe go one step further and look about the emotional impact of other social networks. Here’s my view on a few I am using regularly:

Twitter does not create so much emotional impact except on those of us that are attracted by instant news and updates, so I do not believe in its ultimate success unless it enriches content with the objective of improving significantly its emotional impact (which it has started doing adding pictures and videos, but it remains limited and focused on news and events, so I am not convinced they’ll pull it through)
the weakness of Google+ in my view is also the sleekness of the interface and the lack of a similar emotional impact like in Facebook, except for those that crave for great high-quality artistic pictures
YouTube’s success could be attributable to the fact that video as a medium is much more emotionally inductive than pictures or text due to its rich content

Maybe you could think about other social networks and share how it fares in terms of emotional impact, and share whether it is correlated with its value. Please share in the comments!

How We Have Increased Dramatically our Feedback to all Services We Use

Following up on our post ‘How Social Ratings Determine Our Choices‘, let’s add how much more often we are asked to rate, and we do rate services.

I am amazed at how often I am prompted to give my feedback now. In all situations: when using a website or a service on internet; when visiting a hotel on the reservation platform; when downloading or using an app; when reading a book on my Kindle; and even when visiting the toilet at the airport!

And when we don’t do it consciously, the machine does infer some ratings: for example, how much and quick I read my book on Kindle certainly creates some rating in Amazon.

When we put this situation together with the fact that this forces the system to behave like a complex systems, reinforcing the popularity of the popular services and diminishing greatly the popularity to the others, we can see how our world is increasingly transforming in all spaces to a “winner takes all” situation, or that everything will be increasingly governed by the famous long tail distribution.

Welcome to the Collaborative Age!

By the way: how do you rate this post? 🙂

How to Improve the Effectiveness of Complex Problem-Solving Teams

We’ve already established in this blog that an effective team is the best way to tackle complexity. There appears to be one additional condition: the team must be complete when it meets to resolve a situation.

According to Michael Marquardt in the book ‘Optimizing the Power of Action Learning’, “Putnam (2000) notes that the most complex problems can be solved only by a group that has developed a strong social bonding. Therefore, it is much better that the group meets fewer times when everyone is present than more times when one or more of the members may be absent”

I have observed that when people are missing it certainly influences the effectiveness of the process. This warning also implies that problem-solving teams be of a limited size so as to make it workable.

Increase definitely the effectiveness of complex problem solving by insisting on the attendance of everybody in the problem-solving team!

How Creativity and Productivity Are Seasonal

“Remember that creativity and peak productivity are seasonal: there’s a time to plant and a time to harvest” writes Robin Sharma.

I think it is true that it is quite impossible to stay hyper creative and productive all time; we need downtime and resourcing. We also need to consciously take time for reflection and refocus.

Contrary to natural seasons, the seasons hinted at by Robin Sharma develop along different timeframes – and intermingle. The most important timeframes are:

intra-day,
in our weekly rhythm, between week-days and week-end,
and finally over months or years.

And as Robin Sharma reminds us, we also need to be able to plant today to hope for reaping later. Investment in creativity and production is sometimes tough and costly, and remains necessary.

Do you give yourself time for downtime, reflection, and planting seeds that could eventually grow into full fledged harvest?

Why Computer Hardware Investment Leads to Significant Business Improvement

“For every dollar of investment in computer hardware, companies need to invest up to another nine dollars in software, training, and business process redesign” – according to a study by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee quoted in ‘The Second Machine Age‘.

This looks first as a warning to budget adequately when buying computer hardware! In reality, it is a measure of the leverage into business improvement that is provided by computer capabilities.

And it is true that investment in new hardware or software always leads to business and process investment, and eventually to business improvement (which is required to justify the investment in the first place). Even if process improvements are not immediate due to change management considerations, it will happen eventually when the organization’s contributors will realize the capabilities that are now available to them. I believe it is typical in professional business software implementation to see professional fees to be up to 3 or 4 times the license investment; and obviously the leverage ratio is even higher on hardware investment.

Investment in computing capabilities always leads, sooner or later, to business improvement. It is one of the main driving forces of today’s productivity improvements that will make the Collaborative Age much more efficient.

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