Collaborative Age value production system | The Fourth Revolution Blog

Why you should Fully Segregate Manufacturing and Creative Activities

Manufacturing (Industrial Age) and Creative (Collaborative Age) organizations require different approaches and skills. They are two different business models. As such, organizations should not try to run them in the same business unit.

Manufacturing organizations require:

compliance to the rules;
minimum variation;
carefully evaluated changes thus, continuous improvement;
production of large quantities and high physical capital intensity to achieve the necessary economy of scale.

Creative organizations require:

non compliance to rules, misfits and weirdos
discontinuous and radical change
small scale production and low capital intensity (outside human capital)

Apple Designed in California, Manufactured in China — Apple is a key example where creative and manufacturing activities are separated. You are not obliged to treat manufacturing as subcontractors; but you need to make it at least, a separate business unit

How can you even imaging having these two kinds of activities under the same roof, under the same budget, under the same responsible person?

Following a very general recommendation in the field of entrepreneurship and even of management, two different business models should be separated. If not run in different legal entities, they should be run in different business units. Creation of the product needs to be separated from manufacturing production. The necessary interface needs to be managed through a carefully arranged agreement.

Separate fully your creative, project creation side from your traditional manufacturing side or you’ll never manage to take advantage of the Fourth Revolution!

Why Writing is a Key Skill – and How it Can be Learned

I love writing. I love the way it forces me to put my thoughts together in the right order, how it shows whether what I think is logical and meaningful. Writing undoubtedly also exercises my creativity.

I did not always love writing. I was quite crappy as a young student. I improved. Today I write a lot, and I exercise in writing a lot (this blog is part of the exercise!). It’s clearly a skill that can be improved. Today I can write very quickly good quality pieces of text. It has become such a skill that it is part of the foundation of my professional success as a consultant (writing procedures and reports, anyone?).

This astonishing article “The Writing Revolution” even shows how imparting writing skills to struggling students can change their lives and their grades. How giving them the skills to express themselves clearly and logically improved their level in almost every topic. A school introduced that and it is now becoming a standard throughout the US.

Further to writing by itself, writing and publishing to the world is a further skill where you need to overcome shyness.

In the Collaborative Age, writing as a skill is even more important because we are using more writing than ever to communicate. Are you improving steadily your writing skills? if you are not, you should!

Today More Than Ever, Powerlessness Doesn’t Fly! Do Something!

“Today more than ever, claiming powerlessness doesn’t fly. Excuses suck. There are people changing entire roles, departments, organizations.”

Leading Change — (courtesy of ondemandleadership.com)

“There are people starting companies because they couldn’t find one they wanted to work for. There are people changing careers, changing their lives, changing the perspectives of the people around them and earning the permission to do something new and different in even the most notoriously complex industries.” That’s a quote from Amber Naslund on her blog Brasstackthinking (read more of that post here).

She goes on – “Hell, people are reinventing industries right out from under the old models, and creating markets we’ve never seen.”

Are you still there, or already on your way to create something new and great?

Industrial Age’s Compliance Doesn’t Work any More for Creative Organizations

In the Industrial Age, the typical manufacturing worker had to be compliant. Follow orders. In the Collaborative Age, where creativity matters as a key competitive advantage, using the same approach leads to disaster.

Paramilitary training — Getting Industrial Age recruits ready for service

One of the best examples I got about the spirit of the Industrial Age comes from a plant project in a remote areas. It is important to employ locals – who had until then been only in the Agricultural Age. The key initiation for the new recruits is a paramilitary boot camp. Why? Because it trains for compliance, obedience, rigor, timeliness, self-maintenance… everything that you would expect from an Industrial Age worker. Thus the transition from the Agricultural Age to the Industrial Age is about imparting compliance. That’s exactly what the mandatory public school, after 1850, did to our economies (and still does, which is a problem).

Today, in the Collaborative Age organizations, the key is creativity and difference. In an excellent book “Weird Ideas that Work: How to Build a Creative Company“, Robert Sutton explains clearly why having people that don’t fit in the mold, misfits that don’t obey the organization’s social codes, is a key ingredient of success for creative organizations. Here are some of his weird ideas:

Hire slow learners of the organizational code and misfits
Hire people who make you uncomfortable even those you dislike
Encourage people to ignore and defy superiors and peers

Note exactly what you would expect to happen in a manufacturing organization!

Think about it. We are so much used to the Industrial Age organization that we take for granted that employees should be compliant. That’s true in manufacturing activities where you seek repeated similarity and minimum variation. That’s suicide in the creative organizations of the Collaborative Age.

Which side is your organization? Are you sure you are doing the right thing and not falling off to the comfort zone of the Industrial Age?

The Nonsense of Copyright Life Extensions

Copyright is an institution of the Industrial Age that will be transformed deeply by the Fourth Revolution. Yet, while the availability of material on the internet that can be downloaded and reused for free is booming, while the cost of patent and copyright infringements lawsuits is exploding, this questions has not yet found the right answer.

Lock and Copyright sign — The Copyright institution, locking away troves of opportunities

Actually in the last 50 years the law has been constantly amended in the wrong direction, as mentioned for example in this post by Alex Tabarrok “Copyright unbalanced“: the duration of the protection has been increased from 28 years after a voluntary deposit to 95 years after publication (whether or not the copyright protection would have been sought).

This lengthening of copyright protection is at odds with the acceleration of our daily life and the much quicker obsolescence of content. Copyright protection duration should shrink, not be extended. These extensions are but the reflection of seeking undue benefits.

In the changes to the Copyright institution in the Collaborative Age, 10 years protection should be more than enough. Specific copyrights with different timeframes could also be implemented (1 month for news, 1 year for position papers…). Less developed countries where copyright rights are not defended strongly are benefiting of this situation to be more creative and to develop their own products. When will politicians and diplomats seriously tackle this issue which impedes our economies to grow and develop?

What is Strategy really about? Analysis or Action?

“Real strategy lies not in figuring out what to do, but in devising ways to ensure that, compared to others, we actually do more of what everybody knows they should do”. This quote by David H Maister in “Strategy and the Fat Smoker: Doing What’s Obvious but Not Easy” is actually a great insight. Read it again just to get it.

Fat person working out — Will you make the first step like this guy?

His view is that it is quite easy to know what you need to do; but that genius lies in effectively doing it. Like the Fat Smoker knows he needs to stop smoking and needs to go on a diet but for some reason it turns out to be too hard.

Would competitive advantage be more on the execution side than on the conceptual strategy side? As mentioned often in the field of startups, ideas by themselves have absolutely no value; what gives them value is their realization. It is the fact that you battle the world to give shape to your idea – probably pivoting and improving from time to time as you get feedback from the world.

Of course then all the usual issues about changing behavior and doing new things apply: do not set unrealistic expectations, set achievable intermediate goals and follow up on the long run, get support on your commitment from your environment, etc.

Remember that doing more theoretical analysis of your strategy is not very effective. What’s effective is to plow your way decidedly. Take action. Now.

If a Team could not Solve a Problem, the Person with the Information you Need was not Invited

This quote is from a presentation by Matt Fourie, a consultant specialized in problem-solving and thinking tools, at the last Project Management Institute regional conference in Singapore.

Empty chair in a meeting — Who in your your organization knows about the issue?

What he means is that throughout his decades of experience as a consultant helping organizations solve problems, he has found that in more than 95% of the cases, the solution and the understanding of the problem was known by someone in the organization. But that this knowledge was not mobilized effectively. This very much connects with my experience too – often by listening to the front line people, the answer is obvious.

Usual issues that impede proper problem solving are:

problem-solving meetings involve managers that do not know about the details of the operation
there is a disconnect between management and operators
people jump to conclusion (and action) without analyzing the data

It is where all the initiatives such as Total Quality management are really useful, as they seek to mobilize effectively all the organization members’ knowledge. Today with internal social networks we have a further opportunity to leverage that knowledge.

Next time when you face an issue in your organization, rather than looking for external answers, the first question you should ask is: “who would know the answer in the organization, who should I include in the discussion?”. Do that today! You’ll see the difference.

How to Respond to the Question: “Who Are You To Do This?”

As I try new things outside what people would expect to be my normal occupation (as defined by my diplomas, certificates and list of positions), a question I often get is “Who are you to do this?.. do that?..”.

Distinguished Professor teaching students — Do you need to be certified, chartered, PhD to teach effectively?

At first I was a bit disturbed by the question. I did not have the certificate to train! I did not have the diploma to facilitate! I am not a certified consultant (yes, certification programs also exist for consulting!). My answer now is: “I am a passionate human being”.

Of course there are some areas for which I needed to have additional education. I am a Certified Professional Coach because I needed a structured program to get the competencies it entails. But for many other activities I have no formal paper to certify my competency. Still I manage to develop my brand and I get more and more clients.

As soon as you’ll try new things outside what non-imaginative people expect from you, based on your standard Industrial Age profile, you’ll get the question: “Who are you to do this, to do that?”. Don’t feel threatened. Know that you do that because you bring value to others and to yourself.

Don’t hesitate. The new world will be created outside the certifications, diplomas, courses and standards. The people that changed the world did that outside the usual framework and values of their time.

Go for it. If you feel you are the one that can do it, do it. For yourself. For the others.

How Economists can’t explain Collaboration

Economists are known not to agree on explanation of past events, and to be a disaster when it comes to predicting what will happen in the economy.

Among their feats, economists still can’t explain how Wikipedia, for example, works. As quoted by Alex Tabarrok in his post “Shared Creation”, they still can’t figure out what is the effect of such low transaction costs in the spontaneous assembly of people performing for free a seemingly so valuable service to Humankind.

Because non monetary motivation is more important than any kind of economic exchange in this case, the usual tools of the economists based on the “economically rational individual” fail completely. And indeed – Wikipedia lives only through the voluntarily contributions of millions of people. Still, it is now an institution that is supported by many and has become so indispensable in our lives.

As Alex Tabarrok mentions, “Economists thought that Wikipedia couldn’t work because of problems of motivation but what turned out to matter most was not motivation but transaction costs. With 7 billion people and low transaction costs what other forms of shared creation become possible?”

That transaction costs are now zero changes completely the logic of the exchange of value. A lot of what we are doing during the day is not any more just motivated by economic rationality. It makes the reason why so many organizations and institutions exist completely obsolete. Will economists become also an extinct profession in the Fourth Revolution?

How Education Accreditation Impedes Change towards Excellence

One institution of the Late Industrial Age is university and, in general, education and training accreditation. National (governmental) or professional bodies decide what the education program should be and expect the university’s or the school’s program to be fully aligned.

Accreditation Seal — Is your education accredited? By whom?

And behold those education institutions that would not fit in the mold! They take the risk of losing the right to use certain nationally and internationally recognized titles for their diplomas of achievements, and thus to lose the interest of prospective students.

Of course on one hand, accreditation guarantees a minimum quality. But on the other hand, what a formidable hurdle to educational experiments!

A university in Malaysia tried to implement a new, original education system with many advantages to prepare students to work life (as it included many work-related projects and close relationship with industry). Discussing with the university founder, he described how painful it had been to have to fit finally within a standard education framework determined by bureaucrats – for fear of losing the right to use the normal university grades and titles.

Accreditation is beneficial at the beginning when a profession first forms. Like any institution is soon impedes change and tries to defend itself against the external world. As everything becomes global, standardization of accreditation is another significant issue. The only remedy is to create a new education brand that will be stronger in terms of recognition than the conventional accredited grades and diplomas.

This new, strong brand of an education adapted to the Fourth Revolution will appear eventually. The format of delivery education will change, needs to change with the Fourth Revolution, online education, and the need to foster improved emotional intelligence in the new generations to come. Accreditation programs will slow this evolution – but like any institution will finally have to give way.

Must Read: “Makers” the Manufacturing Revolution

Chris Anderson, the author of “Free” and “The Long Tail“, and editor at Wired, has produced another great book to help us understand what is happening today: “Makers“. A must read for your holidays!

“The past ten years have been about discovering new ways to create, invent and work together on the Web. The next ten years will be about applying those lessons to the real world”

Chris Anderson makes the case of manufacturing coming into the age of collaboration with 3D printing and other manufacturing techniques allowing to produce economically small series of objects (a few to a few thousands). This will change the face of manufacturing. Exactly like ‘Print on Demand’ is changing the publishing industry, ‘Produce on Demand’ starts to change manufacturing.

Chris Anderson makes the case that because the logic of large commodities production is becoming less prevalent, manufacturing will return closed to where the consumer are. In any case, distances are abolished as your 3D plans can be sent to any suppliers to be produced in any quantities. Design is important, manufacturing in any quantity becomes a commodity.

Welcome to the Collaborative Age of tangible things. Read this book to understand the seismic wave that is changing manufacturing forever, right now under our eyes. It might take a decade to bring our industry upside down, but it will certainly transform it completely. The old Industrial Age manufacturing is obsolete.

Monitoring flu trends in real time… thanks to Google!

Google is known for weird projects that make sense. Here is a great project – Flutrends. This tool give instantaneous measurement of the flu epidemics level based… on the number of searches related to ‘flu’ on Google! This turns out to be quite an efficient way of crowdsourcing the information.

Here is an example of a historical graph for France

(more info and more countries covered on Google Flutrends – the same tool also covers Dengue)

What are the troves of data that are available but not exploited by those companies like Google (or at least, not given out to the public?)

As usual I am aghast at the power of the Fourth Revolution. Do you know other similar examples? Please comment!

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